When I think back on my degree, it isn’t the lectures or essays that stand out most clearly. It’s the year I spent living somewhere new – a year that took the language I’d studied in classrooms and lecture halls and turned it into the backdrop of my everyday life. What began as part of the course became the part that changed me most.
I spent my year in Elche, a predominantly sunlit city in southeastern Spain, famous for its Huerto del Cura palm groves and the ethereal mediaeval Misteri d’Elx mystery play. I went to teach English and to live in Spanish. What I didn’t expect was how much that year would stay with me, not so much in the form of photos or souvenirs, but in small ways that still shape how I see the world.
The First Weeks
At the start, everything was new. A new city, a new flat, new people, and a whole new rhythm of life to adjust to. I shared a flat with two other students, one French and one German, and the only language that all three of us shared was Spanish. That made every meal, every joke, and every misunderstanding part of the learning process.
The city and its surroundings became familiar one small step at a time: the café where we’d gather with new-found friends most evenings, the bus to Alicante for which you certainly didn’t do the British thing and wait in a queue, the hairdresser’s where they soon got to learn my favoured haircut (made more interesting by my slightly off-kilter initial Spanish description), and ‘Bar Hawaii’ in nearby San José, where four of us would share banana cocktails out of a vast earthenware jug (with straws). These were the details that quietly turned a place on a map into somewhere that felt like home.
There was something grounding about the slower and more relaxed pace of life. Shops closed for the afternoon, and we felt justified taking the occasional siesta. Coming from a culture that often rushes through the day, that unhurried approach to time seemed very attractive. At least, it did most of the time. Waiting what seemed like an eternity for the gas man to change our gas canisters (cue cold showers and enforced gazpacho) or the washing repair man fobbing us off with the equivalent of an hasta mañana on the multiple occasions when our ancient, erratic washing machine hobbled around the kitchen.
Language as a Daily Companion
When you live through another language, it stops being something you consciously “study.” It becomes part of your everyday thinking. You hear it everywhere – in laughter, in arguments, in the background hum of a café. You start to notice tone and rhythm as well as the actual words.
It’s not about perfection or achievement; it’s about absorption. The way the school caretaker says “hola, Chris. ¿Qué?” each morning, the way friends pepper their conversations with new obscenities and swear words, the way you learn from your students just as much as they learn from you. All of it weaves into your sense of a new belonging.
And that belonging grows gradually. It’s not marked by big breakthroughs necessarily, but by small ones: understanding a joke without translation, describing the haircut you want to the barber (and coming out sporting it), shouting out the answers on TV quiz shows (and using those new swear words when you get them wrong), being included in a conversation because people no longer feel the need to slow down for you.
In the Classroom
I worked as a language assistant at the local Escuela Oficial de Idiomas. My job was to help students practise spoken English, and in doing so, I learned as much as I taught.
The classroom was a mirror of the wider world – a place full of curiosity, humour and occasional frustration. My students taught me about Spanish life: how families worked, how different the dynamic was between women and men, how people approached education, how they saw Britain from afar. We exchanged not just words, but perspectives.
There were moments of quiet pride, when new students successfully used phrases we’d been practising all week, moments of utter bewilderment when I decided to teach cockney rhyming slang, and moments of unbridled chaos, such as when I was trying to teach words for daily chores, asked a lady whether her husband helped with the ironing, and we all descended into nation-agnostic, uncontrollable laughter. Those small exchanges were as real and human as language learning gets.
The Everyday Adventures
What makes a year abroad special isn’t only the big experiences – though there were plenty. I remember my birthday on a beach near Alicante, the variety and splendour of the Las Fallas festivals in Valencia, long evenings, nights and early mornings at many a nightclub, or just ambling through the crowded streets.
But it was the quieter things that shaped the year: the pleasant walk to work through palm-lined streets, the (rather too frequent) visits to the little local book shop, where I’d pore over language books and dictionaries I’d never find in the UK, the spontaneous conversations that started awkwardly but eventually flowed.
I learned enough of the local Valencian language to follow the news and the occasional quiz show on Canal Nou and to chat with the ilicitanos – the people of Elche – in their home language. The look of surprise and warmth when I tried was always the same. It wasn’t about getting it right; it was about trying and getting that positive reaction.
And then there were the moments that had nothing to do with language at all: eating arroz con costra at a teacher’s casa de campo, laughter echoing across the table, or visiting the Huerto del Cura, where the palm fronds are gathered each year for Palm Sunday across Spain. Those were the days that gave texture to life abroad – the kind of texture you don’t get from studying culture in a book or from afar.
The Lessons That Last
A year abroad doesn’t feel extraordinary while you’re living it. It’s just life – work, friends, routine. It’s only later that you realise how much it changed you.
You learn how to handle uncertainty, to navigate things without always knowing the right words or the exact plan. You learn how to be patient, how to laugh at misunderstandings, and how to rely on people who were strangers just months earlier.
You learn that independence isn’t about doing everything alone; it’s about finding your place in a community that once felt unfamiliar, and letting it shape you.
Coming Home
When I came back to the UK, it was strange how familiar everything looked, and yet how different it felt. That’s one of the quiet effects of a year abroad: it doesn’t just open your eyes to another culture; it changes how you see your own.
You start to notice things you used to overlook. You think about time, work, conversation – all the ordinary parts of life – in a new way. And you realise that you’ve grown comfortable moving between worlds.
That’s what studying languages does at its best: it makes the world feel bigger, but also more connected.
Why It Matters
If you study languages, your year abroad is much more than a required element of your degree course. It’s where all the theory and grammar and vocabulary find their purpose. It’s when language stops being something you learn and starts being something you live.
But it’s also about perspective – about seeing what daily life looks like somewhere else, about making friends across cultures, about discovering that you can belong in more than one place at once.
It’s not a dramatic transformation. It’s a steady one, built day by day, conversation by conversation, until one day you realise the impact that it’s had on you.
A year abroad gives you more than language skills. It gives you adaptability, empathy, resilience and the quiet confidence that you can make a life anywhere. It gives you a lifetime of memories, friendships and unrepeatable experiences. In my case, it also taught me that the appropriate answer to a caretaker’s “hola, Chris. ¿Qué?” is “pues nada” (obviously).
Those are lessons that last long after the degree ends.
Albaro Languages 