Aero: Kevin Urbaitis – Costa Rica 2015 – Learning the Language

Aero: Kevin Urbaitis – Costa Rica 2015 – Learning the Language
Creative Commons Image via The LEAF Project

Aero: Kevin Urbaitis – Costa Rica 2015 – Learning the Language

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Kevin Urbaitis

Visiting a country where English is not the main language was a completely new experience for me. Prior to arriving in Costa Rica, I had only been learning and practicing Spanish for a rather short period of time, around four months or so. While my Spanish skills were minimal, I came to Costa Rica expecting to sharpen my Spanish skills drastically. Now, reflecting back on the trip, I feel as though my Spanish skills did not improve as much as I expected. While I did have ample opportunity to practice and improve my Spanish, I ended up using and conversing in English a lot more than anticipated on the trip. Whether that was because of my uncomfortableness and unfamiliarity with the Spanish language or the fact that many people could speak English a lot better than I speak Spanish, I am unsure. However, being in Costa Rica did help enforce and ingrain the basics of Spanish speaking in my head and allowed me to remember and reuse what I had learned during my first ever semester speaking Spanish. I feel that this was a good building block for the growth of my Spanish skills and allowed me to appreciate and understand the importance of knowing a second language more than I did before the trip.

ML@FLCC Costa Rica
2015 Flickr Gallery

Communicating on the trip was not as bad as I had anticipated, as most people at least spoke a little English if I could not figure out what they were saying in Spanish. For example, communicating with my host father was challenging sometimes in that his English vocabulary was not the strongest. However, that challenge made communicating with Marco interesting and fun in that we had to work together and push ourselves to properly understand and get across with what we wanted to say to one another. I made a promise to Marco and his family that when I come back to Costa Rica and visit them, my Spanish speaking will be greatly improved from what it was the first time I visited and lived with them. This promise is just one of the many aspects of Costa Rican society that has further motivated me to improve my skills in the Spanish language.

Kevin Urbaitis
LEAF Contributor