Universitat de Barcelona (UB)

When I first got there I was a little timid about using my spanish in some situations. It was a little intimidating at first. After a while I became more comfortable and really enjoyed interacting with the locals. I think that living with a host family gave me the most help with improving my spanish.

Thera are two local languages, spanish and catalan, son at the beginning it was a bit difficult, but University provides free courses of catalan, so it was great and after studying I could choice some courses in catalan. Also we had some courses in English. The experience was positive.

In the beginning it was very hard, as the Spanish in general don't speak any English. But this is a good stimulus to learn the language. I also had the luck to live with Spanish girls. So in a short time I learned a lot of Spanish. Unfortunately didn't have time to learn any Catalan.

Catalan is a very difficult language to learn. All of my professors and the friends i made over there spoke castellano because they knew that is why i was over there.

At the UB, both Catalan and Castellano are used as official languages, while Catalan is clearly preferred by most students and staff. It is claimed that every teacher and student would unhesitantly swap into Castellano if asked for that, but my experience was that many (by far not all) teachers ignored the presence of ERASMUS students and kept talking in Catalan, making classes impossible to follow. Of course, the bigger the number of exchange students present, the bigger the pressure for the teacher to stick to Castellano...

Communication was the key word of my experience: a lot of people very open minded, from plenty of different places around the world. And the amazing point was that everybody was talking in spanish all the time even if we could speak english (even better sometimes)