Spanish Language School Guide: How to Get Most Spanish Out of
Your Dollar
Congratulations on your decision to study abroad Spanish! Yes,
one of the best way to improve your Spanish is to immerse
yourself in the environment and live the language. But the other
side of the coin is that the study abroad experience requires a
huge commitment on your part. For example, money. Depending on
how you do it, it could cost you a small fortune. In order to
harvest the great return of improved Spanish, you have to invest
in yourself, right? But what if you can optimize the investment
by getting the most Spanish out of your dollar? This article is
about that. More specifically speaking, there are 3 ways to
obtain maximum amount of Spanish by studying abroad. There are:
1) Picking the right country to study Spanish in, 2) Picking the
right airline, 3) Not signing up with the language school agency.
Out of the 3, Picking the right country holds the utmost
importance because it will determine significant portion of your
study abroad expense. Of course, the countries determine the
available touristic resources, difference in how the Spanish is
spoken, etc, but we'll focus on monetary issue today. Let's say
that you are looking for an one-on-one class in Spanish because
you've already taken some high school and college Spanish class
with 30 other students and that didn't give you much opportunity
to practice. As you know, Spanish is spoken in Spain and many
Latin American countries and thus, you now have a huge
selection. And cost of the study varies significantly from one
country to another. For instance in Spain, the individual class
in Spanish for a week runs around $850-$900. If you want more
complete immersion living with a host family, there goes another
$350-$400. If you are going to study for 4 weeks, it's a safe
bit to budget around $6000! On the other hand, there are less
expensive options in Central America. In Guatemala, you can find
both the one-on-one Spanish class and homestay within $150-$250.
You definitely don't want to ignore this enormous range of
difference.
Another huge expense is the transportation fee. Since most of us
will be going to the destination country by air, we'll look at
how you can save on airfares. But, first of all, let me just
tell you that since I don't work in travel industry, I don't
have the insider's secret. I don't have the travel wisdom of a
nomadic super backpacker either. All I can give you is a few web
sites where you can begin shopping around for your airfare. They
are: Economy Travel
, Airlin
e Consolidators and Best Fares. If you
have been buying tickets from places like Expedia, Orbitz,
Priceline and Travelocity, you will see the difference. I
guarantee it.
Finally, another way to cut the cost of your Spanish learning
experience is to go direct to the Spanish school by skipping
through the language school agencies. When you search for
Spanish schools on the web, most likely, those agencies are the
ones that you will encounter first. They come up on the top of
the search engine list and they offer lots of options too. After
all, that's their job. They are the "advertising agency" for
Spanish school. They charge tons of money from the individual
Spanish schools and from you too by marking up about 10%-20% on
top of the tuition you pay to the school. Yes, some of them do
offer fairly nice information of the countries and schools and
we should use them to familiarize ourselves about the potential
destinations. But it's not rare that those agencies have
problems communicating your needs to the school (My friend had
to wonder around the street of Guatemala with all his luggage
because the agency didn't notify the arrival time to the school)
and there is no point paying extra $50 for the "introductory
packet" from the agency when you sign up with them because
that's the copied one from the Spanish school. So, once you find
out the name of the school you are interested from the agency,
just go to Google or Yahoo and type in the name of the school to
go to the school's home page and sign up directly.
In conclusion, I'd recommend that you use the language school
agency to learn about the going price of tuition in various
Spanish speaking countries and when you find a school of your
interest, go to their web site to register directly with them.
Finally, use the discount airfare web sites indicated previously
as a reference point to shop around for your best airfare. With
this little bit of research, you are well on your way to get
most Spanish out of your bucks!