Colombia: Medellin, Bogota, Cali
South America, Colombia
I live in places instead of visiting them. Peru, Colombia, Portugal, Mexico. Teaching English, volunteering, learning the language on the ground, then writing up what it actually took: the combi you need, the price people really pay, the office hours nobody posts. I write the same field notes at Vibing with Locals.
- Total cost
- —
- Days needed
- 14
- Go between
- Dec to Mar
- Monthly cost
- —
Textbook Spanish gets you a transaction. Street Spanish gets you ten minutes and a grin. The fillers, the slang by country, and the rhythm rules that actually change how people answer you.
5 of 8 sections are free to read.
The Verdict
Your Spanish is not too bad, it is too formal. Six fillers, a short slang list per country, and three rhythm rules will change how people answer you within a week. Learn from the room you are standing in, not the book on your shelf.
Ten minutes of conversation instead of a transaction
Getting There
This one is not about getting to a city, it is about getting into the room where the language is. Between the three Colombian cities: Medellin to Bogota is about an hour by plane or nine hours by bus through mountains. Bogota to Cali is about an hour by plane. The buses are cheap and long, and a long bus is one of the best language rooms there is, so the slow option is not only the cheap one. Inside the cities the rule is the same: stay where you can walk or take the metro to somewhere with people in it after 9pm. If you have to book a car every time you want to talk to someone, you will stop. The rooms that work: the salsa bar in Cali, any tienda counter in Bogota where you order standing up, a set menu lunch anywhere, the hostel kitchen at night, a long bus.
Cali, where the salsa runs all year
The Month
Any month works for this. Colombia has no season that stops people talking. December and January are the loudest and the friendliest. Everyone is off, families are together, the bars are full, and strangers have time. If your goal is volume of conversation, go then. April, May, October and November are the wetter months in Bogota and Medellin. Rain does not matter for this, it arguably helps, because people sit indoors for longer. Cali is hot all year and the salsa runs all year. Thursday to Saturday is when the rooms fill. The only timing that really matters is your own. Two weeks is enough to build the list. Under a week and you are collecting phrases without hearing them three times, which is the whole method.
The Receipt
There is no receipt for this one and I am not going to invent one. The method costs the price of the coffee you were buying anyway. The only recurring cost worth planning for is a tutor underneath it, and the number I have from Medellin is
What Went Wrong
I learned Spanish from a textbook and then used it on real people, which is how a friend of mine ended up being laughed at, kindly, in a salsa bar in Cali. He said something correct and nobody says it. The room did not mock him. They repeated it back with delight, the way you would repeat a very old fashioned phrase from a grandparent, and then they taught him the version people use. I did the same thing in Bogota and watched it happen twice in one afternoon. First the textbook order, word perfect, and I got exactly what I asked for and nothing else. Then, an hour later, the loose version of the same request, oiga, me da una de esas, and I got the thing, plus ten minutes of conversation, plus a recommendation, plus a grin. Same shop. Same person. Different sentence. I used vale for a fortnight in Colombia because that is what I had picked up from a Spanish course. It is not wrong, it just tells everyone you learned from Spain, which is a strange thing to announce in Bogota. I also carried slang between countries without checking. A word that was warm in Medellin landed badly in Lima. Build a new list per country, do not assume the old one travels. The last thing I got wrong: I tried to memorise slang from lists online. Dead on arrival. The only phrases that stuck were the ones I heard three times in three days and wrote down in the room where I heard them.
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