A struggling Spanish Learner in Guatemala

            In  my last post I described my difficulties acquiring Spanish as a student at university. I would like to dedicate this post to my experience as a Spanish student in a Spanish school in Guatemala, where I started speaking the language for the first time.

I have always been fascinated with Central America and its culture. After graduating from university, I went backpacking on my own in Central America, Guatemala being my first destination.  A couple of days  after I had arrived in Guatemala, I realized that I had a problem, because I wasn't able to communicate with the locals in Spanish. Feeling extremely lost, I could neither utter a complete sentence in Spanish nor ask a simple question. Having realized that I must acquire basic Spanish in order to continue my trip, I decided to change my plans and go to study Spanish for several weeks.

 Guatemala is the cheapest country in the world to study Spanish and Quetzaltenango, or Xela as the locals call her, is the cheapest place in the country. With more than 40 Spanish schools, this city, which is not populated with gringos, expats and backpackers as Antigua, another popular destination to study Spanish, offers better opportunities to the Spanish learners to practice Spanish with the locals rather than speak English with travelers. As a result, people from all over the world come to Xela to learn Spanish and, or volunteer in different social projects.

After I arrived in Xela, I enrolled at a Spanish school.  Most schools have the same daily schedule: in the morning, a student can choose to learn four or five hours with a private Spanish teacher; in the afternoon, most schools offer different activities such as cooking classes, salsa classes, movies and different trips in the area, such as a trip to hot springs in Xela, Fuentas Georginas, which was definitely one of my favorites activities in Xela. In addition, many schools offer a homestay with a Guatemalan family in order to encourage complete immersion in the language, as the families do not speak English and the student must communicate in Spanish.  

My Spanish teacher, Norma who is a native Guatemalan, taught me five hours a day for three weeks. Although she had been teaching foreigners for more than 10 years, she could barely speak English. In her lessons, mainly putting emphasis on grammar, she first taught the new material and afterwards I had to do exercises. At first, I was quite skeptical about being able to enrich my vocabulary by studying mostly grammar; instead, I actually expanded my vocabulary through acquiring the words that were covered by the grammar topics. For example, when I learnt the present tense, I also had to learn the meaning of the irregular verbs. At the end of the school day, when I was too tired to study grammar, we used to read children's  stories together, which was a great way of reviewing grammar in a meaningful context. Significantly, Norma was a very strict teacher; not only did I have to take a test at the end of each week, but I also had to write an essay every day. She was so strict that even on the day before my last class; she refused to cut me some slack and made me write my last essay for the following day. L

 What I mostly learnt from this experience is that when you have to communicate with people whose language you don't speak, after a short while, you will start speaking their language. This is exactly what happened to me; once I was surrounded with people who could only speak Spanish, both at school and at the homestay, I had no other choice but to speak Spanish. I did whatever I could to be understood, from using the words I had picked up during my stay to miming.

I like calling this experience "the Spanish Brainwash Effect" because after two week I was able to acquire basic Spanish to chat freely with the locals. Only in Guatemala, after a short amount of time was I able to start speaking Spanish. Without a doubt, even if I studied Spanish for three years in University , I would not be able to achieve that level of proficiency.

If you ever have the time and the money, I recommend that you stay  for a while in a foreign country studying its language. I think that my experience as a language learner helped  me identify with my students' frustrations and difficulties, later on in my career as an English teacher in Israel. In my opinion, every teacher teaching a second language, especially if this teacher is a native speaker of that language, must undergo the process of learning a second language in order to understand his students and become a better teacher.

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