Maybe I'm just old and stupid, but I don't feel like I am really learning a lot watching movies in a foreign language. I should probably try to do it more though.
I grew up in San Diego and took like four Spanish classes and even some in college. But never really learned verbal skills and did not use it since school.
I moved to Playas de Tijuana a few years ago to save money. For more than a year I made really minimal efforts to practice my Spanish though. It was not usually necessary since a lot of the people here speak okay English. I usually just take an Uber and it wasn't very important. And since my Spanish was horrible, often it felt counterproductive to try.
But the last several months I have been making a deliberate modest effort to practice. And I feel like I am slowly getting less hopeless.
But I would say if you are going for the immersion route and are lazy (practical?) like me, you might actually have to go somewhere kind of far (definitely not right next to the border) to find a place where you really need to use it a lot due to lack of English in the population. Here it is a little too easy to find people who are fluent in English.
Part of the challenge for me is that I didn't want to sound like an idiot. I decided to just accept that and now I pretend that verb tenses don't exist (I was pretty good at them in high school but that was like 25 years ago) and it makes it much easier. Lol.
I grew up in San Diego and took like four Spanish classes and even some in college. But never really learned verbal skills and did not use it since school.
I moved to Playas de Tijuana a few years ago to save money. For more than a year I made really minimal efforts to practice my Spanish though. It was not usually necessary since a lot of the people here speak okay English. I usually just take an Uber and it wasn't very important. And since my Spanish was horrible, often it felt counterproductive to try.
But the last several months I have been making a deliberate modest effort to practice. And I feel like I am slowly getting less hopeless.
But I would say if you are going for the immersion route and are lazy (practical?) like me, you might actually have to go somewhere kind of far (definitely not right next to the border) to find a place where you really need to use it a lot due to lack of English in the population. Here it is a little too easy to find people who are fluent in English.
Part of the challenge for me is that I didn't want to sound like an idiot. I decided to just accept that and now I pretend that verb tenses don't exist (I was pretty good at them in high school but that was like 25 years ago) and it makes it much easier. Lol.