Off to SEPA in Costa Rica in January
 

I am very excited to have chosen a Home Stay Spanish language school destination for a 4 week stint from Mid-January next year.
I have zeroed in on SEPA in San Isidro de el General in Costa Rica.
We visited the area a few years ago (but for just a few days) and I loved it so much I have been itching for an excuse to return. (the weather is cooler than at the ocean - I don't do Hot-Hot well. and there is an incredibly cool river which has HUGE boulders and swimming-pool sized water pools, for bathing, Plus ceviche)

has anyone been to SEPA? It gets pretty good reviews and .... how bad can it be? I am willing to roll the dice.

quite affordable (I think). $1800 USD for 4 weeks of M-F 4-hours a day small group classes plus half-board home stay.

we'll take road bikes to explore the area's quite quiet seeming roads when we are not in class.

I am looking forward to it.

Enjoy!
The Ticos use a lot of slang that no one else in Central America shares. They also don't roll their r's. I found that very interesting while living there.

Rusty, I found your comment on the tico r interesting.

Can you give a phonological description of it? Were you able to reproduce it during your stay?

The reason I ask is that I have a text from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Manual de Transcripció fonètica, 1997) in which this particular r found in Costa Rica is equated to the voiced ?, the notoriously difficult rhotic found in Czech. I have always wondered about this, but have never visited Costa Rica to investigate.

It is hard to describe this sound, but it seems to be a fricative that is a simultaneous rolled r and a zh sound. Extremely difficult for foreigners to master, and also difficult for Czech children to learn. The tendency for foreigners is to make a sequence, r.zh, but that is incorrect. It has to be simultaneous. It is cognate with the palatalized r in Russian, ??, which is also a very difficult sound to master (but not the same sound as the ?).

In this text from Barcelona, Costan Rican Spanish was the only language mentioned other than Czech to have this sound.

Here is a voice file with the Czech sound:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:C...nin_Dvorak.ogg

The Czech sound isn't quite the same.
I heard the Costa Rican 'rr' as being a /??/ ('zhr') sound.