The label ‘Spanish for Travel Course’ can mean many things depending on the content and length of such course. It’s not the same, for example, a short course of five or even ten lessons than a year long course of forty lessons.
In my own experience as Spanish language tutor, I’ve found that lots of people wanting to learn Spanish for travelling purposes tend to assume that a short course - even one of five lessons - will equip them with the necessary skills to get by when travelling to a Spanish speaking country. That assumption maybe relevant if the student wants to learn the language at a superficial level, which involves learning a fragmented form of the language or what I call ‘gimmick Spanish’. This is the type of language presented by popular commercial language travel guides and the typical short courses offered by language schools.
Those guides and courses present the student with language structures such as:”Quisiera una cerveza, por favor” (”I’d like a beer, please”) or “¿Hay una estación de tren cerca de aquí?” (”Is there a train station nearby?”). Guides and courses of this type may be very convenient for the rushed traveller, but as to how useful the language learnt may be for communication and language development purposes, is entirely a different matter.
Any Spanish for travel course which focus on fragmented language and which is not followed up by continuous learning prior to travel cannot provide the student with firm foundations to tackle the whole body of language. This is so because proper learning and acquisition of language implies that the student in any given situation of spoken language exchange must be able to express ideas with ease. I always explain to my students that by using language as clear as the two examples above, more often than not, they run into the risk of being taken by a native Spanish speaker, as users of language that are in possession of full fluency in Spanish.
I put to my students that the reply to a clear request or question - as the two cited above - may be so overwhelming and so long, to the point that the answers apart of not providing any help may instead contribute to get them into an even more confused situation. Answering an open ended question is a complex process which is very rarely straight forward. For the examples above, requesting a beer may involve the waiter or barman asking in return questions -in Spanish - such as: “What brand of beer would you like”; “Do you want a local or imported beer?”; Would you like a glass for your beer?”; “Would you like to eat something with your beer?”; “Do you want an ale or a lager?”. This is not what the traveller expected! But this is what normally happens. The answer to a question asking for the location of a place may be even more complex.
Short Spanish courses for travel - or labeled any other way - do not provide the necessary language skills for anybody wanting to use Spanish in a natural way with native Spanish speakers. Short Spanish courses can only be effective when they can be followed up by further learning prior to travelling. On the other hand, knowing some Spanish, even in a fragmented way, is better than not knowing Spanish at all.
If short Spanish for travel courses aren’t of much use, what about a long course? A long course implies getting to know more about all aspects of language that facilitate full development of oral and written skills. Read more about this subject later.
Tell us about your own language experiences while travelling within a Spanish speaking country.
Filed under: Foreign Language Learning, Language learning, Second Language Learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning
