There is a great restaurant in town where I love to eat steak. It is cheap, though they don't offer the best cuts of meat. However, the steak is tender, comes with a load of sides, and is cooked perfectly for my tastes. It is a popular place and listed in all the guidebooks. I've [...]
You and your business partner have been working your tails off trying to get a bunch of modern, Mexican-style duplexes off the ground. You've poured too much money to think about into hiring Mexican workers to build this duplex complex. You all have not only hired locals to do all the work, tolerating the cultural [...]
To be honest with you, I don't see why more Gringos in Guanajuato aren't getting ripped off when trying to rent, or God forbid, buy a house on their own. It never occurred to us to move here without as much Spanish under our belts as possible. We had a high degree of fluency BEFORE [...]
I wish someone had written a more reality-based expatriation guide we could have read during our research phase before moving to Mexico. The fine books that do exist, that everyone seems to have read, give you a rosy picture of what life is like in Mexico for the American. For those who are thinking about [...]
What got me started on an Intercambio jag was learning how Mexicans in the tourist industry on Mexico's Gold Coast learn English and achieve an amazing level of proficiency. They do it by engaging in Intercambios! This is where you exchange an hour of helping a Mexican struggling to learn English with an hour of [...]
Going to the host country of the target language has always taken on a sort of mythical quality. It has been believed that you could not learn a foreign language unless you went to the country associated with the target language and engaged in something called Total Immersion.
Total Immersion is NOT a protracted amount of [...]
There are two additional courses that I recommend. In fact, they are so effective that these, along with The Learnables, I credit with helping on my road to a high degree of spoken fluency. These courses are Pimsleur Spanish and Learning Spanish Like Crazy. Without this trio of courses I would not be where I [...]
I've been thinking about this lady in San Miguel de Allende. I don't know her well. I've never met her, actually, but we have corresponded. She told me that she's tried learning Spanish. She's spent money she didn't have to attend classes that yielded little in the way of spoken fluency in the language. Her [...]
The Horse, as I wrote previously, is spoken fluency. I made the point that long before they go off to first grade, children already have a high degree of spoken fluency in their native tongue before they learn the parts of speech or memorize grammar rules. It is my contention, and the premise of this [...]
It is not an exaggeration to declare that the United States of America could be the only country in the world where one can graduate from high school and even college without taking one course of foreign language study. Of those few schools which still require their students to take a foreign language to graduate, [...]