study Spanish in South America

I told my co-worker about this goal, and she suggested that Guatemala would be cheaper, safer, and basically more do-able. Venezuela’s in a volatile political state right now, with Chavez and all, and may not be the best place for foreign travelers. My co-worker’s best friend (and also a co-worker of mine) went to Guatemala to study, and ended up living and working there for two years! Now, I don’t expect to do that, but it’s a nice indication of how much she loved the country. Also, the Spanish is apparently quite standard there, with not as many derivatives as other countries have, and the people speak more slowly than in other countries. It’s dirt cheap to live there, and a study program would probably be cheaper than I’m expecting, as well.

Co-worker #1 is going to have co-worker #2 get me some information on Spanish programs when we get back to Atlanta. Ideally, I would like to do an immersion study for a month.

I studied Spanish through middle school, high school, and part of college, but through those last couple years of college, I started forgetting pretty much everything but “Donde esta’...?” and some of the delightful insults I had learned. Then I lived in Japan for a time, and, oddly enough, some of my Spanish started coming back (when you move to a place where you don’t know the language, the instinct seems to be to try out other foreign languages you know). Now that I work at a language school in Atlanta, I use some Spanish at work, and I have a couple people to practice with. But, man, watching some of my English students improve dramatically through out immersion programs has made me feel like such a dolt for not working to become fluent in a foreign language as well. One of my first students at the language school was Beatriz, from Venezuela. In the past six months, she’s told me a lot about her home country: the rants about Chavez, her rhapsodizing about salsa dancing, stories about popping over to the mountains one day and the beach the next. I know it’s not a politically stable place right now, but I can’t shake my urges to do a Spanish immersion program there: four or five days a week of language classes, and then exploring the area on weekends. My company has a school there, and I KNOW they won’t spring for paying for my lessons, but maybe I can at least hope for a tiny discount…?