I started learning Spanish at age 32! My husband and I and our first daughter moved to San José, Costa Rica to study Spanish at the Instituto de lengua española for 1 year. We actually ended up leaving after about 10 months, and continued our learning in Caracas, Venezuela. The motivation for learning Spanish was our vocation as missionaries. We were convinced that if we were to be effective as missionaries, we needed to have a good command of the language. Our first experience with Immersion was in Costa Rica. Our teachers NEVER used English with us. I would sit there day after day watching their mouths move, and the expressions on their faces. They were actually communicating something important to me, but I had no idea what it was.
Then I started catching a few patterns. For example, I caught the grammar pattern of I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they. But then I was really blown away by how many words there were for the same verb! And all in the present tense!! I remember feeling the embarrassment of not understanding. After all, I was an intelligent human being with an advanced education, and now I was reduced to a range of vocabulary that rivaled my 1 year old!
However, in any classroom, there's always someone who has just a little more experience than you do. I had studied Latin & French in High School, but that had been soooo long ago. There were a few others in the class who had studied Spanish before coming to Costa Rica. Even though they were surprised by their lack of fluency and understanding, they had enough of a base that they could help us total novices understand a few things. This was was my first experience with one of the key strategies in Immersion Education: students can interpret for students, but teachers must always maintain communication in the target language.
We chose Immersion education for ourselves partly because it was recommended by our Mission board, and partly because we were learning the language in a natural environment. We are so grateful for that opportunity. We never regretted that decision. What about you? Where did you start?
hi sheryl - so glad to finally have some time to sit down and enjoy your blog - thanks for sharing your ideas and experiences! as the parent of one child in an immersion program, and soon to be two, i am tremendously grateful for the opportunity for kids in our community to be able to acquire a second language so young. i have been incredibly fortunate in my life and have traveled extensively; i've lived in europe, asia, and central america, and have visited maybe three dozen different countries. and on every trip, i've wished i spoke something more than english and my basic (bad) spanish. i've met europeans who speak four, five, or six languages with relative ease and their worlds are so much the richer for it. being able to start our daughters on this path at a very young age helps them to not only learn anther language, but helps them to appreciate the connections between people that can be made when you know another language, the ways that words can build bridges among people, the ways that sharing a language can make our enormous, crazy world just a little bit smaller and a little bit friendlier. i am grateful for your part in that at our school!
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