Students Take Fast Route to Learning Spanish : Popularity of the Mexican Language Schools Has Increased Dramatically

As she boarded the bus from Mexico City to Cuernavaca, Kathy Quintana fought the urge to turn around and go home.

The 21-year-old Corona del Mar resident had never been to Mexico before. Now she was not only in a strange country on her own; she faced the prospect of living with a Mexican family she had never met--for a month.

As the bus rolled out of the uneven dirt parking lot behind the bus station, Quintana thought, “What am I doing here?”

The answer came back almost automatically--”Learning Spanish.”

Quintana, who recently returned from her four-week stay in Cuernavaca, had arranged to live with a Mexican family as part of an intensive program of Spanish-language instruction. She is one of thousands of people who lived with a family in Mexico this year while studying Spanish at private schools.

Motivation, Adjustment

The experience requires a high degree of motivation and a willingness to adjust to cultural and family differences--adjustments that are not always easy for Americans. Yet the popularity of such schools has increased dramatically. There are now at least 20 language schools scattered throughout Mexico, nearly all of them less than 10 years old. Enrollment at the Center for Bilingual Multicultural Studies in Cuernavaca jumped from 423 in 1980 to 1,328 last year. At the Academia Hispano Americana in San Miguel de Allende, enrollment increased from 627 to 993 during the same period. Other schools also report steady increases.

Students from Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia have become commonplace, but directors of several of the largest schools say more than half of their students come from the United States, most of them from Southern California.

“The density of Spanish-speaking people is higher in Southern California” than in most other areas of the United States, said Zenon Toledo, director of a language school called Cuauhnahuac in Cuernavaca. “Many of our students are doctors, nurses, lawyers and psychologists who work (or want to work) with Latinos.”

Written Several Articles

Leo Ortiz-Minique, a Spanish-language instructor at Clark University in Massachusetts who has written several articles about Mexican language schools, noted that the political and social strife in Central American countries such as Nicaragua has also fostered an interest in Spanish for many Americans, particularly college students.

Many students attend language schools in Mexico simply because the institutions offer the fastest route to communicating with other Spanish speakers. Minique said that someone enrolled in an intensive program of five to six hours of Spanish a day, five days a week “can get the equivalent of a semester of college Spanish in three to four weeks.” Coupled with the experience of living with a Mexican family, the schools provide “a total immersion that cannot be duplicated in U.S. universities,” he added.

Those enrolled at Quintana’s school included not only college students but journalists, teachers, diplomats, social workers and businessmen who hoped to increase or improve their dealings with Mexican companies. But Quintana had a special reason for attending.

Although she grew up in a Mexican-American family in Corona, she never learned enough Spanish to participate in family discussions during holiday and birthday celebrations. “I knew exactly what was being said, but I was always afraid my family was going to laugh at me if I talked because I didn’t know grammar very well. It was very frustrating,” Quintana explained.

“I figured I should know how to speak Spanish because that’s what my origins are. But I couldn’t.”

Recommended by a Friend

Like most students, Quintana chose a school that was recommended by a friend. It was in Cuernavaca. Although there are language schools in small towns such as Rosarito Beach and San Miguel de Allende, industrial centers such as Puebla and Mexico City, and resort cities such as Merida and Mazatlan, Cuernavaca--with no less than a dozen schools--has become Mexico’s unofficial headquarters for language students.

“In Cuernavaca there are more language institutions per square mile than any other city in the Spanish-speaking world,” Ortiz-Minique said.

Nearly all of them offer a program of three to five hours of grammar and conversation classes a day. And nearly all offer additional minicourses on Mexican or Latin American culture and history.

Costs are also remarkably similar. Tuition at the schools runs $400 to $500 a month, and room and board with a family $10 to $15 a night (including all meals), depending on whether a student wants his own room or is willing to share with another student.

Nevertheless, there are differences. Size is one. Although grammar classes in most schools are limited to five students or less, the total number of students at a school can affect the atmosphere and even the scheduling of classes. The Rev. Ron Geikow, pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Bell, has attended both large and small schools in Cuernavaca and said that although he liked them both, the small school appealed to him more “because you got a little more individual attention.”

Another difference is the teaching philosophy. Some schools coordinate frequent social activities because they believe that students relax more in such settings and try to speak Spanish more readily. Others hold few parties and instead concentrate on providing lectures in Spanish so that students can develop both their comprehension and confidence.

Still others are more politically oriented, offering lectures and courses on the issues currently affecting Central America.

For Quintana, selecting a school was the easy part. The difficult part came when she stood on the front porch of a middle-class house in Cuernavaca and was introduced to the family with which she’d be living for the next four weeks.

“I felt uncomfortable,” she recalled, “not knowing what to say, or what they expected. . . . Actually, I felt uncomfortable for the first two weeks. Every time we sat at the table I felt I had to say something, participate. . . .”

Quintana, like many students, also found that eating the main meal of the day at 2:30 p.m. and then only a light supper at 8 or 9 in the evening required getting used to. And privacy and solitude are hard to find in family-oriented Mexico.

But students are not the only ones who need to make adjustments. One Cuernavaca mother, Estela Zapata Araujo, recalled that her lodgers have included a young woman who rose at dawn to do aerobics on the front porch, and Buddhist monks who chanted over their food every afternoon in the garden.

Embarrassing Situations

The students’ imperfect grasp of the language can also lead to embarrassing situations. Nancy Bullard of Los Angeles was mortified to learn that for two weeks she had been calling her family’s young son Marcial, Marciano --which in Spanish means Martian .

And Tomas Augsberger, a student from Munich, West Germany, tried out his Spanish on his Mexican girlfriend during a romantic moment one evening, only to discover that he’d called her “my exotic umbrella.” Asked when he realized his mistake, Augsberger replied with a hearty laugh: “When I saw her face.”

Perhaps the most difficult thing for Americans to adjust to, however, is the tradition of machismo and the resulting unequal treatment of men and women. Single women students often find that their Mexican families are highly protective of them and watch their comings and goings far more closely than those of male students. And women comprise the majority of language students in Mexico--up to 80% in some schools.

“Learning a foreign language isn’t necessary to get ahead in the United States,” so many American men simply don’t bother to learn one, said Charles Goff, director of the Cemanahuac language school in Cuernavaca. “Women students are more interested in the humanities, things that aren’t necessarily going to result in a bigger income. They also seem to have more free time” to pursue language studies, he added.

Machismo manifests itself in hoots and catcalls on the street and spills over into classrooms, too, where the predominantly male instructors sometimes flirt openly with their female students. “I was always conscious of being a sex object,” said Karen Wagner, program director for a sexual harassment center in New York City. Wagner recently attended a language school in Cuernavaca in order to communicate better with the minority women she sometimes counsels.

The flirting “was distracting at school. After a certain point the grammar was lost and the class degenerated into just chatter and joking. . . . Spanish became a byproduct,” she said.

Toledo of Cuauhnahuac and Goff of Cemanahuac said they have to cope with similar problems, and noted that marriages between instructors and students do occur. Still, the majority of American women, including Quintana, find the sexual attention directed at them both annoying and frustrating.

Afraid to Be Friendly

“You can’t be friendly with any of the males because you’re afraid they’ll take it the wrong way. That’s hard for me to accept,” Quintana said.

In spite of such distractions, Wagner and Quintana both said they learned a lot of Spanish. “I feel my comprehension improved tremendously, but my ability to speak didn’t improve as much as I’d hoped,” Wagner said. “Part of that was my own unrealistic expectations, but I guess I had hoped there would be more conversation in class, too.

“But I’d advise people to go. The total immersion in the culture was a really good way to acclimate your ear to the sound of the language, and also to practice your Spanish.”

Quintana, too, said she thought that after four weeks in Mexico she’d speak “better than I do. It’s harder than I thought it was. . . . Still, I made a lot of progress grammatically with things like verb tenses and vocabulary. And I’m less self-conscious about talking. What you get most out of this experience is learning to say something .

“Before, I was afraid to speak Spanish around my family because I thought they’d laugh at me. Now, I don’t feel I’d be self-conscious if I went home and told my aunt, ‘I’m going to speak Spanish.’ ”