¡Hola a todos!
Yep, it’s me, after 2 months of absence. I have been meaning to pop my head in here for a while, but I didn’t really have a lot to say. Just to clarify, I still don’t have much to say, but I just feel like giving you all an update about my life and language learning, so here I am.
So I started this year and this log with big plans, as I am want to do. I wanted to tackle all of my target languages head-on, with lofty challenges and big changes in mind. However, several weeks in, I realised (finally) that I am not someone who deals with big changes and lofty challenges very well. I have noticed that gradually making small changes seems to suit me much better, because it requires much less effort.
I’m giving up on the challenges I set myself at the beginning of the year and, for now, I’m putting all of my target languages on the back burner, apart from Spanish. Over the past few years, I have been trying to focus on improving in other languages, such as Italian/Esperanto, or adding new languages, like German and Greek, while also trying to maintain (and possibly improve) my Spanish.
The thing is, no matter how much fun I was having with other languages, I always felt as though I was cheating on Spanish. After all the time I had dedicated to it at university, and the level I had achieved, letting my Spanish get steadily more rusty made me start to feel embarrassed by it and therefore almost unwilling to use the language in the few opportunities I had to do just that.
So, enough about what I haven’t done - what
have I done? Well, I’ve started taking private Spanish lessons. It all happened in a short period of time and completely by chance. A particularly long phone call at work meant that I left the building at the same time that the teacher my employers had hired to teach beginners Spanish to my colleagues (I knew these lessons were taking place, but I didn’t take part, for obvious reasons) was leaving. One of my colleagues told her I speak Spanish so we started chatting, and the rest was history.
We meet up for one hour a week and have a chat in Spanish over a cup of coffee. We get on very well and have a lot of common interests, so it’s an absolute pleasure to talk to her, but we are still working out how to best spend our time to make sure that I am actually progressing and she feels like my paying her is justified. She is very flexible and willing to work the way I would like her to, but I find it hard to be specific about what I want. I have explained that I want her to correct the mistakes I make, challenge me to speak about all kinds of topics, and help me express myself in a natural way, avoiding direct translation from English. I also acknowledge that I tend to listen a lot and make comments, rather than making a point of telling a story or explaining something myself, but this is probably down to us meeting after work when I have been speaking non-stop for 8 hours and tend to enjoy staying quiet for a bit.
So far things are going pretty well, I think. She’s Argentinian, so when I am not swooning over her accent, I am fascinated by the vocabulary she uses and the different ways she expresses herself compared to what I’m used to from peninsular Spanish. I don’t think I have started imitating her accent yet, but that’s bound to happen at some point.
In other news, I have continued listening to
Entiende tu mente, that podcast about psychology, and I have been watching both the second season of
Ingobernable and an Argentinian series called
Conflictos Modernos which I found on Youtube. I also started reading
Metro 2033, but I think I may need to start that again, because I can’t remember what was going on when I last read any of it.
Although I’m not spending masses of time engaging with Spanish each day, I have noticed that I am almost always thinking about it, about how I would say this or that, or what I want to discuss in my next coffee shop chat, and that’s a great feeling. I am still not sure what my end goal is with Spanish, but this quality time I’m spending with the language is
genial!
I managed to do my 30 minutes after work each day last week, despite not doing anything else, but then I took Saturday off again and played a lot more Mass Effect 