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| Marcelo Arroyo Jiménez Andrea Cascante, left, taught a class at the Intercultura center in Heredia, Costa Rica, in 2011. |
AMERICANS are not known
for their facility with foreign languages, and learning gets more difficult as
people age. But that has not stopped 60-, 70- and 80-somethings from heading to
senior-friendly language immersion classes to tackle verb conjugations and the
nuances of idioms — in places like the Tuscan hills and beach towns of Costa
Rica.
“It can open up your world, and it’s a
great way to meet people,” said Randy Balla, 63, of Evanston, Ill., who was a
middle-school special education teacher for 31 years before retiring. He took
up French recently. “The language is beautiful,” he said. He hopes to learn
enough to discuss French literature and poetry and enhance his travel
experiences.
“Learning now is more focused, more
pleasant and less pressured than college,” said Mr. Balla. He took a three-week
French immersion program last summer at the University of Quebec in
Trois-Rivières and plans to attend this summer. “The tests are easier now,
because there aren’t any,” he said jokingly.
The program is offered by Road Scholar, a nonprofit group formerly known as Elderhostel that created some language programs more than 10 years ago.
Daniel Lavoie, director of the École Internationale de Français at the University of Quebec, where the French Quebec Road Scholar program is held, said the average participant was 70, but some as old as 85 had attended. One woman has taken the program 15 times.
“We have to be patient, so going at a slower pace may be in order,” Mr. Lavoie said, but there were few other special challenges in teaching older adults. “They really like to learn,” he said. “If they are motivated, for sure they will learn it. That’s the key.”
However, fine-tuning pronunciation can be tricky. “The accent? Who cares?” he said with a laugh.
The number of older adults enrolled in immersion programs abroad is not tracked, experts said. Beth Lieberman, vice president of AmeriSpan Study Abroad, a company that offers language travel programs through partner schools in 15 languages in 40 countries, said older adult participation “has remained consistent since the early 1990s and is a good portion of our repeat business.”
In the last five to 10 years, there has been a trend to tailor programs to the needs and interests of travelers 50 and older, Ms. Lieberman said. AmeriSpan offers eight such programs, called Golden Age programs, in Italy, Spain and France. They are part of its Language and Fun series, which combine language immersion with excursions and cultural activities.
But Ms. Lieberman said that while some older adults preferred same-age groups, many others favored general classes that offered a greater variety of dates and locations and a mix of international students of all ages.
Il Sasso, an Italian language school in Montepulciano, Italy, tried special classes for older adults several years ago.
Not all of the older people were happy with it, said Heike K. Wilms, Il Sasso’s office manager. Most students preferred a mixed environment, she said. In addition, she said, because most students at Il Sasso were age 40 or older, nobody had the feeling of being too old. So the special classes were discontinued.
One of the most common concerns many older learners have is fear of failure and the worry that they will be the worst in the class. “Most students have not been to school for 20, 30 or 40 years. If they are bombarded with grammar, they go home and are not happy. It has to be fun,” Ms. Wilms said.
“As an older learner, maybe one approaches it with high expectations to learn quickly,” said Irmgard Booth, 72, from Lewisburg, W.Va., a retired nurse. She studied at Il Sasso this month, her third time since April 2011. But “some days you absorb it very well, and other days it’s like, ‘What’s going on?’ Sometimes it’s discouraging,” she said.
But “proper grammar is not a priority for me,” said Ms. Booth. She is learning the language so she can speak with her son’s future mother-in-law, who is Italian. “She’s taking English and I’m taking Italian,” she said.
The teachers are patient and reassuring, Ms. Wilms said. And the school weaves Italian culture through its programs, with a variety of activities like cooking, wine tasting and hiking through the Tuscan countryside, she said.
Immersion programs tend to progress at a rapid pace and can be tiring, so the Intercultura Language School and Cultural Center, a Spanish language school in Costa Rica, does several things to help some older learners at its campuses in the colonial city of Heredia and the beachfront community of Sámara. They are offered an extra hour of private tutoring each day, as well as conversation classes outside the regular class, two extra hours a week.
“The percentage of people who take it increases proportionately with age,” said Laura Ellington, the school’s founding director. Extra practice “gives them more confidence” and helps them overcome the fear of making mistakes, she said.
And then, of course, there are the superstars, like Jane Gantz, a former senior associate director of admissions at Indiana University in Bloomington, who retired four and a half years ago. She has studied at Intercultura a number of times, staying four to six weeks each time.
“It was hard. It’s still hard,” Ms. Gantz said in a phone conversation from Valencia, Spain, where she is taking immersion Spanish and living with a local family. “I really work hard at it.”
When not traveling, she regularly listens to Latin American music, takes language classes and attends conversation classes near her home.
She is now nearly fluent, according to Lucie Angers, group coordinator at Intercultura’s Sámara campus. “Her Spanish is beautiful,” she said.
Ms. Gantz’s interest began 20 years ago when a young woman from Spain lived with her family as an exchange student. “I was very frustrated because I wasn’t able to communicate with her,” she said, but she was not able to find the time to study Spanish while working.
She said she planned to return to Costa Rica to study every February, when the weather was ideal. “I’ll do this for as long as I am able to do it,” she said. “I have discovered my passion. It really changed my life. It is the best thing I’ve done.”
Language immersion programs are particularly good for people who are traveling alone, visiting a country for the first time and planning extended stays but are not interested in traditional tour groups.
“They feel like they have a support base and are not totally on their own, like backpackers,” Ms. Ellington said. She strongly recommends staying with a local family and sharing meals, an excellent way to learn about a culture and gain an instant connection to the community. “And for language acquisition, it is unbeatable,” she said.
George Hughes, 83, a retired university professor who lives on a small ranch near SweetHome, Ore., took classes at Intercultura last year and lived with a host family. He said he had been comforted by the built-in social network of language schools. “At my age, I don’t want to go to a hotel,” he said.
Mr. Hughes had trouble adjusting since his wife died six and a half years ago, so he took up Spanish.
“To get back into the swing of things, I started going south of the border,” he said. He plans to head to Oaxaca, Mexico, this week for his 19th Spanish language program abroad. He will be joined by his grandson, a 20-year-old college student.
“I always enroll in a school for three weeks at a time,” Mr. Hughes said. “I love it. I have a good time.”
Does all this language learning help keep the mind sharp?
Scientific evidence shows that being bilingual is a particularly good exercise for the brain and an excellent way to build cognitive reserves, said Ellen Bialystok, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto who has studied the benefits to the brain of bilingualism. She said it would not prevent diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia; it simply helped coping with them by delaying symptoms. “Everything you do that is stimulating and hard is good for your brain,” she said.
The program is offered by Road Scholar, a nonprofit group formerly known as Elderhostel that created some language programs more than 10 years ago.
Daniel Lavoie, director of the École Internationale de Français at the University of Quebec, where the French Quebec Road Scholar program is held, said the average participant was 70, but some as old as 85 had attended. One woman has taken the program 15 times.
“We have to be patient, so going at a slower pace may be in order,” Mr. Lavoie said, but there were few other special challenges in teaching older adults. “They really like to learn,” he said. “If they are motivated, for sure they will learn it. That’s the key.”
However, fine-tuning pronunciation can be tricky. “The accent? Who cares?” he said with a laugh.
The number of older adults enrolled in immersion programs abroad is not tracked, experts said. Beth Lieberman, vice president of AmeriSpan Study Abroad, a company that offers language travel programs through partner schools in 15 languages in 40 countries, said older adult participation “has remained consistent since the early 1990s and is a good portion of our repeat business.”
In the last five to 10 years, there has been a trend to tailor programs to the needs and interests of travelers 50 and older, Ms. Lieberman said. AmeriSpan offers eight such programs, called Golden Age programs, in Italy, Spain and France. They are part of its Language and Fun series, which combine language immersion with excursions and cultural activities.
But Ms. Lieberman said that while some older adults preferred same-age groups, many others favored general classes that offered a greater variety of dates and locations and a mix of international students of all ages.
Il Sasso, an Italian language school in Montepulciano, Italy, tried special classes for older adults several years ago.
Not all of the older people were happy with it, said Heike K. Wilms, Il Sasso’s office manager. Most students preferred a mixed environment, she said. In addition, she said, because most students at Il Sasso were age 40 or older, nobody had the feeling of being too old. So the special classes were discontinued.
One of the most common concerns many older learners have is fear of failure and the worry that they will be the worst in the class. “Most students have not been to school for 20, 30 or 40 years. If they are bombarded with grammar, they go home and are not happy. It has to be fun,” Ms. Wilms said.
“As an older learner, maybe one approaches it with high expectations to learn quickly,” said Irmgard Booth, 72, from Lewisburg, W.Va., a retired nurse. She studied at Il Sasso this month, her third time since April 2011. But “some days you absorb it very well, and other days it’s like, ‘What’s going on?’ Sometimes it’s discouraging,” she said.
But “proper grammar is not a priority for me,” said Ms. Booth. She is learning the language so she can speak with her son’s future mother-in-law, who is Italian. “She’s taking English and I’m taking Italian,” she said.
The teachers are patient and reassuring, Ms. Wilms said. And the school weaves Italian culture through its programs, with a variety of activities like cooking, wine tasting and hiking through the Tuscan countryside, she said.
Immersion programs tend to progress at a rapid pace and can be tiring, so the Intercultura Language School and Cultural Center, a Spanish language school in Costa Rica, does several things to help some older learners at its campuses in the colonial city of Heredia and the beachfront community of Sámara. They are offered an extra hour of private tutoring each day, as well as conversation classes outside the regular class, two extra hours a week.
“The percentage of people who take it increases proportionately with age,” said Laura Ellington, the school’s founding director. Extra practice “gives them more confidence” and helps them overcome the fear of making mistakes, she said.
And then, of course, there are the superstars, like Jane Gantz, a former senior associate director of admissions at Indiana University in Bloomington, who retired four and a half years ago. She has studied at Intercultura a number of times, staying four to six weeks each time.
“It was hard. It’s still hard,” Ms. Gantz said in a phone conversation from Valencia, Spain, where she is taking immersion Spanish and living with a local family. “I really work hard at it.”
When not traveling, she regularly listens to Latin American music, takes language classes and attends conversation classes near her home.
She is now nearly fluent, according to Lucie Angers, group coordinator at Intercultura’s Sámara campus. “Her Spanish is beautiful,” she said.
Ms. Gantz’s interest began 20 years ago when a young woman from Spain lived with her family as an exchange student. “I was very frustrated because I wasn’t able to communicate with her,” she said, but she was not able to find the time to study Spanish while working.
She said she planned to return to Costa Rica to study every February, when the weather was ideal. “I’ll do this for as long as I am able to do it,” she said. “I have discovered my passion. It really changed my life. It is the best thing I’ve done.”
Language immersion programs are particularly good for people who are traveling alone, visiting a country for the first time and planning extended stays but are not interested in traditional tour groups.
“They feel like they have a support base and are not totally on their own, like backpackers,” Ms. Ellington said. She strongly recommends staying with a local family and sharing meals, an excellent way to learn about a culture and gain an instant connection to the community. “And for language acquisition, it is unbeatable,” she said.
George Hughes, 83, a retired university professor who lives on a small ranch near SweetHome, Ore., took classes at Intercultura last year and lived with a host family. He said he had been comforted by the built-in social network of language schools. “At my age, I don’t want to go to a hotel,” he said.
Mr. Hughes had trouble adjusting since his wife died six and a half years ago, so he took up Spanish.
“To get back into the swing of things, I started going south of the border,” he said. He plans to head to Oaxaca, Mexico, this week for his 19th Spanish language program abroad. He will be joined by his grandson, a 20-year-old college student.
“I always enroll in a school for three weeks at a time,” Mr. Hughes said. “I love it. I have a good time.”
Does all this language learning help keep the mind sharp?
Scientific evidence shows that being bilingual is a particularly good exercise for the brain and an excellent way to build cognitive reserves, said Ellen Bialystok, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto who has studied the benefits to the brain of bilingualism. She said it would not prevent diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia; it simply helped coping with them by delaying symptoms. “Everything you do that is stimulating and hard is good for your brain,” she said.
A version of this article appeared in
print on May 10, 2012, on page F7 of the New York TIMES edition with the headline: Learning a New
Language on Location.
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