This first week of Spanish immersion was in some ways harder than I expected, but overall the first week felt productive. In many ways, the class was like going back to school. I haven’t had an instructional education experience in many years. Sure, there were the inevitable corporate training exercises, but those are nothing like sitting in a class with a teacher. We’re doing a two-week class at Hablando Mexicano in Todos Santos, Baja Sur. Three hours per day, five days a week. Each day after class, I was mentally exhausted. I guess at 53, I’m just not used to learning at this level of focus.
Valarie and I have been working to learn Spanish for the last six or seven months. There have been previous false starts at this goal, but when we decided we were going to spend a year traveling in Mexico, Central and South America, the reality of the need to be able to communicate with local people in their language became real.
We both started using Dreaming Spanish back in the spring of 2025. Dreaming Spanish’s system is based on the theory of Comprehensible Input. How I like to think about it is, when you learned a language as a child, you didn’t do grammar lessons right off the bat. Your family spoke to you, and you started to pick up the meaning of words and phrases along the way. CI suggests you learn a language by, at first, mostly watching content being spoken by native speakers. Along the path you start to introduce speaking, reading and writing in your new language. CI suggests you delay speaking practice until after closer to a thousand hours of input. I know this works for many people, but we wanted to push ourselves by mixing up the approaches.
When we started on this path, we knew we would need to layer in various approaches. While Dreaming Spanish has been super helpful, we knew we needed to get out there and start to speak with people. The idea of speaking Spanish to native speakers is pretty scary to me. Heck, speaking to others in English isn’t my strong suit. Although I took the two years of Spanish in high school that is common for many high schoolers, I honestly didn’t feel like I really learned anything. More so, I never thought of myself as someone who could learn a new language.
Although the class is difficult, the instructors have been super patient. And I have been seeing progress. At this point the frustrating part is the class is an immersive experience, so the instructors do their best to only speak Spanish. I would love to be able to match them when I have questions, but I am just not there yet. Progress is really what I’m looking for. I know I have a long way to go.
It has been helpful for me to start to frame my goal to learn Spanish less as something I can complete, and more as a new practice that will be lifelong. To become someone who can speak Spanish, someone who can learn languages.
Looking back, the motivation to start on this journey was really about safety first, while traveling down the Pan American Highway. Second, it was my interest to be able to connect with people during this journey. But as I thought more about this goal, it made me feel that if I only did this it would be disappointing to put all this effort in, to then lose the ability after we returned from Argentina.
I am very far from being able to say I can speak Spanish. But I can start to think of myself as someone who can learn these types of things. I don’t need to define myself as someone who is no good at languages. This is part of my journey post-retirement to push myself to question my previous assumptions about who I am.