One of our goals is to learn enough Spanish to at least get by comfortably. So we planned to do a weeks worth of lessons in Buenos Aires to get us started on our way. Luckily we didn’t pay for the whole lot up front. We did a two hour private lesson just to test it out and see how it went. It was useless!! Even for private lessons they seemed to categorise you into beginner/internediate/advanced. So despite the fact that we already knew a few basics the teacher started right from ‘Hola’. Fair enough, I could cope with that. But the teaching style seemed to be give us a script to read. Read it. Explain what all the words mean. Alright, next script. Reading is definitely a good skill to have, but not the way to teach a one week crash course in a language. In two hours the only thing we learnt was that ll is pronounced more like ‘sh’ in Argentina, whereas we were saying it as a ‘y’ sound which is correct for other parts of South America. Even worse rather than being a good way to boost our confidence and help us have the courage to speak to people in Spanish she made us feel like complete idiots who knew nothing. Needless to say we decided not to continue with the lessons.
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