Speaking Spanish gives you access to the local culture and enables you to engage with people in ways that are simply not possible through third party translation and will enhance every experience you encounter in Mexico.

Conversation is the key to language fluency

It’s the everyday interactions with other people that give us the most value and most pleasure from being able to communicate in another language.  Developing your ability to converse in Spanish requires a regular exercise of your vocabulary, and confidence.

The online course offered by our associate is helpful when

• you visit Mexico frequently and want to converse in Spanish for leisure, lifestyle, or for work;
• you’re already living in Mexico and want to improve your Spanish language conversation skills;
• you plan to move to Mexico and you’d like to arrive prepared to converse more confidently.

Each course is tailored based on your current skill level and language learning goals, and your free assessment also includes a lesson test-run via video-call.

True beginner

When you want to get started speaking Spanish for the first time, a coach will help you to build a solid foundation and get you conversing in Spanish.  You will be speaking Spanish from day one of the course.  This is ideal for those who have never studied Spanish before or those who studied it many years ago but don’t remember much, or anything, from those studies.

False beginner

When you’re someone who’s had previous experiences with trying to learn Spanish but still can’t string a sentence together, this course can help you to retrieve the information you’ve stored over the years, unlock what you already know, and develop new vocabulary and skills while building confidence speaking Spanish in everyday situations.   It’s ideal when you understand more Spanish than you can speak or lack confidence when you need to express yourself in Spanish.

Intermediate learner

When you have a good basic grasp of Spanish, but you sense that you’ve reached a plateau you can’t overcome or need to develop confidence to speak Spanish with strangers or in public, this course can help you to make material advances in your current Spanish language capabilities.  Most language students get stuck in a loop and need some help at some point, and a coach will assess your current level with a view to structuring a course to help you reach your goals.  This is ideal when you’ve tried other courses that don’t seem to work, or sense that your vocabulary and sentence structure need to be sharper or more refined.

Intermediate-advanced learner

When you’re seeking to improve your Spanish language capabilities for specific purposes, for example, as part of a career development plan or due to some other specialized interest, your intermediate-advanced skills can benefit by having the course structured to your more advanced needs or professional goals.   For example, you might need to learn Spanish in the context of medical, scientific, business, educational, or technical disciplines.  This course is ideal for those who have a decent command of the Spanish language, but who want to sharpen their abilities and gain others’ trust when speaking in Spanish, especially in formal or business situations.

Someone who wants to learn Spanish for living in Mexico

If you’re living in Mexico, or plan to make a move here in the future, this online course can also help you to improve your Spanish language skills to face everyday lifestyle situations in Mexico.  Language lifestyle conversations are helpful when you are already living here and want to improve your language skills, or you visit Mexico frequently, or plan to move to Mexico in future—so that you can arrive prepared with language and vocabulary skills that will enable you to converse confidently in lifestyle situations you’ll encounter when you’re here.

Every course is tailored to your current skill level

Every course is tailor-made for each student.

Request a free consultation today and our language partner will take the time to assess your current language skill level on a video call and talk about your goals and intentions in regard to improving your Spanish language conversation skills, with no obligation.

Your free assessment also includes a lesson test-run via video-call, and if you enjoy the format you can choose to sign-up for a course that will be tailored to your current Spanish language proficiency and language learning goals.

Month-to-month coaching plans are available from US$140 per month; and you can cancel anytime.

Book your free consultation and lesson test-run, with no obligation

Activities include exercises and practices between classmates and some courses also feature days-out at shops, markets, and cultural centers where the classroom learning can be practiced in real life situations.  The schools themselves are based at some of Mexico’s most picturesque locations and provide a perfect backdrop for combining learning and enjoyment.

By attending a program with others who share the desire to learn or improve their language skills, —and to build confidence in language use— a language course in Mexico can provide you with a worthwhile experience, whether you plan to visit or live in Mexico, or are living here already.

Building your confidence in use of a language is often the hardest part of becoming more fluent. There’s no better way of learning than to be among people who share the same goals as you. Language classes in Mexico allow you and your classmates to progress and improve your understanding and build your confidence while speaking Spanish with others around you.

Spanish schools offering courses in Mexico

Here is a list of Spanish Schools in Mexico offering courses, by location.  Connect directly to their websites for details of their services, offers and schedules.

Puebla

Puebla is one of Mexico’s colonial treasures.  The city is conveniently located about a 90-minute road trip south of Mexico City.

You can learn more about Spanish languages courses in Mexico here on Mexperience.

Language opens your access to the culture

Language is a primary instrument that gives you access to a foreign culture, and being able to converse in Spanish —even at a basic conversational level— will make every experience you encounter in Mexico richer, and more meaningful to you.

Spanish is an important language that is widely spoken around the the world, and Mexican Spanish is polite, clear, and easy to understand.  The speed at which the language is spoken in Mexico is not as accelerated as it is Spain and some South American countries, and the pronunciation is softer, which makes the language easier to ‘pick-up’ and easier for beginners to learn.

PinPoint Spanish series shares valuable insights

PinPoint Spanish is an extensive series of articles which help you to study Mexican Spanish language usage and additionally, provide context and nuance of the language as it’s contemporarily spoken and applied in everyday situations across Mexico.

The series is an ideal study resource for beginners who want to get a wider perspective of the language beyond the basic mechanics and grammar, while intermediate and advanced students of the language will particularly enjoy the insights the articles share about the subtle nuances and everyday practical uses of Mexican Spanish.

Spanish language resources on Mexperience

Mexperience offers you knowledge and connections to help you learn and improve your Spanish language capabilities:

• Enjoy dozens of language insight articles through our PinPoint Spanish series
• Connect to our Learning Spanish section for more advice
• Find online Spanish courses to help you develop your conversation skills
• Discover language schools in Mexico where you can participate in a class in-person, or online

Speaking Spanish gives you access to the local culture and enables you to engage with people in ways that are simply not possible through third party translation and will enhance every experience you encounter in Mexico.

Expat Spanish offers lessons designed for everyday life situations in Mexico

Conversing in Spanish is the key to building confidence in your everyday interactions with other people as you go about your daily routines.

Whether you’re at the local market asking about seasonal produce or prices, at your local restaurant ordering a meal, at a dinner party where English and Spanish are intertwined within the conversations, or talking to a plumber about your leaking tap—learning or improving your Spanish to help you communicate in everyday situations is one of the keys to achieving a fruitful settlement in Mexico.

Begin to converse confidently in Spanish

The online course offered by Expat Spanish is focused on developing skills that  will enable you to speak, listen, think, and respond confidently in Spanish, using their their FRASE (Fun, Real, Active, Speaking, Efficient) teaching methodology.

New concepts are introduced as you need them, so you won’t feel overwhelmed or discouraged as you build and develop your language skills throughout the course.

The Expats Spanish online course offers:

• A choice of private or small group classes to ensure you get plenty of speaking practice, feedback, pronunciation help, and the opportunity to ask questions with every lesson.
• Lessons designed around real interactions you face in everyday situations when living in Mexico.
• A strong review system that reinforces what you’ve learned and facilitates constructive progress in your learning.
• An online course that offers flexible schedules and can be taken whether you are still in your home country and want to begin learning Spanish before you arrive in Mexico, or are already here in Mexico and want to learn or improve your conversation abilities.

A Spanish course developed by an Expat for Expats

Amy Whitney, who leads Expats Spanish, is a resident living in Mexico, and the Spanish from Zero course she created is tailored to the real and practical language needs of expats living here.

As someone who has battled with learning Spanish herself, she understands the tremendous difficulty expats can face when trying to become conversational in a second language; especially as an adult learner.

Her own personal experience inspired her to develop this course with the goal of enabling students to quickly gain traction with their Spanish while also building a strong foundation for reaching higher levels

To jumpstart your Spanish and start handling conversations with confidence, book a free trial lesson to get a feel for the format and approach before committing to a course.

Visiting versus living in Mexico

While those who visit on vacation can enjoy Mexico without needing to speak any Spanish, when you’re living here and doing everyday tasks like shopping at the market, paying your bills, getting your car repaired, and arranging for a plumber to fix a leaking pipe, most conversations you encounter will need to be undertaken in Spanish.

Mexican Spanish is clear and easy to understand, and those with a basic grounding in the language —possibly from High School— tend to find that they can use their existing capabilities to engage in straightforward conversations. (Mexican Spanish is not spoken as fast as it is in some other Latin American countries.)

Situations where speaking Spanish makes a positive difference

There are some situations when being able to speak some Spanish will make a material difference to your experiences here.

Spanish for leisure visits

If you’re visiting Mexico for a well-earned vacation, or arriving for a short business trip, being able to speak some Spanish will give you deeper access to the local culture and with it, a richer and more vibrant travel experience.

Spanish for lifestyle

If you’re living in Mexico already, or planning to move here to live part-time or full-time (perhaps to retire), making an effort to learn Spanish to at least a level where you can get by for your day-to-day needs should form part of your planning if you’re not already conversant in the language.

While there are some foreign residents living here that don’t speak much —if any— Spanish, daily life without being able to converse locally will be more challenging and it’s always more convenient to be able to negotiate your way around everyday situations without the help of an interpreter, or relying on others to speak in English to you.

Spanish for working and business

If you intend to work in Mexico —formally, or as a self-employed person— then you will need to have at least a basic grasp of the language, and ideally be able to speak Spanish at an intermediate or advanced level.

While many professionals in Mexico speak English well, your business networks and your career prospects will be in good part formed by your ability to build relationships and work while speaking, reading and writing in Spanish.

Helpful resources for learning Spanish

Whether you’re just beginning to learn Spanish or you’re already proficient, there are options for developing your skills: with online courses, and local language classes, workshops, and local language groups.

One of the best ways to improve your Spanish is to become immersed in the language, and thus moving to live in Mexico and being surrounded by the language everyday, will help anyone who is determined to improve or master use of the language.

Mexperience offers a range of resources to help you learn and/or improve your Spanish language skills:

• Pinpoint Spanish: An ideal resource for readers who want to gain practical insights into the language is PinPoint Spanish —an extensive series of articles that helps you to study Mexican Spanish language usage and which additionally provide context and nuance of the language as it’s contemporarily spoken and applied in everyday situations across Mexico.
• Language schools and online courses: Find connections to language schools in Mexico and online courses
• Further reading: For additional resources about Spanish language and its usage, connect to the Learning Spanish section of Mexperience.

It isn’t moved to the nearest Sunday like Father’s Day, or Mother’s Day in other countries: when it falls on a week day, so be it. Working mothers are given the day off, some people leave early for family gatherings, and any employer who refuses to allow this without good reason may be said to “not have a mother.”

Which brings this entry to its point: the widespread use of the word madre in expressions whose English equivalents have nothing to do with matriarchal figures.

When it’s said of a person, “no tiene madre,” it means they are shameless or unscrupulous. It can also be applied to things that are disgraceful or simply unfair. A variation is “¡qué poca madre!” which amounts to the same thing.

These two expressions, however, can also mean something quite different, in fact something quite positive:

“Este juego de video no tiene madre” means the video game is very good—extraordinary, in fact; a football team that played “de poca madre“ played extremely well; and a great party can also be said to have been “de poca madre.”

A car that whizzes past at breakneck speed “va hecho la madre,” although “va hecho la raya” means the same thing and is more fitting in polite company.

Hasta la madre is a versatile expression that suggests testing limits in a variety of ways. Its basic meaning is fed-up, or sick-and-tired. “Estoy hasta la madre del tráfico,” or the more personal and unpleasant “me tienes hasta la madre.”

Someone who is very drunk can be described as being “hasta la madre” with alcohol, and a bus that is so crammed-full with passengers that they are hanging out of the doors is also packed “hasta la madre.”

“Hasta el gorro” — literally “up to the cap” — is a valid alternative.

In Spanish “mentar la madre” means to insult — literally “mention or refer to the mother,” even if the recipient’s mother or mother-child relationship isn’t alluded to.

Threats to visit bodily harm on a person can be expressed as “te voy a romper la madre” or “dar en la madre” which make as little sense, literally considered, as some of their English equivalents. And if you run headlong into a brick wall or fall off a bike, a bystander may observe that someone “se dio en la madre.”

A standalone expression of surprise or shock, “¡en la madre!” can be elicited from someone observing an accident or disastrous event.

But the real Mexican classic is “me vale madre” — “I don’t give a damn” — used widely across classes and  immortalized by the illustration of late cartoonist Rogelio Naranjo. This mother of all expressions even has its own noun form: someone in Mexico who habitually couldn’t care less is known as a “valemadrista.”

Often when something happens that was or might have been predicted, a commentator, writer, or speaker somewhere will refer to their version of the event as “the chronicle of a ______ foretold.”  So we have had chronicles of soccer matches foretold, chronicles of election outcomes foretold, and if worse comes to worst, we may have chronicles of a credit ratings downgrade foretold.

This use of the “chronicle” puts the title up there with “to be, or not to be,” which people considering dilemmas far removed from outrageous fortune will yet utter as if that solved the problem, and A Tale of Two Cities, practically any dichotomy being prone to the epithet “A tale of two … ”

The late García Márquez, probably the best known contemporary Latin American author, lived in Mexico for many years before his death in Mexico City on April 17th, 2014.  Both he and his works are very popular here, and people could be forgiven for thinking him Mexican.

A traveler on the Mexico City Metro was once overheard explaining to a friend one of “Gabo’s” books.  Not only was that work brilliant, he said, but so were all the others.  The enthusiasm was so contagious that before the train reached the terminal, the friend had stated his intention to buy one at the next opportunity.

This was instructive for the eavesdropper who had become bored after only about 30 years of solitude and laid the book quietly aside, and whose subsequent reading of The Autumn of the Patriarch was abandoned in a second attempt because the author kept messing around with the clocks.

Download our free, comprehensive eBook guide to living and retirement in Mexico.

Guide to Living and Retirement in Mexico

This guide to living and retirement in Mexico intends to help anyone exploring prospects for living and retirement in Mexico. It provides practical insights, incisive local knowledge, and meaningful guidance that helps you to discover opportunities, consider your choices, and make informed decisions.

The guide helps you to discover what lifestyles Mexico offers, identify opportunities of interest to you, weight up the compromises, consider your options, and plot a course based on the things that are important to you, and helps you to begin weaving together the principal components that can create a workable and realistic lifestyle plan.

It has been thought for some years that Spanish is becoming an increasingly important language in the U.S. and the recent (2010) census has not only confirmed this, but revealed that Spanish is now a firmly established language there. The reach and numbers speak for themselves:

• Spanish is one of the European Union’s official languages (being spoken in Spain); it is one of the United Nation’s six official languages; and is predominant throughout Latin America (except Brazil, although Mercosur, of which Brazil is a member, uses Spanish as its official language).
• Recent U.S. census data also reveal that over 51 million people in the United States today speak Spanish, comprised of 45 million Hispanics and some 6 million students of the Spanish language. This makes the U.S. host to the largest Spanish-speaking community in the world, outside of Mexico.
• More people in the U.S. speak Spanish than those speaking Chinese, French and Italian combined. Nearly one in every seven people living in the U.S. speaks Spanish, and it’s predicted that by 2050, nearly 100 million people in the United States alone–one in three–will speak Spanish.
• Worldwide, Spanish is spoken by over 420 million people. Spanish is commonly spoken across four of our six inhabited continents and is the second most natively-spoken language after Mandarin Chinese.

Today, many people who learned English as their first language are beginning to appreciate the importance of learning a second (or third) language. Americans are leading the way with large numbers of mono and bi-lingual Americans now beginning to learn second and third languages in earnest. For mono-lingual Americans, Spanish is at the top of the ‘second language wish list’.

Throughout the ages, different languages have held varying degrees of influence and importance. While English has emerged as today’s dominant global language, and mono-lingual English speakers might be tempted to rest on their laurels, the recent U.S. census data—coupled with global language trends—suggest that the room for complacency in regard to this matter is quickly diminishing, with Spanish emerging as of the world’s most influential languages.

See Also: Learn Spanish

Even if you plan to live in an area of Mexico that is settled by large foreign expat communities speaking English, you will still need to learn some Spanish to get by on a daily basis, and especially if you want to get the most of your experience of being in Mexico.

Spanish is Mexico’s official language, and is spoken by over 450 million people in over 20 countries world-wide. By being able to understand and speak Spanish, you will gain access to the culture in a way that you would otherwise not be able to benefit from by having everyone else speak to you in English.

Furthermore, many of the people you will need and want to interact with regularly may not speak much English, if any at all. On a daily basis these could include the local shop keepers and market traders, the gasoline station attendant, the bank clerk, your maid and the gardener. People who provide essential services on an ad-hoc basis and who also may not speak English include the plumber, the car mechanic, the electrician, or the local doctor.

It’s inconvenient having to ask someone to translate for you all of the time. It’s also good manners to demonstrate at least a modicum of skill in the local language. Spanish is a phonetic language, so it’s easy to grasp the basics and you can start learning right away, with online lessons.

To accelerate your learning, there is no better way to learn Spanish than by immersing yourself in the language among a group of peers, attending a course at a local language school in Mexico. Structured courses offer an excellent way to learn Spanish, alongside other students who have the same desire study, sharing the learning and getting involved locally at markets, banks, shops, and other places where you can exercise the language you’ve studied in the classroom.

If a move to Mexico is part of longer-term plan, and you intend to visit Mexico beforehand, consider mixing learning with pleasure on your next visit by including a course at a local Spanish language school.

Our Learning Spanish guide is an integral part of our Living & Lifestyle section, where you can learn about how Spanish is used in Mexico, as well as the reasons why Spanish is such a great language to learn.

Intermediate and advanced students of Spanish will also find a lot of value by reading our PinPoint Spanish articles here on Mexperience.

Next: Part 2 – Flexibility & Patience