Anyone recommend any total immersion residentials suitable for beginners?

[Eddie Jones]

¡Hola amigos!

I am an English guy (25 years old) who currently knows very little Spanish but wants to learn Spanish because he loves the sound of the language and the process of learning foreign languages and is intrigued by certain aspects of Spanish and South American cultures. Here is my plan for learning Spanish. Any comments or advice would be appreciated, particularly about any intensive course recommendations.

So here is my plan at present:
• do the entire Pimsleur Spanish course (100 half hour lessons) this Spring+Summer and listen to lots of childrens' audio books (en español, obviamente)
• go to a lot of UK music festivals with a T-shirt on that says ¿Hablas Español? and speak it as much as possible
• listen to plenty of music by Manu Chao (other music artist suggestions please) having learned the meaning of the lyrics already
• go to Spain in September 2012 and do a several week long intensive complete-immersion style course where you refrain from speaking your native language all together 24hours. Do these exist in Spain? I am particularly looking for ones which have much greater emphasis on are speaking-listening rather than reading writing.
• hike around Spain for several months, using Couchsurfing for accomodation and to provide maximum opportunity to speak my new language

So, what do you think of plan?

Muchas gracias por tu ayuda!

- Eddie

[jorge]

that sounds like a great plan! i actually tried the pimsleur course and its pretty good. im also surrounded by spanish speaking people all the time but it just so happens i never really bothered to try to master the language until recently.

[Hablando]

Hi,

I like the t-shirt idea ut maybe you could be more direct with it. Like ask for help "Hablas espanol?" And on the back "Ayuda me por favor!"

As for your immersion course in Spain, that's a great idea. I went to Granada for 6 weeks last year (as a beginner - I had 3 'private' one hour lessons before went which gave me an idea of the present simple grammar form) and I was amazed how much you can learn in a short time. It helped that I met a great bunch of people from all over the world and many of them couldn't or didn't want to speak English. This meant Spanish became our common language - even as beginners. I've been to 2 schools - Proyecto Espanol and Enforex and booked both trips through the Estudia Espana website.

I can recommend both schools. Proyecto was cheaper but Enforex was probably higher quaility classrooms, library, multimedia equipment etc but to be honest, the learning experience was the same.

Whatever you do, you HAVE to go to Spain to learn Spanish - there's no comparison and much much more effective than learning from books or cassettes in an environment where you leave your house and speak English.

Good luck!

[Don José]

Granada is a great place. Beautiful, lots of bars, free "tapas"...

[CrOtALiTo]

Hello firstly I bid you welcome to these forums, I can see you are new signed in the forums therefore, I can offer to you my help or support as you can see it,

Later,

Do you have tried with the online lesson?

I mean you have a lot of chances to practice in the website already out there're a lot of methods for learn or takes a class since your home.

Other way is that you takes a book spoken completely since the beginning until the end and you transcript all the book in the language that you prefer, already you will get more practice translating in Spanish to English.

That's was my method sometimes besides of write all the days in the forums and I <snip> that someone correct to me.

Greetings.