Aprendiendo la Lengua

¡Hola a todos!  I have just completed my first week of classes.  By week, of course, I mean four days of class because we only have class Monday through Thursday.  My first reaction to these classes is that they are kind of easy.  The three electives that I'm taking, which will go towards my minor, are all covering the basics.  The only difficulty is that it is in Spanish, but even that isn't bad because they know that we aren't fluent so they explain every new word.  There is also not much homework as of right now, which I could get used to.  But yeah, classes are going well.

The most interesting thing that happened to me this week was a visit from my host mom's former resident who studied with API.  The last time he saw her was as when he lived in her apartment 9 years ago in 2003! He was 20 then and has since become fluent in Spanish.  His name is Nico, just like my roommate, and he is taller and very skinny.  He lives in Washington, DC and works for a company there, but he still travels to Spain whenever he gets the chance.  He told us his story about how he was studying abroad in Granada and was speaking English and hanging out with the other API people and he felt like he wasn't learning anything.  He woke up one day and realized that he was in a Spanish speaking country for only 8 months (he was doing two semesters), and he should instead be learning the language the best way you can: by making friends with the natives.

In Spain they have these programs called intercambios, or exchanges, where a group of Americans and a group of Spaniards meet at a bar or other such location and just talk.  The Spaniards don't usually know a lot of English and the Americans are trying to improve their Spanish.  He told us that for one of them, he met a Spaniard that knew English so he really was the only one practicing a weaker language.  Fortunately, API holds intercambios about once a month and typically you go and talk to someone for half an hour and then switch.  If at any point you hit it off with someone, you can either get their number or their Facebook and keep in contact.  At one of the intercambios, Nico actually met a girl that he ended up dating for his time in Granada.  Dating someone is also a great way to learn their language :P.

On top of that, he also stopped speaking English entirely, which is something Nico and I are already starting to do, at least at home.  Honestly, in the past week, I feel like I've learned more Spanish in all of the years that I've taken classes.  The constant bombardment of Spanish from being in classes, from your host mom, and from living in the country really penetrate deep and mold your mind to their thinking.  It's really cool to feel like I'm getting better when it has only been one week.  But I also know that it will take hard work.  The other Nico said that he made flashcards of new words and that he would always ask what a word means from a Spaniard's point of view.  In my clase de gramática, grammar class, we talk about words with their literal definition and our professor corrects us because the way we use it doesn't capture it's true meaning.  A word is more than just it's definition, it has it's own feeling and place in the language.

Nico really enjoyed his time when he stayed here and concluded that this was the place where his passion arose.  After a long lunch, he took a picture with Carmen and checked out his old room.  No ha cambiado nada, it hasn't changed at all, he said.  He then told Carmen that this would not be his last visit, but that he should really be going.  He was meeting up with Spanish friends and they were going to walk around the city that had ignited his lingual fuse.  Carmen definitely was grateful that Nico had stopped and she told us that she has had so many kids that few are as memorable as he was.  She has been doing this for 14 years (only 9 with API), which could mean that she had 28 different students come in and out of her life.

All in all, there was definitely a message to take away from his experience: don't write blog posts in English :P.  No,  but seriously, the more Spanish you speak the better you will get.  He even said that speaking well is like an addiction, you just want to keep doing it to hear how good you've gotten.  I apologize for the lack of pictures in this post; it would've been awkward to take pictures of him during lunch, so I will leave you with a nice picture of my favorite park: Parque de Federico Garcia Lorca.  ¡Hasta luego!