ANYONE living in the Orihuela Costa area who is not yet fluent in Spanish can improve their skills – or learn the language from scratch – free of charge in a month-long course starting after Easter.
¿Hablas español? After a month's worth of daily two-hour classes, you'll be able to answer that question with, sí, ¡claro! (photo: Royal Caribbean)
Taking place every day from Tuesday, April 19 to Thursday, May 19 inclusive, classes are two hours long and tailored specifically to the needs of residents who are concerned with learning to communicate in ordinary, on-the-street situations that they face daily, whilst providing the background and structure to the language to enable them to get creative and expand their conversation under their own steam as they get confident.
A greater variety and scope of topics and more complex conversation will be introduced for higher levels.
For those who are starting out from zero, or near-zero, classes run from 14.00 to 16.00 every weekday.
Those who feel they would not benefit from a beginners' class and want to start learning to say what they want to say, not just what they are able to say, can join the upper-elementary and pre-intermediate class which runs from 16.00 to 18.00, Monday to Friday.
And for those who want to perfect an already sound working knowledge, the intermediate and advanced session is from 18.00 to 20.00 – evenings, so that those who work and want to improve their Spanish for their jobs can join lessons after they clock off.
After a month's worth of daily, two-hour classes, even the least-confident and most-cautious learner will make considerable progress, by default – most adults grappling with a new language are worried about their ability to remember what they have been taught, but the key to fluency is constant repetition.
If memory is an issue, you might have to repeat each new bit you learn more often, or over a longer time, and these new bits might have to come in smaller chunks, but the process eventually becomes habit-forming – no differently to learning any other skill, knowledge or set of vocabulary, such as how to use Facebook or SmartPhones.
After all, none of us knew what an 'App' was 20 years ago, or a QR code, or a USB port, or what downloading or uploading meant, and this terminology is now part of our everyday speech.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com