I'm back from Spain!
Naturally, I spoke and heard lots of
Spanish. I feel like this trip was a sort of milestone in my language journey, not in terms of competence but of avoiding perfectionism and not being afraid to try. There were times when I quite deliberately used language that I knew was incorrect because I couldn't remember or didn't know the correct form but I knew I'd get my point across, wheareas in the past I might well have paused to think (and probably interrupted the flow of conversation or missed my turn to speak) or just avoided saying it entirely.
I was keeping in mind the idea of "language for communication, rather than art for art's sake" from that Cure Dolly video that I mentioned recently, and also my experience in Japan with my partner at the time who wasn't shy about speaking at every possible opportunity even with an incomplete knowledge of the language. I was still being realistic: I accept that by nature I'm a more reserved person so I wasn't trying to measure myself by that bar, but still, seeing what is possible gave me the encouragement I needed to step a little more out of my comfort zone. I had a friendly chat with the receptionist every morning at breakfast; I spoke a lot with a guest from Mallorca who was takging surfing lessons with me; and in customer service interactions I tried to go a little beyond the necessary where appropriate by adding in a comment or a question or a joke.
The lessons and the conversations with the instructors tended to be in a mixture of English and Spanish since some attendees were Spanish speakers and others not. I'd say I can now quite confidently talk about sea and wave conditions, which is useful since if someone is considering going surfing and sees you walking back from the beach they might well ask you about that!
Switches to English did happen a few times, but similarly to my experiences in Germany last year I felt that it was usually justified: I had had a couple of "strikes" like not understanding something or not being able to say something, and the other person's English was good enough. There were a couple of cases of more French/Italian-like behaviour of switching as soon as they could tell I was non-native, but they were the exception.
I was very aware that my Spanish has many gaps and weak points and I'm not quite at an advanced level yet, and I do feel encouraged to improve it. Especially since I see myself spending a lot more time in Spanish-speaking areas in the next few years: I'd love to go back to see more of the north of Spain and surf more, and maybe I'll finally make it out to Latin America. And I'm sure I could get to that level: just a few hundred more hours of input, some speaking and writing practice now and again, and patching up some grammar points and verb forms that I'm still a little shaky with.
But my language-learning routine is quite full already and I'd have to make sacrifices if I wanted to improve my Spanish while continuing to progress in Japanese and German. Either slow down in those languages (not that German could be much slower at the moment!), or carve out time at the expense of other things in my life, or be a bit more "extreme" about listening (have headphones in more of the time, avoid watching things in English, etc.). At least my Spanish level is high enough that working on it isn't too mentally demanding and is more just about putting in the hours, so I'd still have brainpower to spare for the lower-level languages.
My
German premonition didn't really come true; there were a couple of Germans there and I spoke a lot with one of them, but she was a young student with near-perfect English. On the other hand, there was a huge group of
Italians for the first few days so I heard and spoke some of that. Which just resulted in a lot of confusion and mistakes in both languages! There was a group of Dutch-speaking Belgians too and I wondered if my German knowledge would help me understand them, but it didn't much apart from a few words like "echt?" ("really?").
TV and filmI watched a few more episodes of
Idhún and of
Erased during my downtime.
Idhún is fine really, it's not demanding and the short episodes are convenient. Given my ambitious learning goals, I think it's best to focus on stuff that's convenient and easy to consume rather than on quality, and that's where Netflix comes in. I also started a German series,
Dear Child. I might even have to resort to dubbed series if I want to have my cake and eat it too (quality + convenience)... Input is input and desperate times call for desperate measures
Last night there was a one-off screening of
Battle Royale at my local cinema, and since it's Japanese and I had seen it recommended in various places I couldn't refuse. I don't have much new to report in terms of understanding the language, but it did have a lot of on-screen text. Sometimes I even knew most of the characters, but the text wasn't on the screen for anywhere long enough for me to process it all! It also included a lot of names (like in the reports of who had been killed at each point) so it was interesting to see how names are written in Kanji and which ones I recognised the sounds and readings of.
I've also seen that there's a
Spy x Family film and another Japanese drama called
Evil does not exist showing later this month, and they're showing
The Teacher's Lounge (German) soon which again was already on my list, so more cinema trips will be coming up!
I did keep up a bit of
Japanese learning while I was away. I did WaniKani lessons and reviews, although a bit haphazardly and with only a few new lessons per day since I found it a bit hard to focus on them and do them at consistent times. I'm finding that Level 7 has quite a few words and characters that are easy to confuse with each other. I kept up with the other apps too; apps never beat proper learning resources, but they're sure handy at times like this when I'm away and just want to keep up some form of study. I'm looking forward to getting back into Genki this week.
General feelingsAs I hinted at, I might be biting off more than I can chew since I want to put more time into Spanish but don't want to slow down with Japanese or Spanish. As usual I think I'll just see how it goes. The Spanish motivation might just be a temporary post-trip effect.
I'm tempted to consider Spain again as a place to live. I like Berlin and all, but I'd love to be near the sea now that I'm getting more into surfing, and I have mixed feelings on big cities. But remote working and easy travel options from Berlin might also be an option to get the best of both worlds.