My Spanish course in November 2015

I studied Spanish at the Escuela Montalbán in Granada from 02.11. to 13.11. this year.

1. Teachers:

Grammar: Berna
Conversation: Maria in my second week, cannot remember the teacher´s name who did the teaching during my first week

2. What I liked

We were a small group of students so that everyone could (and actually had to) participate quite extensively. No place to hide :-)

3. What I didn´t like

I studied some Spanish more than 30 years ago. In the meantime I had not had any contact at all with the Spanish language. When I did the level test at home I stated that the only tenses I could somewhat remember were the present tense and the pretérito perfecto. All other tenses had totally escaped me.
When we started to work on the use of the préterito perfecto and the préterito indefinido on my very first day in class, I was a bit shocked. Trying to work out which tense to use if you do not even know how to form the different tenses (not even for the regular verbs) is rather hard. It is also very taxing to make a conversation when your knowledge of vocabulary is so pathetically restricted (unfortunately mine is). Trying to put a sentence together by looking up more or less each and every word in a dictionary is actually not inspiring. It is a bit frustrating because it doesn´t make you feel confident about what you have already achieved but it makes you feel disappointed about all the things you would like to say and you just cannot.

4. Conclusion:

I enjoyed my time at the Escuela Montalbán. I learnt a lot - my listening skills have much improved. During the first 2 days I had severe problems to follow what the teachers said. At the end of the second week that was no problem at all. I would have preferred, however,  that the individual results of the level tests had been taken more into consideration when allocating the students to their classes. But maybe the reason is that you just do not have enough students in November to set up so many different classes.

Anyway I will continue my studies here in Germany because the time I spent at your school certainly prodded me to try to further improve my Spanish. Thanks a lot.

Andrea Vater-Adler from Germany