When I stepped out from security, I saw a bunch of people waiting for their family and friends. It was a little tense and awkward, but eventually, I got through customs. But they're telling me, "No, no, no, you can't have this banana," in Spanish. Meanwhile, I'm just saying "no, está bien" hoping they will throw away the banana. I'd forgotten that I had a banana in my backpack, which can be problematic when you're traveling to another country because of agricultural laws that don't allow produce. I flew into Guadalajara and immediately had trouble communicating. "What if May doesn't show up?" She could easily stay at home and pretend that we never talked and I would be stuck in a country where I barely spoke the language.įortunately, that didn’t happen - though things didn’t go smoothly either. While everything was going well, I couldn’t help but overthink my way to Mexico. After that, I bought my ticket to Mexico.įrom that point on, we were chatting more via Skype, which gave me a lot more listening and speaking practice because I couldn't look up words in Google to translate when everything was live and in person. To calm our friends down (and maybe put ourselves at ease a little bit), we decided to get on Skype and chat face-to-face. I had never been to Mexico and she was already teaching languages professionally so we decided to meet in Mexico. Spanish Immersion in MexicoĪfter four or five months of chatting, we finally decided to meet up. It was simply about getting to know each other through language as best as we could. We didn't have any idea of forming a relationship at the time. I wanted to ensure I was analyzing sentences and getting as much out of the experience as possible. Every time I would get a message from her, I would put maybe an hour or so into responding to her to make sure that I got everything right. In fact, I'd say most of my writing skills still stem from messages written to May via Skype and italki. I was still Google translating a lot and picking up on a ton of vocabulary and getting used to writing Spanish, which I hadn't done while reading Madrigal's book or with my tutor. That said, our conversations were pretty basic. She would then write back in English and Spanish, so we were both getting some practice (although I got the most out of these conversations in terms of learning the language).Īt this point, I was about six months into learning Spanish and taking it seriously. Usually, I would write something in English and then in Spanish. So, we met there through private messages. She spoke French, English, and Spanish, and she had just graduated from college, where she learned how to teach languages professionally. It's a website kind of like Facebook, but for languages, where you can see everybody's profiles, see what languages they speak, what proficiency level they are at, and link up and send private messages or pay for a private tutor.įor those of you who don't know, May is the other half of Spanish and Go, and she was already way ahead of me in terms of learning a second language. Another coworker of mine who was also learning Spanish recommended a website called italki. Having a tutor helped me a lot so I wanted to find other ways of practicing with someone (reading and studying alone just isn’t as fun).
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