Learning Spanish can be both exciting and fun depending upon the method chosen. While there are a variety of methods available today to learn Spanish, each method has its own pros and cons. I'll review some of these pros and cons of the various methods commonly used in the next several posts.
True full immersion in the Spanish language can only be accomplished by living for some period in a country where Spanish is spoken as a native language. The intent of full immersion is that you are surrounded by the language you are trying to learn. Everywhere you turn, you are confronted by the new language. For example, if you are learning Spanish and studying the language in a Spanish speaking country, the newspapers and periodicals are all in Spanish, television is in Spanish, and people all around you are speaking Spanish. You can not fall back on your native language as a crutch but are forced to interact in Spanish.
Informally, full immersion can be as simple as actually moving to that country and living among the populous and picking up the language by observation, watching local television, reading local papers, etc until you finally learn the language. This is a very hard and difficult way to learn a language but is often the method used by refuges or immigrants. The informal full immersion method works best if there are no other speakers of your own native language around, thus forcing the learning of the new language. An Romanian acquaintance of mine used this method of learning English after moving to the United States. However, Spanish speaking immigrants to the United States find many other Spanish speakers to whom they can communicate and thus do not find learning English as much a necessity as my Romanian friend and many fail to learn much English at all.
A more formal method of full immersion is to take a formal language learning course while living in the country. There are a number of formal Spanish language learning programs designed to use this method that can be found in Spain, Mexico and Costa Rica. They usually involve living with a local family, attending formal Spanish language classes half a day each weekday and numerous local field trips all conducted in Spanish. While these programs are generally an excellent method of learning Spanish, they can be quite expensive, considering not only the cost of the program itself, but the cost of living locally while taking the course and of course the time involved. For most of us some other more cost effective method is needed and I will explore those options in future posts.
[Note] In an attempt to take advantage of the success of full or total immersion programs, one foreign language learning company has used the term "Instant Immersion" to name their foreign language learning CD program. It is NOT the same thing. Their program not only is NOT total immersion, it is also not very good, and in my opinion a waste of money. I purchased the CD's of both their basic and deluxe programs and cannot recommend them. There are much better options available on the market including the Rosetta Stone Spanish programs (both Spain and Latin American Spanish) and the Pimsleur Spanish language programs (while more expensive, they are much more effective).
Coming up next will be a discussion of learning Spanish with audio only language learning programs.
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