ESADE Business School

My motivations for an exchange in Spain were to know more about spanish culture and improve my spanish. The courses were in spanish-castillan but the local life was in catalan (most of the time subtitled in castillan). Catalan people speak both castillan and catalan so, as they were noticing that we were foreigners, they spoke to us in castillan so we coud easily understand. In fact, my life in Barcelona was castillan!

I could get around very easily with my language skills. With a fluent command of English and advanced level of Spanish, I've experienced no communication barriers . ESADE being an international Business School offered plenty of possibilities for communication in different languages.

Barcelona is an odd place to learn to speak Spanish b/c Catalan is the primary language and the people are not that welcoming. However, I did learn a lot about the culture and improved my Spanish skilled through attending classes in Spanish and having Spanish-speaking roommmates.

I have learned a lot of spanish at my home university, but I feel that you really have to spend some time in a spanish environment to fully understand all the aspects of the language. So I feel that the exchange i BCN was a natural continuation of my earlier spanish studies.

The first few weeks of class were hard. After about a month I began to understand much more in my classes. There were a lot of students from my home university there, so I was surrounded by english-speaking people too often which hindered my spanish progress for a while.

Spending a term of four months abroad has been for me absolutley fundamental to perfectly learn a foreign language. Moreover ESADE offered me a course to improve my spanish and it helped me a lot in the social and university communication.Communication in Spanisch has always been for me easy and stimulating in the same time, also thanks to the help constantly received by local teachers and friends.