I was standing by a pool in the middle of the jungle, two hours from Mérida, talking to a member of the hotel staff about the rain that had not arrived yet. My Spanish was slow. I reached for a word, missed it, reached again, and got a close-enough cousin of the word I wanted. He waited. Then he answered me in Spanish, at Spanish speed, because I had earned that by trying.
That is the whole thing, right there. I am not fluent. I may never be fluent. And learning Spanish has still changed how I move through the world.
If you have been following along on Facebook and Instagram, you have watched me stumble through this in public for a while now. Lately I have added a little Japanese to the pile, because I have a trip coming up and I refuse to arrive somewhere with nothing but hello in my pocket. So let me make the case for the version of language learning that nobody sells you: the unfinished kind.
Your brain benefits before you are anywhere near fluent
This is the part that surprised me most, and it is not folklore. It is measured.
In 2016, researchers at the University of Edinburgh published a study in PLOS ONE on what happens after a one-week intensive language course. Thirty-three people took a week of Scottish Gaelic on the Isle of Skye — about fourteen hours of instruction — and were tested against two control groups. The learners showed a significant improvement in attentional switching, the mental skill of moving cleanly between tasks. The control groups did not.
Two details from that study matter more than the headline. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 78, and every age group improved. And at the nine-month follow-up, the people who kept practicing at least five hours a week had held onto their gains, while those practicing four hours or less were a mixed bag. One week started it. Practice is what kept it.
Then there is the question I hear most from women my age: isn't it too late? A 2014 study in Annals of Neurology, drawn from the Lothian Birth Cohort — 835 people in Edinburgh who were tested at age eleven and again in their seventies — found that those who spoke a second language performed better in later life than their own childhood scores predicted. Of the 262 bilinguals in that group, 65 had learned their second language after age eighteen, and the effects showed up in them too.
You will also see headlines about bilingualism and dementia. The often-cited source is a 2007 study in Neuropsychologia of 184 memory-clinic patients, where symptoms of dementia appeared at an average age of 75.5 in bilinguals versus 71.4 in monolinguals — roughly a four-year difference. I want to be honest about what that does and does not say. Those were lifelong bilinguals, not people who started Spanish lessons at fifty-two, and an association in one clinic population is not a promise. I am not telling you a language app will protect your memory. I am telling you the direction the research points, and that it points somewhere worth walking.
The three things that got me here
I have tried a lot. These are the three that stuck. Two of them have changed since I started, and I am going to tell you exactly how, because I would rather be useful than tidy.
Live classes with an actual teacher. For a long time this was Babbel Live, and it was the single most valuable thing I did. Real classes, real teachers, picked by my level and my schedule, capped at six students. More than once I was the only one who showed up, which meant I paid group prices for a private lesson. I have had classmates in three time zones correcting my verb tenses.
Babbel has since discontinued Babbel Live for individual subscribers — live instruction moved over to their corporate side, Babbel for Business. If you are learning on your own now, the path within Babbel is the core self-study app plus its AI conversation practice.
And AI practice is great, truly. It is patient, it is available at three in the morning, and it lets you be terrible in private until you are ready to be terrible in public. That is not nothing. But for some things you still want a human — because a person waits differently than a program does, and the waiting is part of what teaches you.
So if you want the human version, go find one. Private tutors on a site like Preply will run you anywhere from a few dollars to forty-plus an hour depending on who you pick, you can book a short trial lesson before committing, and you can switch tutors if the fit is wrong. A language exchange is the other route, and it costs nothing but nerve: you pair up with someone learning your language, and you trade. Apps like Tandem match you and give you text, voice, and video. Or search Meetup for a Spanish conversation group near you — most decent-sized cities have an intercambio meeting in a coffee shop somewhere, and there is something about doing this across a table that an app cannot replicate.
I have a soft spot for the exchange model, because it is the only version where you are not just the student. Somebody needs your English as much as you need their Spanish. That is not a transaction. That is two people helping each other.
The Duolingo Spanish Podcast. I am not a fan of the Duolingo app. The podcast is a different animal entirely, and I love it, because it is stories. True ones. A narrator sets the scene in English and then hands it to the storyteller, who speaks in intermediate-level Spanish — and crucially, the English is context, not translation. You are never being handed the answer. You are being given just enough footing to work the rest out yourself, which is exactly how you actually learn. Every episode has a full transcript on their website, so on the days I want to go deeper, I read along and pull the phrases I want to keep.
My Spanish playlist. This one is pure joy, and it is also ear training. Some songs came from friends, some I heard on the radio in Mexico and shazamed in the car. Some days my whole lesson is one song: pull up the lyrics, work out what she is actually saying, then sing it badly until it sticks.
That is not a shortcut, by the way. A study in Memory & Cognition had sixty adults learn Hungarian phrases in fifteen minutes, split into three groups — speaking, rhythmic speaking, and singing. The singers outperformed the speakers on the tests that required them to actually produce Hungarian out loud. Singing along in the car is a legitimate study method. I have been telling myself this for two years and now I have a citation.
Then you travel, and the classroom disappears
There is a ceiling on what any app or class can teach you, and you hit it the moment you are standing in a market and someone asks you a question you did not prepare for.
That is where travel does what no lesson can. In Mérida, my Spanish gets used for things that matter to me — asking a vendor what is in the dish, understanding the answer, following a conversation at a table where nobody switches to English on my behalf. At that jungle hotel outside Campeche, I practiced with the staff and with other guests, and the practice was not an exercise. It was just the day.
If you want to build immersion into a trip on purpose, a few things work:
- Stay somewhere family-run. Boutique properties and small guesthouses give you the same handful of people every day, and by day three they know you are trying.
- Take a class in the language, not about it. A cooking class, a pottery workshop, a walking tour with a local guide. You will learn the words for what your hands are doing, and those are the words that stay.
- Go where the schedule is theirs, not yours. Markets in the morning, the long meal in the afternoon, the plaza in the evening.
- Eat where you have to ask. A menu without pictures is a lesson.
- Stay longer than you think you need to. The first two days you are translating. Somewhere around day four, you stop.
I build trips around this for clients regularly, and the pattern is consistent: the people who come home changed are almost never the ones who saw the most. They are the ones who understood the most.
The part I feel strongly about
When you are traveling, making an attempt at the local language shows respect and consideration. That is the whole argument, and I do not think it needs dressing up.
As U.S. travelers, we can sometimes move through the world as though it revolves around us. It does not. And we have a bit of a blind spot here worth naming: according to Pew Research Center, roughly 20% of American K-12 students are enrolled in a foreign language class, compared with a median of 92% of students across Europe. Most of the people you will meet abroad have studied your language. Very few of us have studied theirs.
So when you say buenos días badly, you are not performing. You are conceding, in public, that you are a guest here. In my experience people meet that halfway almost every single time. And on the rare occasion someone switches to English to spare us both — fine. The gesture already landed.
You will be bad at it first. Be bad at it out loud.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the benefits of learning a new language if I never become fluent? Research suggests the benefits begin well before fluency. A 2016 PLOS ONE study found measurable improvement in attentional switching after just one week of intensive language study, across participants aged 18 to 78. Beyond the cognitive side, even limited language ability changes how you travel — it opens conversations, signals respect to the people hosting you, and gets you access to experiences that stay closed to visitors who never try.
Am I too old to start learning a language? No. A 2014 study in Annals of Neurology found cognitive benefits in people who had learned their second language after age eighteen, not only in those raised bilingual. In the one-week Gaelic study, every age group up to 78 improved.
How much practice does it actually take? In the follow-up to that Gaelic study, participants who practiced at least five hours a week held their improvements nine months later. Under four hours, results were inconsistent. Roughly forty-five minutes a day is a realistic target.
What is the best way to learn a language for travel? Combine a speaking-based class with daily listening and then use a trip as immersion. Learn the phrases you will actually say — ordering, asking directions, greeting people, saying thank you — rather than working through a curriculum front to back.
Do locals really appreciate it when you try? That has consistently been my experience. Trying signals that you understand you are a guest, and people generally meet it with warmth, even when your grammar is a mess.
I am not going to tell you that learning Spanish made me a different person. But it made me a different traveler, and after years of putting everyone else's needs at the front of the line, that is a version of myself I have earned the right to build on purpose.
So tell me: what language have you been meaning to start? Hit reply. I read every one.
If you would like a trip designed around real immersion rather than a checklist of sights, let's talk about what that could look like for you — built around your interests, your pace, and your preferences. Schedule a Call