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Learning Spanish can be both exciting and fun depending upon the method chosen. While there are a variety of methods available today to learn Spanish, each method has its own pros and cons. I'll review some of these pros and cons of the various methods commonly used in the next several posts.

Total or full immersion involves living in a country where Spanish is spoken as the native language such as Spain, Mexico or Costa Rica or one of the many other Spanish speaking countries.

Informally, full immersion can be as simple as actually moving to that country and living among the populous and picking up the language by observation, watching local television, reading local papers, etc until you finally learn the language. This is a very hard and difficult way to learn a language but is often the method used by refuges or immigrants. The informal full immersion method works best if there are no other speakers of your own native language around, thus forcing the learning of the new language. An Romanian acquaintance of mine used this method of learning English after moving to the United States. However, Spanish speaking immigrants to the United States find many other Spanish speakers to whom they can communicate and thus do not find learning English as much a necessity as my Romanian friend and many fail to learn much English at all.

Full immersion programs that are more formally structured involve living in a foreign country for some period of time where the language is spoken natively while at the same time taking actual language classes. Some programs even included the opportunity to live with a local family while attending the course. While these programs offer excellent opportunities for learning a foreign language such as Spanish, they can be quite expensive and require time away from your normal duties.

[Note] In an attempt to take advantage of the success of full or total immersion programs, one foreign language learning company has used the term "Instant Immersion" to name their foreign language learning CD program. It is NOT the same thing. Their program not only is NOT total immersion, it is also not very good, and in my opinion a waste of money. I purchased the CD's of both their basic and deluxe programs and cannot recommend them. There are much better options available on the market including the Rosetta Stone Spanish programs (both Spain and Latin American Spanish) and the Pimsleur Spanish language programs (while more expensive, they are much more effective).

Coming up next will be a discussion of learning Spanish with audio only language learning programs.