Spanish evening course: Cactus staff experience

I’m walking towards St Giles in Brighton feeling a bit nervous. I’ve signed up for a Spanish course and am about to attend the first class in a few minutes. I wanted a challenge and so enrolled onto the Upper Intermediate level, even though I scored one level below in the Cactus online level test. However, I feel my Spanish skills have become pretty rusty lately. The weeks preceding the course I have been trying to get used to speaking English 24/7, my mother tongue being Finnish, and the sudden swap of languages makes me a bit worried – maybe I will be able to recall English words only when trying to express myself in Spanish for a change.

I find my way to the class room and soon my fears have vanished. The teacher is encouraging us to speak and is happy about every sentence we are able to produce, regardless if it’s grammatically a hundred percent correct or not. The most important thing is that you can make yourself understood. Over the years I have taken lessons in a total of seven foreign languages and some of these I studied for several years. I have been taught by 25 to 30 language teachers. I can tell from my experience that the best way to obtain skills that are useful in real-life situations is to speak, speak and speak a bit (or better still, a lot) more.

Even though I still feel my Spanish is rusty and all the vocabulary I once learned is hidden somewhere in the back of my brain, I feel comfortable on the course. The class size is small, just four of us altogether which forces you to participate actively. It is a weekly full immersion into the Spanish language for two hours. The teaching method is ‘full immersion’ which means that no English whatsoever is used from the moment we enter the class room – if we don’t understand a word, our tutor will explain it to us in Spanish. During those two hours on Wednesday nights we have time to do lots of different kinds of exercises – listening, role plays, games, general conversation about some certain topics etc.

The ten weeks pass by quickly and we are finishing with the course sooner than I realise. I am happy with the course but not too happy with my own performance – I should have spent some more time on self-study between the classes. Fortunately I can also continue with independent study after the course as I have my text book, all the materials our teacher has handed out and the podcasts that are available for downloading after every lesson. And actually the immersion experience wasn’t limited to the class time either. Once after our lesson we had a Spanish dinner together with the class and the teacher. Spanish omelette – delicious!

Cactus runs Spanish evening courses in Brighton and other cities across the UK. Courses are also available in the US and Canada.

Those wishing to practise their newfound language skills abroad can take a Spanish course in locations across Spain and Latin America. Learning a language in the country where it’s spoken is the ideal way to really immerse yourself in the language and culture.