Learn Spanish After 50... or 60!
When I ran into Beatriz Siliceo at a party recently, I took advantage of our meeting to ask her a few questions about learning Spanish. She's a bilingual Mexican who is so at home in English that she does translations and has taught English as a second language. I had met her a time or two before, when friends of mine were studying beginning Spanish with her in San Antonio Tlayacapan, here by Lake Chapala. I had been pleased to see verb charts on their refrigerator.
I hear so many older foreigners here in Mexico saying how hard they find it to learn Spanish. While I have noticed that sometimes I learn a word on Monday and can't remember it Tuesday, I think that also happened when I lived in Spain when I was 25!
So I asked Beatriz, "Do you find that people who are about 60 have any more trouble learning Spanish that, say, those who are about 40?"
"Not at all," she said. "Motivation is far more important than age."
My experience in Mexico is so much the richer for speaking Spanish. Just recently, I spent some time with a delightful Mexican man who didn't speak English. When I apologized for my fractured verbs and lousy accent, he said (in Spanish) "But we can communicate! That's the important thing!"
I also think that the little hassles of everyday can be much more severe if you live in Mexico or any Spanish-speaking country and don't speak Spanish. Recently I called the electric company to report a power outage, certainly far easier with a modicum of Spanish than not.
If you are in the Lake Chapala area and want to learn Spanish with Beatriz, her email is beatrizsiliceo at hotmail dot com... I put it that way because you can figure it out but there is software that searches the net for spammers, looking for email addresses.
Wherever you are, whatever age you are, do learn more Spanish! Here's a page where I review
my favorite downloadable program to learn to speak Spanish.
Labels: Learn Spanish, speaking Spanish
posted by Rosana Hart @ Saturday, December 15, 2007
2 Comments:
At December 16, 2007 10:55 AM,
Marie McC said…
I've been saying the same thing for years to anyone who'll listen! I strongly believe if you have an aptitude for language, you'll have it at no matter which age. Motivation often increases when you have a need to use the language, such as when you are an expat in Mexico.
Where I think some people fall down is that they aren't in a total immersion setting, i.e., they may as an expat live in a community where there are large numbers of English speaking foreigners and where the Mexican business owners have adapted to their needs by learning English. Those who have a spouse who speaks better Spanish than they do also are less motivated to put in the necessary work.
Also, people get discouraged because they aren't fluent in a short amount of time. Generally speaking, three years of college study will get you to where you can understand more written than spoken Spanish. But even at that, it's no guarantee that you'll be able to speak it effortlessly. That uses a different part of the brain, and takes a lot of practice, practice, practice. It's a lot of hard work, and it takes a lot more effort than taking a one hour class once or twice a week.
I started learning French when I was 43. Three years later and after a summer immersion program in France, I could say pretty much whatever I needed to without hesitating to think about it. I'm picking up Spanish again, after only two years high school study. I'm in my mid-50s, and I easily outperformed the 20 year olds in my summer conversation class.
Motivation is truly the key. As you mentioned, even faulty Spanish can be overlooked if the desire to communicate is strong enough.
Good post!
At December 16, 2007 11:40 AM,
Rosana Hart said…
A nice advantage of learning Spanish over French is that as a general thing, Spanish-speakers are more forgiving of our errors than the French. I still remember being 19 in Paris and a taxi driver refusing to take me where I was going -- 8, rue de la Harpe -- until I pronounced those pesky French u sounds to his satisfaction! There was some kindness in this, granted, but also some arrogance!
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