Many students use coffee to help them stay awake while preparing their exams and term papers. Caffeine is a  stimulating substance that gives us the boost we need to keep on working when we fall short of strength. However, you don’t need to go through intense sessions of this sort to enjoy the benefits of a cup of coffee. As we will see, a moderate consumption of coffee can help you study Spanish.

Coffee has been blamed for being unhealthy and addictive. However, recent research has shown that coffee, within a healthy and active lifestyle, can even help you live longer. Of course, this does not mean that coffee has to be drunk without control, but a measured use of coffee poses no risk. Indeed, not only are one or two cups a day harmless, but they also can be beneficial. Let’s see how coffee can help you study Spanish.

Overall, the caffeine in coffee is a mild stimulant that can in many ways help increase the capacity to study, by increasing your level of alert, by putting you in a more cheerful mood and by making you more active. This can be applied to the study of Spanish:

• It improves your alertness: Coffee keeps you awake and active, what helps you relieve tiredness and keep you more willing to study. If this was not enough, this state increases your short-term memory abilities, so you will be able to retain more information (vocabulary, for instance) over a short period of time, so your understanding will automatically grow.
• It increases your focus and concentration: Coffee improves attention and helps you reduce distractions, so you will stay more focused when you read long texts in Spanish or complete grammar exercises.
• It is a perfect excuse for a break: Studying can get counterproductive when the student does not rest. Small breaks are needed if we want to keep our brain fresh, for long uninterrupted sessions of studying negatively affect our levels of attention and concentration. Having a coffee break is an effective way of relaxing and letting your brain breathe before you go back to your Spanish book.

Of course, coffee is not a magic potion. Coffee affects different people differently, and for some, it may be too strong or too hard to digest. Try it and see how it works for you. If it gives you palpitations, makes you nervous, or disrupts your sleep, it might not be your cup of tea.

In our Spanish school in Madrid, we are aware of the beneficial influence that coffee can bring to our students. That is why we created the free of charge daily morning activity Café y Prensa, where our students discuss in Spanish the latest news appearing in the Spanish press, with the assistance of a teacher, while they enjoy a cup of coffee or tea. As our students use to put it, it is the most civilized way of starting the day. Visit us and discover how coffee can help you study Spanish.