I'm the exact same way with Spanish. I had some formal education when I was younger and I keep trying to pick it up again but I always get side-tracked. I just downloaded Dualingo for my phone and hopefully it will help me stick with it because I may need it if I get the chance to work in Panama for a few weeks in January.
I took spanish in High School and one year in College. I find that when I spend a week or more in a spanish speaking country it all comes flying back to me and I can carry on pretty well. Good luck with it! What will you potentially be doing in Panama? I have a cousin living there.
Like I said to Cortez below, Spanish is the second language of the people that live there, so we will see how much it helps my Spanish, but I'm looking forward to it either way. We're working on getting clean water to rural communities there. We will be building and showing people there how to build simple water filters.
We will be building and showing people there how to build simple water filters.
That sounds like a worthwhile endeavor, best of luck with it. ... I mean, muchas suerte
Well . . . yes and no. There is a lot of research on how immersion can affect language acquisition and the general thought at this point is, yes, immersion can help in language learning, as long as there is sufficient familiarity between the learner's mother tongue (or L1) and the language being learned. Essentially, if a language is too dissimilar to your first language, then being immersed in the culture can actually limit one's learning because it can be overwhelming. This is one reason why it can be really difficult for say, English speakers to learn to speak Cantonese fluently and why it's common to encounter various immigrants in the U.S. who may have lived in the country for a long time, but still speak using grammatical constructions similar to those found in their L1. One reason why language classes can be good, is that a capable language teacher will be able to help break students of their tendency to form sentences in their L1 and then translate them word for word into their target language (L2). This might not seem to be a problem, but it's a bit like when kids learn to read. Most people will subvocalize at least a little bit when reading and this is actually the greatest obstacle to reading quickly. It's easier to tell with kids, because they may be reading silently, but their lips might be moving. Anyway, it's like running two programs on a computer at the same time, generating responses from one program and then pasting them into the second program and hoping that everything will come out right, knowing full well that the second program operates along different parameters.
I think the greatest advantage in living in the culture who's language you wish to learn is that you learn to actually communicate. Colloquialisms are not often taught in a classroom and make a very big difference when actually speaking a language, rather than just understanding it.
This is true, but for colloquialisms to be understood and taken in, context is necessary. Again, if languages are very similar to one's L1, colloquialisms will more likely make sense to the learner. Take English and French for example. For an English learner of French, the phrase "cherchez la femme" might be familiar, but translating it (look for the woman) into their L1 is likely to convey a similar meaning in context. If we take an English learner of Vietnamese (which I speak a bit of and have trouble with) then the idioms and colloquialisms will seem very strange unless or until one has sufficient context for them and a certain amount of accepting those idiomatic quirks as "just the way the language is." For example, a common phrase "không sao đâu" literally translates to "no stars where" but colloquially, it means "never mind". It's hard to become a fluent speaker of languages that are vastly different from one's own using only immersion or only classes. What the literature suggests (which I support, due to my own experiences in teaching) is that learners need high context environments, dealing with realia (real examples of the languages as native speakers use it) supported by exercises designed to break down reaction time and to eliminate word for word translation from L1 to L2. Learners are also helped to acquire language by other learners rather than being taught to as is found in traditional teacher-centric classrooms as it allows greater opportunity for self-assessment, monitoring and comparison of language use.
Well Spanish is the second language of the people I would be working with, so it may be a bit counter-productive to take too much from my experience there. I will probably need to be proficient by the time I start. And it's just a good life skill to have, especially living in Texas.