It’s no secret that to really get better at learning a new language you have to, well, speak it. It’s very easy to forget what you’ve learned if you don’t use it and I’m guilty of this myself.

Ever since I left Guatemala over 6 months ago I haven’t really been practicing my Spanish much and now that I’m here in Buenos Aires, my last stop in Latin America, I feel like I knew more …

Northwest of Lake Atitlan is a city called Quetzaltenango, or “Xela” (from the Mayan name “Xelaju”) for short. This city in Guatemala is quite popular for language students as the classes are cheap and many schools provide a homestay option with a Guatemalan family to really immerse yourself with the local culture and forces you to use what you learn.

I went with a school near the central park called Utatlan. The tuition is …

I decided to continue my Spanish lessons in Lake Atitlan. I stayed in La Iguana Perdida in Santa Cruz La Laguna and signed up for the package of 5 days of Spanish lessons, 7 nights accommodation, and 6 days allowance of Q75 to spend in their restaurant.

The view from this hostel is just beautiful! I start my morning every day staring at the beautiful Lake Atitlan and the volcanoes.

My teacher actually lives in …

One of my goals for my round-the-world trip is to learn Spanish. I want to learn enough that I’d be able to hold a conversation in Spanish by the time my trip is over.

When I was doing my research on which country to take classes in, Guatemala kept coming up. It’s supposed to be the cheapest country to study in and Guatemalans speak the language very clearly.

I originally thought about starting classes in …

I’ve been taking 4 hours of Spanish lessons in Antigua, Guatemala for the last 4 days now. I’ve learned a lot in this last 4 days but I still have a ton to learn. My Spanish vocabulary needs a lot of work, so I wrote this simple Python program to help me.

The program loads a list of words from a CSV file (I export my CSV files from Google Docs), shuffles them, iterates …