The Heniges Log Blog

Aventuras en Español

We have it pretty good, speaking English. It's essentially the default language of tourism worldwide. And growing up in the US, it's very easy to live in an English bubble. Yes there are countless other cultures and languages around different parts of the US, but it's very rare we can't get by with only English.

So obviously I need to learn Spanish!

For me there are a lot of reasons, but I love traveling, and one of my favorite parts about traveling is the random wonderful connections I get to make with people. And it's a lot easier to make those connections if you can speak the language.

I was in Vietnam earlier in 2025 and I was absolutely blown away by some of our tour guides that had taught themselves English within a couple years to a B1-B2 level. We were able to communicate well on most topics and almost always found a way to talk around any points of confusion. That's not to say I didn't have some great experiences with non-English speakers (grilling fish around an indoor cooking fire with an old man as he pantomimed his way through telling me about his day ranks very highly!). So from that to meeting other tourists that were non-native English speakers but extraordinarily fluent, it inspired me to broaden my skills.

Our guide Phi. After a few years of saying he knew English, he decided he should probably actually learn it.

We started using Duolingo a little over a year ago, and I think I'm about halfway through the Spanish course. We also started watching a lot of videos through a wonderful tool called Dreaming Spanish, which is all about Comprehensible Input. And then I have also started taking online Spanish lessons with a marvelous teacher in Argentina (hola Mercedes!).

I have a long way to go in my Spanish journey, but it's exciting to see the progress. I can understand most basic things, and I can express myself OK in the present tense, and s-l-o-w-l-y in the past tenses. But it's enough that I can use apps like HelloTalk to chat with a lot of hispanohablantes. Sarah calls it my Latin Lovers app, given some folks seem to think it's Tinder. But I quickly identified my core language partner demographic: moms in their 30s-50s and guys in their 20s. For whatever reason they are most likely to help me with Spanish and I help them with English. For part of our travels we'd like to go to a Spanish language school for a month (as in, they teach Spanish). I've been chatting with a woman in Bolivia and mentioned the name of a school, and the next thing I know she called the school and sent me a bunch of voice messages about it and gave me lots of good information about the location, all in Spanish of course. I'm still blown away, I don't think I'd be calling anyone for an internet stranger. Muchísimas gracias Carla!

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