Spanish @ university here or abroad

JHS
Mon, 02 Dec 2013 15:37:30 +0000

Barcelona is great, but in general the language of instruction will be Catalan, not Spanish. There are so many immigrants from Latin America and Andalucia, as well as foreigners who know Spanish but not Catalan, that I think more Spanish is spoken in Barcelona now than at any previous time in history, including when Catalan was effectively illegal in the 1950s. But the University of Barcelona is probably not the best environment for Spanish immersion for a student not already fluent in Spanish.

Also, from the standpoint of expense, I suspect Latin America will be cheaper than Spain.

What you are probably looking for, though, is a stand-alone language immersion program geared to Americans and Brits, rather than normal university courses taught in Spanish. For the most part, people in Spanish-speaking countries don’t study “Spanish” at all. A few of them study Spanish or Latin American literature or philology, and if that’s what your son wants to do, great. But most of them will be studying biology, or engineering, or math, or economics, or anatomy, just like here, except in Spanish. Taking a biology lecture course with 1,000 students in Spanish, or taking an engineering course in Spanish that would be daunting in one’s native tongue – those are big challenges, great if you succeed (especially if you want to learn the specialized vocabulary in a technical field) but easy to fail.