Jul 3, 2007
Wanna learn Spanish? Cheap? Salamanca's the place
Like Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States, the city of Salamanca (150,000 people) is the major university town of Spain. And there, in a private school charging peanuts -- it's called Salmínter -- the brightest travelers in the world learn to speak Spanish. From the moment you enter your class, held from 9am to 1pm daily, Monday to Friday, all you hear is Spanish, and within moments of entering, the sheerest beginner in each group is speaking Spanish.Salamanca is an ancient walled city whose recorded history goes back to the third century A.D. It is about two hours by train from Madrid, for which the round-trip fare is about $30. Once there, Salmínter charges the Spanish equivalent of $383 (two hours a day for twenty weekdays) or $651 (four hours a day for twenty weekdays) for a month's worth of classes, but you can limit your participation to two weeks, if you wish. Living costs for that month? You can rent a flat (through the school, which will place you) for about $8.10 a day, or be placed by the school with a Spanish-speaking family (no English whatever) that will house you in a small room and give you three meals a day at their table, for about $27 a day. And you can fly to Madrid for the low costs we've discussed in other blog posts.
For the full details on their language courses and housing arrangements, log on to www.salminter.com.
And why choose Spain for your language learning? Why not Mexico or Costa Rica? When that question is put to me, I answer diplomatically that Mexico is Mexico, but Spain is ... well, Spain.
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Arthur Frommer is generally acknowledged to be the nation's foremost travel authority. He is the founder of the
