We’ve written elsewhere about the advantage of getting your children into a Spanish school as early as possible. Children tend to very quickly become bilingual and you’ll probably find they are talking fluent Spanish to their friends and classmates while stubbornly only talking English to you - needless to say they will quickly be ahead of you. But everyone is not the same of course - some children will become very withdrawn when confronted with a new country, new language and whole new set of classmates, and who could blame them. With that in mind, it’s an excellent idea to have them learning Spanish for a year or so before you move out.

The same goes for adults of course. The progress you make in a Spanish class at home will be nothing to the speed at which you advance when you’re out and living there, but it is pretty unforgivable not to start learning the language at least before you go. Any local college will have Spanish lessons, there is a host of good audio courses on CD and DVD available, and with cable and satellite TV in the UK you can even subscribe to a Spanish language channel for a year before you go out. This will also help you learn a little about your new home. Too our mind, too many expats stay as just that for years - talking in English to other expats and struggling by on a little cod and ill pronounced Spanish. If you’re living in a country, really live in it … you’ll find it a much richer experience.

A word about the spelling and language conventions used on this website by the way. Along with most English language publications we don’t use accents, so you won’t find the tilde (~)or cedilla c (ç), nor the acute accent (é or occasionally ó). This of course doesn’t affect the intelligibility of written Spanish words in English. Place names, similarly, are usually Anglicised.