Spanish Institute of Puebla

Studying Spanish at a Spanish language school abroad is one of the best ways to improve your Spanish language skills. To get the best results, you should prepare yourself before you study Spanish abroad. For example, exercises that improve your vocabulary are well worth the time and effort. If you are a beginner, this will help you feel more comfortable once your total immersion program begins.

If you are an absolute beginner, we recommend that you have a Spanish native speaker record some of the most common Spanish phrases and try to learn them by listening to the recording and repeating them (you may request a list of these phrases e-mailing the Spanish Institute of Puebla). Master a short list of phrases like this, and you will be surprised how many simple situations you can deal with. Spanish expressions of this sort will not solve all your communication problems, but they will facilitate basic conversation of Spanish abroad.

If you are a more advanced Spanish learner, you need more complex advice because you are not learning the language from scratch - it's more often a case of building on a weak foundation that you have already attained. Our advice in this case is to learn as many common words as you can before you leave for your study Spanish abroad trip. When you learn a foreign language in your own country you lack a great deal of "everyday" vocabulary. This can cause a real shock when you go abroad and attempt to talk to native speakers.

You cannot really be functional the Spanish language until you know 2,000 to 3,000 words well. That's roughly the same number of words that a four or five-year-old child knows - enough to cope with most everyday situations. Like anything else, a good start is half the job. Please help yourself by being well prepared before you start an immersion program like the one offered at the Spanish Institute of Puebla.

We have been asked by many why we have not addressed the safety of Puebla, Mexico on our web site and the answer has always been very simple: Puebla is one of the safest cities in Mexico and has not been affected by the Narcoviolence. But now that the media talks as if the drug cartel killings and kidnappings happening in the border states between Mexico and the US, in the Pacific Mexican coast and in Cuernavaca, as a universal problem across Mexico, I feel compelled to address it. One way is to compare Puebla to San Antonio, Texas in the United States (both cities with similar population). In this comparison we find out that Puebla is the one with the lower homicide rate.

Another way is to visit the latest Travel Warning provided by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs dated April 22nd, 2011 in which they go in detail mentioning the different dangers in Mexico… they mention cities like Monterrey, Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Acapulco, Cuernavaca, Oaxaca, Guadalajara, etc. but nowhere you will find a warning about Puebla. Moreover, "The San Francisco Chronicle" in a recent issue mentions Puebla as a city "you can travel safely in Mexico" and "hunkered near the bottom of the crime rate list." To prove this last point I'm including in this page a recent data exhibit done by an independent company in which you can see the state of Puebla (Pue) as second from the bottom in "Property and Violent Crime" in Mexico; considering that it has the 4th largest city in Mexico, this is very impressive.