Jitters

So in case you haven't picked up on this, I am making a go at National Blog Posting Month. I am sort of challenging myself to write more substantive things here and use my tumblr for my one-offs... But after a full day of bike riding yesterday and a full day of walking in the sun today, I'm afraid I don't have a ton of energy. And tomorrow my super-expensive Spanish classes begin at nine am so I need to get to bed pretty much now. According to the rules of the school there will not be more than five people in my class tomorrow. Which is a pretty small first impression to make. But the standard first day of school anxiety is still creeping in. Will I make friends? Will everyone else be muchmuch better at Spanish than me? What if I make some crazy pronunciation faux pas (like the time I tried to ask the dishwasher at Aroma for the "vasos" but said something more like "besos")? The "what to wear?" questions are not so pressing since wearing anything other than jeans and a t-shirt here garners far more unwanted attention than its worth. But, you know, which t-shirt??

Teach Yourself Spanish

So despite the fact that I took Spanish classes for four years during high school, my language skills now (in a Spanish speaking country, nine years later) are pretty inadequate. For the last two weeks I have been getting by on my patented method of simple words and phrases accompanied by gestures and lots of smiling. To give you an idea of how much language this really involves, I am also able to communicate this way in French and German speaking countries. And I did not study those languages, even at a high school level. With patient collaborators, I have had several real conversations (with verbs and predicates and occasional subjunctives) in Spanish. Meals, drinks, a card game... But generally improving my level of language proficiency is the goal of my life right now.

I am strongly considering taking some intensive classes starting next week to get my grammar into shape, but I have also created a rigorous course of personal study:

-Write out the entire conjugations of two irregular verbs each day. It's easy to chose these verbs because whenever I am speaking in Spanish I have to stop to conjugate them.

-Write down every word looked up each day (at least ten). I never actually write down all of them. It's rarely convenient to pull out a notebook and take a minute to write something down in the middle of a conversation.

-Speak in Spanish whenever possible. Obviously. But sometimes it feels so much easier, knowing that the person I'm speaking with also speaks English, to resort back. No. That is totally against the rules. (This is a rule I break every day)

-Read something, at least one entire thing, in Spanish everyday. Sometimes it's an article or internet news story. Sometimes it's a poem. This just focuses me on comprehension.

-Reread all notes everyday. Usually in bed before I go to sleep I look through the conjugation tables and the vocab lists and try to find them in my brain again. So far they're usually there somewhere.