Teaching Staff

Mrs A Nichols BA, PGCE

Mrs E Ford BA Hons (French) Leeds University, PGCE

Spanish, Spanish everywhere.

The sheer number of Spanish speakers and their rate of growth makes learning Spanish a smart choice! In Europe, Spanish is the second most popular second language, after English. With some 400 million speakers, Spanish is the fourth most commonly spoken language in the world. Only Mandarin, English and Hindi have more speakers. If you count only native speakers, Spanish outranks English. Spanish is an official language on four continents and is the mother tongue in 21 countries. But it's not only in Europe where Spanish is popular. There are well over 35 million Spanish speakers in the United States, and with over 40% of the population growth being among the Hispanic people, the stage is set for an enormous increase in Spanish usage in the United States.

It's easy: Spanish is one of the easiest foreign languages to learn. Much of its vocabulary is similar to English, and written Spanish is almost completely phonetic: Look at almost any Spanish word and you can tell how it is pronounced. And while mastering the complexities of Spanish grammar can be a challenge, basic grammar is straightforward enough that you can have meaningful communication after only a few lessons.

For many, learning Spanish is rapidly becoming a business necessity. As for job opportunities, it is certainly an advantage to have Spanish on your CV. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to offer your product or service to the 350 million people whose mother tongue is Spanish? One thing is certain. If you are bilingual, you will be more marketable and have more career choices than your monolingual counterpart. Globalization, with its accompanying free trade agreements is shrinking the business world, and those who know more than one language will definitely have the edge.

According to Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "the limits of my language are the limits of my universe." There is no doubt that learning Spanish will expand your own personal universe.

Look who else speaks Spanish......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtFfmqGJP0o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdFsJXeU2zw

¡Nos divertimos!   It’s fun!

We subscribe to fun magazines in Spanish, we use websites and interactive learning, we have a Spanish assistant to help us with language and culture and we all have a friend in Spain to communicate with:  all students studying Spanish at our school have an email penpal link with a Spanish pupil from one of our two link schools in Alicante.

Have a look at the activities, competitions and fun we have at St. Mary’s whilst learning Spanish...