Learning Spanish

It's a good idea when traveling, especially when staying in a place for a while, to try and pick up some of the local tongue. It's both practical and respectful to the local culture. For Costa Rica at least it's not strictly necessary, since enough people here speak English and you can get by, but it can make things easier and it's the perfect time to pick up such a skill. And you get brownie points with the locals.

So Nick and I decided to take lessons from a tutor. Tynan recommended them as one of the most efficient ways to pick up a language, since you get to work one on one or in small groups and the class goes at whatever speed works for you. We signed up for a couple hours per week, which costs $28 per person per class. Not a bad price, we think, especially compared to college.

Our one room school house

Class itself is fairly structured but with a healthy dose of chaos. We'll generally follow the packet the teacher gave us, but often we get sidetracked. Mostly this is my fault because I'll think of something tangential to the current topic (sometimes interesting, sometimes not particularly) and I'll go on to do terrible things to the language in my attempt to say what I'm thinking. I often won't have the vocabulary (or the verb tense) to say what I want to say, so I'm regularly asking '¿como se dice...?'. In this way we usually end up with at least a few dozen new words or phrases per class to learn for next time.

But class isn't enough! Two hours a week is less than half the amount of classtime one gets in a Spanish class in Oberlin, and I've got enough free time to do more. So Nick and I also study a textbook I bought on my Kindle before I left. It's alright quality, and often it teaches us words that aren't really used in Latin America, but it allows us to really pick up the pace of language absorption to our liking.

And to learn all these words from my textbook and from class, I use the very handy program, Anki. It uses a spaced repetition system, which is just about the best way to learn a large body of facts efficiently and effectively. I've known about Anki for a while but didn't really use it a lot before this trip. Boy do I wish I had it back when I was in high school, maybe then French wouldn't have been so painful.

This one is pretty key

So in the middle of the day or after work I take my laptop to a hammock on the porch and study on Anki just about every day. An hour and a half is usually my limit before my brain stops absorbing anything more, but with that much time I usually pick up about forty new words and phrases per day. I hope by the time I leave I'll have learned about two thousand items. And with any luck Anki will remain a part of my daily routine, so that I don't promptly forget most of I've learned, like I've done with French, Swedish and Japanese before. Just a little bit of review a day will keep all that knowledge fresh.

The drop in studies in the middle, that's Arenal's fault!

The only thing that's missing is something to deal with my greatest weakness: listening comprehension. When listening to others talking, if I don't understand everything they say fairly quickly or they go very slowly, I get lost pretty immediately. It's something I've had particular trouble with for every language I've studied. So I'm looking for some online service to help me with that, maybe something along the lines of SpanishPod or something that connects me with Spanish people on the internet I can practice talking with. That would probably be good.

Already though how much we've picked up has come in handy. Nick and I actually understand the prices of things when we go shop at the farmer's market on Saturdays. It's helped me converse with our groundskeeper, Gumerzindo, who knows less English than we do Spanish. And reading a newspaper is slowly becoming feasible. Not bad for about a couple months of work so far. Definitely worth the time and money.