A language learners’ forum

I'm thinking of having a 'gap year' of sorts. My friend just moved to the far east to teach English, and when he was talking about how cheap living costs are over there, it gave me the idea to maybe just take some time out purely to learn a language in that language's country.

So my question is, which city my would my life savings (in sterling... I know!) go furthest? I'm not looking to live the high life, just maybe meeting these criteria:

Cost of living not so bad that £5k would last a year
Preferably a mid-sized city
Access to clean running water and the internet
Some kind of alcohol-based nightlife

Any ideas?

Haiku D'etat wrote:I'm thinking of having a 'gap year' of sorts. My friend just moved to the far east to teach English, and when he was talking about how cheap living costs are over there, it gave me the idea to maybe just take some time out purely to learn a language in that language's country.

So my question is, which city my would my life savings (in sterling... I know!) go furthest? I'm not looking to live the high life, just maybe meeting these criteria:

Cost of living not so bad that £5k would last a year
Preferably a mid-sized city
Access to clean running water and the internet
Some kind of alcohol-based nightlife

Any ideas?

You speak some Italian, would Romania be an option?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania

EDIT
Volunteering abroad might be an option for you too. I think that would take care of your basic living expenses, and your savings would just be leisure money.

(I have a vague memory of a French listed building restoration project giving room and board to volunteer labour.)

Assuming you're a UK citizen and have no other citizenship, you'd also need to think about visas if you're there for more than three months outside of the European Economic Area (since you're talking about getting by on your savings I'm not sure if you've thought about working in the country or spending money on courses for a student visa).

I think it's much better to spend 3 months learning a language you actually want to learn than a year (or more) in an affordable country whose language you don't like.
Check out this thread about volunteering

There's a website called nomadlist.com that lists costs of living, safety, internet speed for cities around the world. I played around with it for a bit. I seem to recall China, Vietnam, and Thailand were the overall winners (really cheap, good internet, relatively safe compared to the other dirt cheap places of the world). In Western/Central Europe, think the best were Portugal and Czech Republic ...

That being said, I agree than if you have no particular interest in the language or culture other than "well, it's cheap there" it could turn into a very long year.