It’s a beautiful Monday morning and the first day of Spanish
classes. We arrived ten minutes early
which required we wait for forty minutes (our first Spanish lesson). We had chosen to take classes at Castila for
a several reasons. Our TEFL training had
been located at their beautiful facilities, we had previously spoken with
several of the staff and the school had the certifications we were looking
for. Importantly, Castila came
recommended by several other people we knew, and we had already corresponded
with Allison, the administrative assistant, through InterNations.
It wasn’t the cheapest school but we were comfortable with
the quality of education we would receive for our money. The classes were guaranteed to have 6 or less
students each which we thought would be a very comfortable learning
environment. We had arranged for a 12
week intensive course thinking that would be the minimum we’d need to obtain a
decent grasp of the language basics.
A group of 6 or 7 of us were finally herded into a room and
given a 3 or 4 page multiple choice and fill in the blank test and told not to
answer any questions we were not absolutely sure of. Needless to say, we were done very quickly
and found ourselves sipping coffee, waiting for those who could actually answer
some of the questions, for an hour or so.
It turned out that there were three of us beginners, we were
joined by a lovely lady from Perth, Australia and our first professor decided
he would conduct class under the fig tree in the garden. For the two of us and our new friend Leslie it
was a wonderful environment for a language class. We were supplied with our books, all written
in Spanish of course. When they say
immersion, they mean immersion. It was a
very interesting experience to be given a text book and course guide for the
class and not be able to read a word of it.
The first couple of weeks our Spanish class was not too bad,
they stuck to the basics. Early on, the
focus was on vocabulary acquisition, with a bit of pronunciation. Verb conjugation began but only with the most
common verbs in present tense. Our class
schedule was 9:30 am to 2:00 pm Monday through Friday, under the fig tree, with
optional cultural events every evening and on weekends.
Every other Monday evening at 6:00 pm they would have a “Copa
de Bienvenidos” or welcome cocktail with a discussion of all the activities
slated for the following two weeks. We
would have a printed copy and they would explain everything in detail. Everything was written and spoken only in
Spanish, of course. We spent a lot of time with our Spanish/English dictionary,
which by the way, we were not allowed to use in class.
Tuesday was movie night, Spanish movies with Spanish
subtitles. The idea is to see and hear
it as much and as often as possible so your ear becomes attuned to the
language. What it really means for rank
beginners is a serious headache from listening so hard and trying to process so
much.
Other activities like seeing some of the historic sites,
taking hikes and even weekend trips to other parts of Andalucía were all on the
program and you could do as much or as little as your brain and budget could
handle.
During our third week of class the school enjoyed an influx
of thirty very young students from France.
Leslie had moved on to enjoy some vacation time before heading home to
Australia so we were on our own. We were
bumped up a level and spent an entire week learning food vocabulary and trying
to keep up with the group we had been moved into. We had not yet learned several key components
of the language (like past tense) that this class had already learned and we
were definitely out of our depth. By
Friday we were completely frustrated and decided to spend a couple of hours in
the residencia with our wonderful friend and house manager Mercedes. She doesn’t speak English but is very patient
and worked through some of our lessons with us at the dining room table.
The following week with the youth group back in France, and we
were back in business. They reshuffled
all the classes based on current level, a couple of new students had arrived so
our group expanded and we went from being classified as “beginner” to
“elementary”. We were becoming accustomed
to the Spanish schedule at this point and were were really beginning to enjoy our everyday life in Granada.
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