Carlos, my fabulous teacher

Thursday, December 11, 2008

This week, my teacher was Carlos. Next week, Carlos is going on vacation, so we'll have a new teacher. Carlos is great. He ends every lesson by saying, "Question? Doubts? Comments?" or in Espanol "Preguntas? Dudas? Commentarias?" I say this all the time now, to my family, friends, etc. After lunch I say, "Preguntas? Dudas? Commentarias?" I think it's funny :).

Here's a picture of Carlos and the board. This board gets completely full and erased and full again about 20 times during the 5 hour school day. Iiiiiiiiiiit's overwhelming.

Here is Carlos after I said "Como Vana White, por favor!!!"

There's a lot of laughing in this class. Por supuesto. (Of course).

Things are still pretty difficult. Still feel like my Spanish is deteriorating. It's tricky to balance the desire to learn and study really hard every night, and the desire to travel and hang out with your friends who speak English instead. And all of this considering the feeling of exhaustion after translating everything you want to say all day long. For those of you who know me, I definitely like to be social, so the temptation is to go out and see things and hang out with people, but I think I will also start to study at night, at least an hour or so, to work on learning vocabulary. We'll see if this helps.

The main problem for me right now is this: when I'm talking to someone, and I know the topic of conversation, the context, I can understand much more. If someone on the street just asks me a random question, I am completely lost, because I don't know the context, and I don't know what words to be listening for.

For instance: you would think a trip to the supermarket would be easy...collect the things you want, go to the check-out counter, and the cashier will tell you how much you have to pay. Easy, right? Yes, except when they ask you a question suddenly, and you didn't know it was coming. The question, apparently, was "Do you have a store discount card?" Wow. How would I have known THAT was coming. The only reason I know what the woman asked me is because my host dad was there with me. The second time, when I went by myself, the woman asked me again, so I was prepared.

I want to apologize for typos, grammatical errors, weird sentences, or anything else incorrect that might be occurring in this blog. With the limited amount of time I have to post (lunch), I am not rereading anything I type, soooo, sorry if there are mistakes! :)

Adios for now...