And Speaking Of...

Whew! It has been a while. I apologize for that, but the pace of my life has quadrupled within the last 3 weeks. Complicating matters is that my blogspot account, along with the majority of my internet preferences, has been changed into Castellano, and for a shamefully long period of time I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how in the world to create a new post.

The language classes have finally started. Such craziness. It is quite difficult to adjust to how languages are taught here. It is not an organized teaching, but situational learning and figuring out verb tenses and vocabulary through context. The theory behind this is that children learn their first language in this manner, so that is how a second language should be learned as well. Not so sure about that yet...I learn much better in charts and vocab lists. I like organized, no scratch that, I love organized. It is how I learned Latin, it is how my brain seems to be wired to learn Spanish. If someone would just go through a verb chart, I could memorize it and be well on my way. We didn’t even start talking about verb conjugation until the second week. Still, my language professor is awesome. His name is Jesus. He has a wardrobe full of colored pants and colored sweaters. He is quite humorous and the king of digression. What follows is an example (real-life!) of the digression that occurs on a daily basis.

An sentence example comes up with the word “bajando”, meaning to download something. From there, we go over the uses of the root “baja”, of which various forms can be used to describe something as short, turning down the volume, going downstairs, downloading, and much more. Then is discussed the sea having a “low tide” and the phrase which describes the movement of the sea. We then learn the difference of using “el mar” vs. “la mar”, including the geographic location of the people using each respective form to refer to the sea. Then comes a history lesson about the Andalucian people discovering a group of islands in the North Atlantic, naming them “La Baja Mar,” but since Andalucian’s don’t have as guttural of a “j” noise as the rest of Spain and a tendency to have silent r’s, this group of islands became known as the Bahamas.

The key phrase is always “and speaking of…”, it is the segue into the next lesson. Previous digressions have included: “and speaking of pregnant women…”, “and speaking of turning pages…”, “and speaking of Juan”. When you hear this phrase, something good is about to happen. There is never a dull moment with Jesús.

In other news, my Spanglish has reached an all-time high. You would think that wouldn’t be a problem after 7 weeks, but it is. This involves mostly taking English words, but by pronouncing the vowels differently, turning them into “Spanish.” I have no clue if these words actually exist, but since there are a lot of words that act like this, subconsciously I just try. It’s really bad for the words that end in “-le”: recycle, possible, bicycle. Some of those connections just aren’t there yet.

Poco a poco.