I Learned Spanish at 51 Using Only My 22-Minute Bus Ride

My bus from home to school takes twenty-two minutes. For most of my teaching career I spent it looking out of the window, marking an essay on my knee or simply dozing. At fifty-one, after a holiday in Andalusia where I could not order anything beyond "una cerveza", I decided to use those minutes to learn Spanish.

Two years later I can hold a slow but real conversation. I did it almost entirely on a bus.

Why the bus worked

I had tried evening classes before, for German, and dropped out after six weeks. I was too tired after school, and missing one week made it easy to miss the next.

The bus was different. It happened every school day whether I felt motivated or not. Twenty-two minutes in the morning, twenty-two in the afternoon. Around 190 school days a year. When I calculated it, that came to about 140 hours a year. More than most evening courses offer.

My system, such as it is

I kept it deliberately simple:

• A pocket paper notebook, divided into three sections: words, phrases and mistakes.
• A Spanish grammar book small enough to fit in my coat pocket.
• An audio course with downloaded lessons I could listen to with headphones, so I did not need the internet.
• A rule: mornings for new material, afternoons for revision.

I did not use any app with points or streaks. I know they work for many people, but for me, the moment a streak broke I lost interest. A notebook does not judge you.

The middle stage was the hardest

The first three months were exciting. Every new word felt like progress. Then, from about month four to month nine, I hit what felt like a wall. I knew hundreds of words, but I could not understand a single sentence in a Spanish film. I felt foolish, a fifty-two-year-old woman whispering verb conjugations to herself on a bus full of teenagers.

What got me through was the mistakes section of the notebook. Each time I re-read it, I could see that mistakes from two months earlier no longer happened. Progress was there, just slower and less visible than at the start.

Speaking out loud

Learning on a bus has one obvious problem: you cannot practise speaking without the other passengers finding you strange. I solved this partly by speaking on my walk from the bus stop to school, about five minutes. I narrated what I saw. "The cat is sitting on the wall. The man is carrying a ladder."

After a year, I found a Spanish teacher online and booked a half-hour conversation every Saturday morning. The first session I could barely speak. By the tenth, we talked about her city, Valencia, and my students, and the endless rain in Bergen, which she found hilarious.

What I learned beyond Spanish

The real lesson was about time I had dismissed. I had always believed I was too busy to learn something new. In fact, I had nearly three hours a week I was not using at all, hidden in a daily commute.

Last summer I went back to Andalusia. I ordered dinner, asked for directions, and had a ten-minute conversation with an elderly woman about her garden. She corrected my grammar twice. I wrote both mistakes in my notebook on the bus to the airport.