Dec. 15, 2007 – 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 for this purpose, Rocket Spanish, on a website of mine devoted to the general topic.