It's harder than you think

For all you people thinking about trying to learn a second language:

It's not easy.

As I was leaving I talked to a lot of people who said, "Oh man when you come back you will be awesome at Spanish." And I believed it. I thought that by the time I got back I would be sounding like a native speaker [that might be an exaggeration] Then there were a few people who had actually been to another country with the hopes of learning the language, who told me that it was going to be hard. And that two months really isn't long enough to completely submerge yourself. But I didn't listen to them. I assumed that they were just peeing on my party. [I'm not sure what led me to that conclusion]
But then I got here and I said to myself, "those party poopers back home might be sort of right." Then I got through the first month and said to myself, "those party poopers back home are totally right." And then what makes it worse is that sometimes you run into some guy who speaks English, Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew and never had to study any of them. [That happened just the other day]

Don't get me wrong, I have learned a ton of Spanish. But I have the vocabulary and grammar of a 3 year old at best. Most of the time I am just asking, "where is the hospital?" or "do you like music?" and when I am really going out on a limb I may say, "It's making nice weather."

But it could be worse...
For the last couple weeks I have been in Spanish Classes at the University of Granada. There are another 3 or so weeks left in the class and then I come home. Normally at the intensive Spanish courses the classes are big mixes of people from tons of different countries but most of the people in my class are Americans. I asked someone about this and they came up with two possible reasons why this might be. (1) Many Europeans are starting their vacations later this month and therefore don't want to be in classes. And (2) Most Europeans are in the higher level classes because by the time they spend the money to go somewhere to study a language they are pretty good at it.

Now I am not in the total beginner class, I want you all to know that. I am in Intermediate B. Which comes after Beginner A and B AND Intermediate A. But it is also lower than Advanced A and B and Superior A and B. I had the option to go into Advance A but I decided that it would be better to be able to review some stuff. After a couple weeks of classes I have decided that I am in the right level for two reasons. (1) The work is challenging but not overwhelming. (2) The Americans in my class make me feel really really good about my Spanish. They have the WORST accents I have ever heard in my life which is saying something because in Spanish most letters are almost always pronounced the same way.

Now we are not talking about having bad Granada accents. [In Granada things are pronounced differently sometimes. Like the C's and Z's are usually turned into a TH sound.] They have no accents at all. They are classic examples of DAA's [Dumb Ass Americans] reading Spanish words off of a page as if they are reading English. I wish I could tape them and put it online for you to hear it. Even those of you who have never taken a Spanish class in your life would wonder what their problem is.

So now I'll wrap it up. The basic ideas of this blog entry are:
Language learning is really hard.
But that doesn't mean you have to sound like a DAA when you are learning to speak.