So you’ve finished your Spanish study abroad. Now what?
Whether you’ve just spent a few weeks mastering the basics or a few months polishing your skills, you need to keep practicing Spanish after you go home if you hope to remember everything you’ve learned. Here are a few suggestions for how to keep from losing your Spanish once you get home:
Watch Spanish videos. There’s tons of Spanish content on the internet–why not take advantage of it? Whether you want to watch the news, listen to music, or watch movies or TV, if you do it in Spanish you can practice your language skills and be entertained at the same time. If you have trouble understanding spoken Spanish, just turn on the Spanish subtitles on your video.
Find a pen pal. Maybe you really hit it off with your host family on your study abroad, or maybe you made friends with other students in your classes that you’d like to keep in touch with. Write, email, Skype, or call them regularly to keep in touch and to practice your Spanish.
Make new friends. Another fun way to practice Spanish after returning to your native land is to find a native speaker to practice with. This doesn’t have to be someone you’ve met before–in fact you might never meet them in person at all. Instead, you can go to social networking sites or sites like italki, which helps people find language practice partners over Skype.
Keep learning. If you’re a beginning or intermediate Spanish speaker, you might consider continuing to take classes at home or learning through various language programs. DuoLingo is an interesting free language learning system that’s social and has some game-like elements. Check out this video–you can learn about DuoLingo and practice your Spanish at the same time: