I have learned alot this semester and I’m very thankful I could end the school year off on a good note.

I liked that this course was primarily self guided, which means my schedule could flex to my own needs. I also appreciated the fact that the lessons assigned were in somewhat of the same format each week, this made it easier for me to plan a schedule to make sure I finished all my work on time. 

Although there were things I liked about this course, it does contain some flaws. Learning a new language online is very difficult primarily because of miscommunication. That being said I think that there should be some new ideas incorporated into future courses on ways to prevent miscommunication from happening.

My instructor, Sr. Everitt, helped a lot with answering my questions although sometimes it took awhile to receive the answers. He was also very understanding with mistakes, which made me more comfortable to “speak up” when I needed help. Sr. Everitt was a great teacher and was usually understanding. Although, sometimes it would take awhile for me to receive an email back after I had contacted him. This made it difficult to finish my work by my prefered scheduled times. 

To help me get the most benefit from this course I got into the habit of doing a couple of things. I made sure to take notes on vocabulary and grammar every time it was provided. It made it significantly easier to study for the quizzes and tests. This helped me maintain a high grade point average through the entire course.

To keep improving in spanish, I plan to take more advanced spanish classes in the future. I also plan to take future spanish courses in a face-to-face learning classroom because the capability of having someone there to ask questions and talk to at any part of the day bests matches my learning style. In future spanish courses I hope to learn more about the different cultures in spanish speaking countries. I find it very interesting that even though they may speak the same language, the culture can be completely different.

Throughout this course I have noticed a couple differences between the english and spanish languages. For example, in spanish, nouns have a gender associated with them as where in english they don't. In english there are not  ancient marks above certain letters, nor are punctuation marks put in front of and behind certain phrases. Also in spanish, it is common not to restate the subject in a sentence.

I found the culture of Costa Rica to be quite interesting. I really enjoyed learning about the communities and how the country is different and/or similar to the United States. One thing that struck my attention when learning about Costa Rica was when I read about how some people have restaurants set up in their garage! I found that very different from the United States and would love to travel to Costa Rica one day to eat at one.