I came across Habla Ya when I was searching for Spanish language schools. I got my first taste of travelling when I took the Explore Program to learn French in Montreal. Two years later I enjoyed my experience so much, I paid to go to another French course in Quebec City. While I was talking about and browsing Spanish Language schools in Latin America, social media adds for Habla Ya started to come up. I then decided to dig into Habla Ya and found out it was a highly rated Spanish language school in Panama. Studying Spanish while enjoying the beaches of the Caribbean? Or big city life of Panama City. They even had a campus in the mountains of Boquete.
I decided to book one week studying Spanish in Panama City and one week in Bocas del Toro.
I was hoping to meet lots of young students who were ready to hit the town and party in Panama. To my disappointment, the classes were really small and the students I was paired with took the learning very seriously. Don’t get me wrong, I was there to learn Spanish and work hard in class, but I wanted to relive my experiences I had in Montreal and Quebec when learning French, but this time in a tropical paradise. Now this is a positive and a negative. Less students means more focus in your classes and more direct instruction from your teacher, but it also means less social interaction.
Habla Ya recommended locations to stay. The locations were cheap and close to campus, but again they were quiet and practical accommodations. For both Panama City and even the small island of Bocas Town, the location was away from the party, so I had to make my way by way of public transportation (Panama City) and bike in Bocas to the hot spots.
Anyways, the instructors were good and the course material they provided was excellent. Even still to this day, when I want to study, I go back and look through my Habla Ya course manual and complete some of the exercises we never finished in my short stay in Panama. The instructors did a good job explaining things even while speaking totally in Spanish. I learned a lot, but I think I could have been put in a higher level in my Panama City section of the course, because my two other classmates, an older couple, were really slow and their Spanish was very bad, slowing down my learning a ton. In Bocas, the pace was perfect and the instructor was great.
As I was writing this review, I unfortunately read that Habla Ya has made the transition to predominantly online courses since the Pandemic. There are no more in person courses in Panama City or Boquete; however, they offer in person courses in Bocas del Toro, which was my favorite part of Panama anyways. Hopefully they can switch back to a larger focus on in-person learning, as it was
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