Intensive Summer Spanish Institute

I’m familiar with a number of schools for intensive study of Spanlsh in Mexico, a couple in Spain and know of some other programs like this one here in the U.S., however, of those in this country, none that I know of are as large or well done as this one. Dozens of my Spanish students have attended this program as we are not far away, and I’ve taught at it as well. It’s the very best thing of its kind that I know of, and next to going to a good school for a week in a Spanish speaking country there probably is nothing better you could do to kick your Spanish up a notch or two.
The program itself is not expensive, but you do have to stay in Tahoe for a week. Some of my students have camped, or have rented places together to keep down the cost. I highly recommend it.

This is offered at Lake Tahoe Community College–
Highly recommended. This has gotta be the next best thing to spending a week in Mexico, 5 eight hour days of Spanish, food and culture. There’s 15 levels of classes from stark beginner to expert. Having managed to forget all of my college Espanol with the exception of «quiero mas cervaza por favor» I signed up for the high beginner class. If you find you’re in a class that’s too advanced or too slow for you, you can change on the first day if there’s space available.
I went in expecting the typical class with maybe some breakout sessions for practicing conversations. But the folks that put this institute together figured out that 8 hours of classroom es muy aburrido (boring) so they mix it up with 3 –4 elective classes daily. You start out with the basic grammer class, and then at 10:00 choose from about 20 different elective classes. The elective classes tend to fall into culture, music, dancing, travel and food catagories — muy bueno! I took classes on tapas, Dia de el Muerto, La Loteria, paella, salsa dancing, nature and my favorite: pan dulce. Yum!
Midday one can sign up for an elective conversation group — highly recommended. I didn’t get that much opportunity to speak in my grammer class, and this group really forced me to come up with the words (palabras). This was followed by another elective session — I signed up for Spanish Swear Words. Dios mio, did I learn a lot of completely useful saying in that class. Almost all of them can’t be posted on Unilocal,but one of my favorites is «baja tu pedo» figuratively meaning «chill out» out but literally translating to «lower your fart».
There’s another one hour grammer class in the afternoon followed by another hour of elective classes. And there’s even another elective session after that, but after 7 hours my brain had turned to flan.
My basic grammer class had about 20 students in it and the professora was excelente. I was surprised at the high ratio of women to men (about 90% women students) could be because they have a lot of classes geared towards nurses and teachers.
ISSI is offered every August, and it does sell out. It costs about $ 125, it might be more for Nevada residents, I’m not sure.
Entonces, if you are like me and can’t afford a school in Costa Rica, get your culito (little butt) to ISSI.