Frequently asked
These are the questions that arrive by email every week, answered as plainly as the documents allow. Where an answer depends on the school, the city or your own calendar, we say so instead of inventing a rule.
No. Complete beginners are placed in an A1 group and start from the first morning, which is why placement includes a short interview as well as a written test. What matters more than existing Spanish is tolerance for being lost for three days. If you have studied before but never spoken, say so during the interview: false beginners are common and belong in a different room from genuine A1 learners.
As a working figure, a CEFR band takes somewhere between 150 and 200 hours of study for most adults, which at twenty lessons a week means eight to ten weeks rather than a fortnight. A two-week intensive course changes habits, fluency and confidence; it rarely changes the letter on your certificate. Plan the fortnight for habits and the level jump for a longer stay or several returns.
Twenty lessons of fifty to fifty-five minutes, usually four each morning with a coffee break in the middle, plus an afternoon programme that may or may not be included in the fee. Super-intensive means twenty-five to thirty. Always convert a course name into that number before comparing prices, because the same label covers different products at different schools.
Typical caps run from eight to fourteen, and the cap predicts speaking minutes better than any other published figure. Ask for the cap at your level in your week, in writing. Ask also what happens when only three or four learners enrol at your level, because low-season classes are sometimes merged across bands.
A host family generates more unscripted Spanish, particularly at meals, and suits a first course. A residence gives independence, a peer group and fewer household rules, which suits longer stays and learners who need to work in the evening. Compare on travel time, meals included, and who else lives there rather than on price alone.
Salamanca is the standard recommendation: small, walkable, full of students used to slow Spanish, with a clear Castilian accent. Valencia is the value alternative with sea air. Madrid suits learners whose level is awkward, because more bands run simultaneously. Barcelona is the most enjoyable and the easiest place to slip into English.
No, but it changes the texture. Catalan is present in signage, schooling and daily life, and the city is bilingual rather than monolingual. Spanish is spoken everywhere and classes run in Spanish. The greater risk to your fortnight is the volume of English in tourist areas, which is a discipline problem rather than a linguistic one.
Spain is closer for European learners, has denser course calendars and is easier to arrange for one or two weeks. Latin America suits longer trips, changes the accent in your ear, reverses the seasons and usually reduces daily costs while increasing flight costs. If the trip is a fortnight of annual leave, Spain almost always wins on logistics.
Register for the sitting first, then arrange the preparation around the date. Preparation is timed practice: listening under pressure, a written paper in the right register, and an oral rehearsed until the format is boring. Sitting within a couple of months of an intensive block gives the best reported results, because the examination technique is still fresh.
A school certificate stating dates attended, hours and the level reached. That is not a DELE diploma, which is a separate official examination with its own fee and calendar. For employers and universities, the two lines that matter are hours attended and level, so check that both appear on the sample certificate before you enrol.
Sometimes. German learners often use Bildungsurlaub, which requires the course and centre to be recognised in the relevant federal state. Some employers reimburse against a certificate stating hours. University credit depends on your own institution, and usually requires a transcript rather than a certificate. Ask before you travel and keep every document.
Six lines make a real total: enrolment fee, tuition, accommodation, meals, transfer and insurance. A brochure figure usually covers one or two of them. Weekly tuition tends to fall as weeks accumulate, with the clearest step change around four weeks. Budget separately for the coffees, tickets and trips that generate most of the conversation.
Yes, with paperwork. Camps for minors involve consent forms, medical and allergy declarations, insurance including repatriation, and airport transfer arrangements for unaccompanied minors. Ask for supervision ratios, curfew rules and the name of the person responsible on site. The good camps answer all of that in one document without being chased.
Three months is comfortable for summer, six weeks for the low season. Housing is the binding constraint in July and August, and examination registration closes earlier than most learners expect. If a visa letter is needed for a stay beyond ninety days, start earlier and expect the school rather than an agent to issue it.
Longer treatments live in the guides, the destination pages and the provider comparisons. If your question is specific to your dates and level, write to the desk and include both.
Nothing about the questions learners ask before a Spanish course is complicated, yet a great deal of it is easy to get slightly wrong. Class composition shifts every Monday because most learners arrive and leave on weekly cycles. Handwritten homework survives the flight home rather better than an app streak does. Where reviews for a network diverge sharply by city, the network is really several schools wearing one logo. Photograph the noticeboard on the first morning, because the free activities are rarely in the brochure. Write it down, then let the week be ordinary; ordinary is what works.
Before committing to the questions learners ask before a Spanish course, it helps to picture the room: how many classmates, which nationalities, and how often the group turns over. Request the housing brief in writing, including meal times and whether other learners share the flat. Where a school runs several buildings in one city, the address on the invoice is not always the address of your classroom. We asked graduates to reconstruct a single day hour by hour, and the reconstructions agreed more than the reviews did. The remainder is attendance, which nobody can outsource.
For the questions learners ask before a Spanish course the useful unit is a fortnight: long enough for a routine to form, short enough to remember in detail. The best reason to use an intermediary is a complicated itinerary; the worst is fear of writing an email in Spanish. Across the messages we receive, the most common regret is arranging too many weeks at too low an intensity. One good classmate is worth three excursions, and you cannot arrange one in advance. Where those conditions hold, the details tend to look after themselves.
One way to think about the questions learners ask before a Spanish course is as a series of small commitments rather than a single large decision. A wide spread of nationalities dilutes any single mother tongue, which is one genuine advantage of scale. We have yet to read a complaint about excursions that was not really a complaint about expectations. Send enrolment questions as a numbered list; the quality of the reply is diagnostic. The timetable footnotes we see most often concern afternoon rotation and bank-holiday substitution. Write it down, then let the week be ordinary; ordinary is what works.
A good description of the questions learners ask before a Spanish course should survive translation into a spreadsheet with columns for hours, levels and cost. Aggregators are excellent at inventory and weaker at telling you which classroom suits a nervous B1 learner. Follow-up messages six months after a course tell us who kept studying, and it correlates with pacing rather than length. Camps for teenagers bundle lessons, supervision, sport and excursions into one fee with fixed start dates. With that in place, the rest is a matter of showing up and staying tired.
Contact
Send your dates, level and the city you are weighing up. Specific questions get specific answers.
Enquiry received
The desk will reply with timetable questions worth asking. If you need a faster answer, call or write directly.
