If you feel like you want to learn a foreign language, or improve your language skills, I would highly recommend you to go abroad. It really is the best way to get familiar with a language.

During my internship at a Spanish company in Salamanca, I really noticed my language skills improved: my vocabulary was growing and at the same time I noticed I really started to understand the grammar. The first 2,5 years of my studies I had Spanish classes weekly, but I saw that at some point I wasn’t improving anymore. I had done all the chapters of my grammar book, but failed to really understand it as I didn’t have anyone to practice with.

During my internship I didn’t do a Spanish language course like the other interns at the company, but I had another way of practising my Spanish: just having conversations in Spanish with the two Spanish boys I was living with, and with all the other Spanish people I met. In general, the problem is that people, when going abroad, tend to spend most of the time with people from their own country. In this way most of the time they speak in their own language and they don’t practice the language they are supposed to learn. Not a lot of improvements are being made and in 99,9% of the situations the reason for this is a lack of practising. You should just try to meet as many native speakers as possible and try to watch for example some television or read a newspaper in the concerning language and see if you understand

Another reason for going abroad is not only that it’s the best way to learn a language, but it is also a good way to get to know another culture. Because of my Spanish boyfriend I really started to live like a Spanish person, speaking for example of the hours of having lunch and dinner. When living with Spanish people, you’ll get familiar with their habits.

Not to forget just the simple fact of meeting new people, something that is always very interesting. You’ll even learn more about other cultures, not only about the culture of the country where you are staying. To meet other people with different views on life, with different goals to meet and other interests makes your stay in a foreign country even more interesting. I met a lot of new people during my stay in Salamanca and this has given me very nice memories.

So because of the positive experience I gained from my stay in Salamanca as an intern, I recommend you to go abroad as well, to experience a new country, friendly people, lovely food and an interesting culture: every foreign country has something special that you should experience yourself!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Learning Abroad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.