By Evelyn
The only request of my parents for my gap year was that I become fluent in Spanish! Despite taking Spanish in school since kindergarten and ending with AP Spanish senior year, I had never felt very confident speaking the language. And I very much want to be fluent, especially as I intend to spend a good portion of my gap year in Spain.
During my 12 weeks away, I was enrolled in the don Quijote Spanish language school, where I took 4 hours of Spanish lessons each day during the week and lived with other students. The school has locations across Spain and I studied in Barcelona, Salamanca, and Madrid over the course of my stay. What I discovered across those three cities wasn’t just how to order coffee or ask for directions—it was that fluency isn’t about perfection. It’s about the willingness to try, laugh at your mistakes, and keep talking anyway.
In Barcelona, I was surrounded by young people, mostly European, who were taking Spanish in order to apply to Spanish universities or jobs. My friends, like me, often had a very traditional basis of understanding of the language from high school or other language classes they had taken. In the classroom, most of us spoke only in full complete sentences and many checked their homework heavily with a translating app. This was the closest to what I experienced when learning Spanish in high school. As a group, we spoke English to each other, checking our Spanish before ordering a meal or speaking to a shop owner.
When I moved to my second location, the small city of Salamanca, I was met with a very different group of people. My classmates were generally older and mostly studying Spanish to use when they traveled post-retirement. In Salamanca, I lived in a homestay with a host mom and an older German woman who, coincidentally, was also named Evelyn! Evelyn had learned Spanish on her own and had come to Spain to improve and practice. She did not know or understand the verb tenses, while I had been quizzed on these over many years of high school Spanish. But her vocabulary was much larger than mine and made up of many useful daily words whereas lots of my vocabulary is from topics we studied in school, such as global warming, politics, and technical art terms. While these were great words for essay writing or classroom presentations, I did not find them helpful when ordering lunch or trying to navigate the metro! Despite her limited knowledge of grammar rules and verbs, Evelyn was more outgoing than the young students in Barcelona. A couple of times during my four weeks in Salamanca, I went out to eat with her and some of her classmates. Despite their limitations, the group was committed to speaking only in Spanish the entire dinner. If someone didn’t know how to say something, they would describe it to the rest of us until we figured it out as a group rather than using Google translate or saying it in English. Our group chat was exclusively Spanish and even though many times someone had to ask for more clarity, we never explained in English. In Salamanca, I took more risks with the language and, with the group, was able to laugh at my errors.
My final location was Madrid, where I lived for two weeks in a shared apartment with two other students. Here, none of my classmates spoke English. Every day during our 20-minute break between classes, I would walk to a small cafe with a French man and a Brazilian woman, both of whom were living in Spain long term. Our only shared language was Spanish, so there was no resorting to English if I didn’t know how to say something. Sometimes I struggled to communicate but I also got very good at figuring out alternative ways to translate a thought!
Overall, I found learning Spanish in Spain was fun in a way it had never been in school. With less pressure and no grades, I wasn’t as concerned with having perfect vocabulary and grammar. I learned the words and phrases for joking around and hanging out with friends. I started talking to myself in Spanish–sometimes out loud!– and I learned to re-phrase my thoughts quickly if I didn’t know how to say something. The fluency I’d traveled to Spain to gain turned out to be less about grammar mastery vocabulary memorization, and much more about leaving behind the fear of being wrong.
