"Avoid the academic study of language at all costs". Opinion.

I speak Spanish at an advanced level, and I continue to learn. I am currently spending a part of my trip to Mexico in a language school in Puerto Vallarta on Mexico's Pacific Coast.

I recommend that you avoid the academic study of Spanish at all costs and instead learn to actually communicate with native speakers in some country. Ordinary people in Mexico and Peru do not learn to speak Spanish by reading Lorca.

Fortunately, language schools are one of the cottage industries of Latin America. In almost any country from Mexico to Chile you can enroll in a language school (escuela de idiomas) and study in a small class. Even better, you can take private lessons, so that all of your learning time is for you. The teachers are generally university educated.

I have studied Spanish this way in four different countries: Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and Cuba. This has helped me learn different accents and regional vocabulary. Most language schools will help you find accommodations, often with a local family that welcomes foreigners, so that you can immerse yourself in the culture. Each of my teachers has given me a window into the Spanish speaking world. The cost of my instruction, mostly private lessons, has ranged from about $12-25 an hour, but there are countries, such as Ecuador and Nicaragua, where private lessons are even cheaper, as little as $7 an hour. When I was in Cuba, there were people who made me aware that if I arranged for truly private lessons, rather than contracting for lessons through the European agency that had the official monopoly, I could get lessons even more cheaply.

Latin American language schools are fun places to study. As a 57-year-old guy I appreciate the time I have spent at these schools, where both the students and the professors are generally younger women. There are often fun social activities arranged by the school, like parties and sightseeing. Study at a language school and you will have a ready-made circle of friends and activities.

At my first language school in Costa Rica (1997), I stayed with a local family. Victor was around 60 years old, and he lived with his wife and her sister. Victor was a carpenter and woodcutter, and he owned no television. He stayed up every night with me, speaking Spanish and asking me questions about the United States.

I learned that even though Latin Americans live at a standard of living far below ours (in the United States), they have incredibly rich lives and close families. Even though I was staying in a simple wood shack with bare electric light bulbs and no modern plumbing, there was an incredible richness to Victor's family life. He had extended family all around him, and I went with him to visit some of them. On the last day of my stay, his wife confessed to me that she could not add figures because her family could not afford to send her to school when she was younger. She asked me to help her add up the bill. I almost cried when she told me that she felt ashamed, and I told her in the best Spanish that I could manage at the time that to me she was not a fool.

Learn more about the best way to learn Spanish.

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