Summer in Madrid, 2011: When it comes to Grammar, There Are Still More Mountains to Climb

When I first saw a flier for UC's yearly “

Summer in Madrid

” program, I hesitated to sign up. The trip, which takes place every summer quarter, offers four hours of daily language instruction at Madrid’s Don Quijote language institute (as well as several excursions and field trips) over six weeks. As an advanced Spanish student with three prior study abroad experiences—Nicaragua, Mexico, and Chile—already under my belt, I wondered whether the Madrid program would be challenging enough for me. After all, I had already run through the gauntlet of UC’s toughest Spanish grammar courses and emerged unscathed. When it came to grammar, I felt that there might not have been any more mountains left to climb. Nevertheless, the prospect of earning 18 credit hours in just six weeks was too tempting to pass up. I packed my bags and headed to Spain.

It took about one week at the Don Quijote language institute for me to realize just how much I didn’t know about Spanish philology. To my surprise, I wasn’t placed in the most challenging class—on a scale that went “A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2,” I tested into the “C1” rung. Yet even so, my professors withheld no punches when it came to grammar. When explaining various grammatical constructions—many of which I had never seen before—they rattled off the names of tenses and parts of speech at lightning speed, and we were expected to follow suit. The professors had a profound understanding of the more technical elements of language, and it wasn’t long before I was speaking as they did; language was suddenly made up not just of nouns and verbs, but also of qualitative adjectives, directional verb compliments, adverbial locutions, paraphrasing verbs, and preterit-pluperfect constructions, and so on.

Vocabulary was just as intense, too. Just in our reading assignments alone, we were often hit with 20 or more new words per day. Over 30 days of instruction, that easily adds up to exposure to over 600 new words. We also learned dozens of figures of speech found in the argot of Spain. That’s not bad for one summer.

Of course, the trip to Madrid was about more than just classroom time. There were also our group sightseeing trips and our host family stays. And with nearly 40 students from the

University of Cincinnati

in attendance, it was always easy to find someone to meet up with for a night on the town. I worked in some quality time with my professors, too, going out for coffee with the instructors from Don Quijote and heading for ice cream with UC’s own Educator Assistant Professor Carl Bryant.

Even so, I feel that my best times in Madrid took place in the classroom. The level of the material the program covered was more advanced than any undergraduate Spanish course offered at UC, and it forced me to think about grammar in a more technical, more sophisticated way. When it was time to leave Madrid, I found some extra resources to help me continue to study the technical aspects of Spanish philology on my own. If I learned one thing in Madrid, it was that there are, indeed, more grammatical mountains left for me to climb.

In the past few months since the program has ended, I have had opportunities to employ my newfound perspective on language. My more technical way of viewing grammar proved useful one month later, when I headed to France as a tenderfoot in French. Already steeped in the parlance of philology professors, I was easily able to grasp the basic grammatical constructions of French, another romance language. Within a couple of weeks, I had learned enough grammar to hold a normal conversation in my new language.

My newfound knowledge of Castilian figures of speech rendered me social dividends as well. While learning French, many of my classmates came from either Madrid or Barcelona—and when they spoke in Spanish, they employed the idioms of their home country with rigor. Having studied these expressions helped me fit in whenever our conversations drifted from French to Spanish over lunch or during breaks between classes.

Studying in Spain challenged me to deepen my understanding of Spanish while giving me an entirely new way to think about my major. The extra 18 hours of Spanish credit will allow me to graduate early, too—another benefit of having gone on the trip. I would recommend this study abroad experience to anyone interested in pushing his or her knowledge of Spanish philology beyond what one can learn at UC.