This week’s newsletter topic is a very interesting one for me; it is one that I will request your feedback and participation on so we can see more data on the subject.

As I was learning to speak Spanish, I went to a two-month intensive training course, then went straight to Latin America and lived among native speakers. It was quite a challenge to immediately communicate only in Spanish after arriving, but it definitely helped my language progression. After about two or three months of living in the country, I found I was able to understand about 75-85% of what was being said. Around that time, as I was becoming more fluent, I decided I was going to try to think in Spanish. If any of you want to get to that point, it can very intimidating unless you think of Spanish as just different vocabulary words used to express the same ideas. (more…)