One of my main goals when I decided to go through Valencia was to improve my Spanish. Here is how I tried to archive that.
At UPV, my university there is a free Spanish course available, but only for A2. I had doubts about my Spanish being A2 level, but I still tried to get into the course by uploading my school certificate. It got accepted. But that took a long time (almost 2 weeks). In the meanwhile I was at a tryout session at "Happy Erasmus", one of the student organizations, for an A1 course.
The teacher there was called Carlos and was really, really good. I immediately signed up to also check out the A2 course they had on offer. Meanwhile I managed to miss the first lesson at the course of the university. Friends of mine who went there told me that there are around 30 people in the class and I became pretty demotivated... After some time I finally got a call for the second tryout session and it was also pretty good. Our teacher was called Maria and she was talking 98% of the time in Spanish. That made it really hard to follow in the first place but I got used to it faster than expected.
The best things about the course were that we where only a few people and the building it was in was basically on the other side of the street from where I live. I pretty quickly made the decision to pay for this course and not visit the one at UPV in general, because when I use my concentration for 3 hours straight it is much better spent with less people in a class.
During all that I am also playing Duolingo everyday. If you don't know Duolingo it is by far the best language learning app available for free. There are Ads on it and you can unlock stuff by paying, but you never have to. I still did it several times already because I really like this company and want to support it.
My learning goal is 50 XP per day (that takes about half an hour) and this is a pretty solid way to not forget about essential vocabulary. By now I have managed a burning 70 day streak, with today it is 71, although I payed for the "1-day off streak" option a few times during the road trip and when Johanna came to visit 😜.
In the course we also got a lot of really useful grammar sheets and exercises that I will continue to work through. My goal is to start another Spanish course when I am back in Vienna.
The A2 course has already finished and we got our certificates, but since we were not enough people interested in a B1 course that didn't work out.
