Tag: Spanish class

Tres cosas importantes en la vida – which means 3 important things in life – to the Spanish are salud (health), dinero (money), and amor (love).  After our Spanish teacher Anna translated what salud means, I asked in all ignorance, “What about heaven?  ¿Cómo se dice “heaven” en español?  (How to say heaven in Spanish?)”  The entire class was silence and then bursted into laughter.  It was happy kind of laughter.  I soon joined them after realizing that salud means health, not hell.  Oh well.  I probably speak Spanish with a Singapore accent while Anna speaks English with a Spanish accent.  How come I was the only one who didn’t get it.

Now you get it?  By now you should.  You knew that I have enrolled the first Spanish lesson this July and since then, my journey has not been that smooth sailing.  If I was to redesign the Spanish curriculum for the English speaking people, I would list out a whole set of vocabulary that is common between Spanish and English (the word ‘curriculum’ is a good example).  And I would also create a list of words that are similar between the two languages.  Such as importantes versus important, vacaciones versus vacations, salario versus salary, familia versus family.  Imagine, all of a sudden, Spanish is not such a foreign language anymore.  Imagine, the level of confidence that I would have, that any English speaking person would have, after seeing that entire list of similarity.

Though I have missed the first class of this new season (because of that trip, you know which trip I am talking about), I am as determined as ever to do well and pass the examination with the rest of the class.  I love my class, I really do.  I don’t want to be left behind as the rest of the class continues to the next level.  These are fun people, people with interesting careers, and most importantly, people whom I look forward to meet every week.

This new season I am doing something different.  I think one way to learn a new language is to try it without thinking too hard about it.  Once again … ¿En la vida solo hay tres cosas importantes amor, salud y dinero?

Si, el mismo orden (yes, in that same order).

How time flies when it seems like yesterday Cynthia and I first joined the Spanish lesson.  I may only get a fraction of what she got from our teacher Anna, I do learn a lot from Anna’s unorthodox way of teaching – letting the learners subtly define our learning objectives, allowing us to grow beyond the syllabus, and making each lesson fun.  Learning should be fun and it shouldn’t be restrictive.

Take today as an example.  Two guys from our class will be visiting Mexico for three months as exchange students for real.  So Anna started the lesson (our last in this course) with the scenario of these two arriving at the airport making friends with the locals.  So they meet this girl and …

At that moment, we were all tongue-tied.  Quickly we rewound to lesson one and asked me llamo XYZ, y tu (my name is so-and-so, and you)?  Next of course is where are you from, de dónde eres?  And then?

We all went blank.

Imagine, two guys and a Mexican lady, how about a beer?  ¿Quieres una cerveza?  How about asking her if she’d like to eat something?  ¿Quieres comer algo?  How to ask if you like me?  ¿Te gusta?  And if she does?  Me gustas mucho.

I love you is te quiero.

What else will our two friends need to know?  At the airport?  Where are the taxis, I suppose.  ¿Dónte están los taxis?  And the taxi driver would probably ask dónde van ustedes (where are you guys going)?  Hotel Hilton, we are going.  Vamos al hotel Hilton.  At the hotel, we may wish to ask where a decent restaurant is.  ¿Dónde hay un buen restaurante?  What time does it open?  ¿A qué hora abre el restaurante?

It is no fun with these two dudes dining on their own, is it?  We can always count on the friendly (and beautiful) Mexican ladies.  Would you like to dine with us?  ¿Quieres cenar con nosotros?  If the response is si, claro.  That is a yes of course.  Quizás is a maybe.

Over the dinning table, the girl may ask cuanto tienpo en mexico (how long are you staying in Mexico)?  And there and then in the class, we learned how to say the years (años), months (meses), weeks (semanas), and days (diás).

One of us asked how to ask the girl for a dance.  Anna told us that in Mexico, you have to ask the permission from her brother as seldom girls come out alone for dates.  Erm, OK.  ¿Puedo bailar con tu hermana?

May I kiss you?!  ¿Puedo besar la?

OK.  Maybe something should be left unsaid.  The dinner is lovely and when the bill comes, why let the girl pays?  Yo invito.  Literally means “I invite (hence I pay)”.  And when will we see each other again?  ¿A qué hora (nosotros) nos encontramos?  Or if the night is still young, why not catch a movie?  ¿Quieres ir al cine?

Our class went on and on creating fun scenarios, departing from our textbooks.  Our teacher Anna really enjoys our sense of curiosity and in her words of encouragement, we have gone far ahead of what beginner 1 class offers.  So here we are, 5 girls and 1 guy (me) heading to beginner 2 class next month.  Oh God, wish me luck.  These girls are smart, very smart.

Thank you for all your creative answers for that little quiz of mine posted last Sunday.  It was a great fun just by reading them.  Darkspore and TK came really close to the answer of a reflection through a car (though I must say they have the advantage of knowing me in person) and therefore, dudes, I will cook that Cantonese meal I promise.  In the spirit of fun and charity, I will make them donate a handsome sum of money so that I can continue to fund this website and continue to delight you lovely readers out there.

I have a habit of taking random pictures as and when inspirations hit me.  I enjoy doing that because these pictures may come in handy in the future.  Like the one for my Sunday post on self-reflection, I thought it does suit the topic well (Cynthia did guess the association right).  This particular image was taken using my camera phone.  I did a rotation and crop the image to the right size.  And I surgically removed the dried leaf on top of the car.  Other than that, there isn’t much alternation to the original picture.

Spanish Class

I look forward to the Spanish class because after all the daily 9-to-5 bombardments in the office, the one thing I look forward to is my weekly 2 hours of dedicated time in learning a new skill.

Can passion be nurtured over time?  I hope so.

Cynthia has a natural talent in learning languages.  For me, I am going to once again deploy my hardcore repetitive drilling exercise.  I write, and write, till these foreign words are scribbled into my brain in black and white.

The variation of Spanish verb forms is just amazing and they have this concept of formal and casual,  permanent and temporary.  In English, we have “I am married” or “I am a man”.  In Spanish, the verb used for the former is different from the one used for the latter because to the Spanish, being married is temporary while being a man is permanent.  So, it is a little bit more complicated than “I am” in English.

And we have to learn by heart that shop, factory, and office for instance take in a feminine form while school, hospital, and farm take in a masculine form.  To introduce you as my friend if you are a guy, I would refer you as “un amigo mío” – literally means a friend of mine.  If you are a lady, all three words have to be switched to “una amiga mía”.  If I am to introduce you as a group of ladies, that would be “unas amigas mías”.  Otherwise, in a mixed gender or only men situation, “unos amigos míos”.

My 6th and 7th lessons are certainly more demanding than the previous one that we sang birthday song and what not.  But certainly we are expanding on what we can converse, in Spanish.

Below are samples of what I managed to squeeze into my brain before the lesson.

I hope none of my colleagues at my office reads this.

Anyways.  I know I have been massively lagging behind in my Spanish class.  But I was inspired by Women’s 400m Butterfly.  Never mind trailing behind in the initial three laps.  It is how much burst energy you have in the last lap that counts.

This morning, I was determined to practice how to write the number 0 to 20 in Spanish.  Cynthia can memorize the spelling in two runs.  My first language is Chinese.  And I learn the language by memorizing the pattern of the character construct, not the sound of the word.  So, I am in for the brutal repetitive drilling exercise to get it.

This morning, I was summoned by my director at another office building.  To sit with him to go through something.  Before we even began, he was summoned by his boss for a brief meeting.  I could …

1. Space out and look stupid.
2. Feverishly texting my friends and look busy.
3. Take over my director’s computer and Google the latest Olympic results.
4. Or I could …

I opened my laptop, created an Excel spreadsheet that generated random numbers between 0 to 20, pasted these random numbers to a Word document, set the language to Spanish, and started to type the numbers in Spanish (see picture above).  The first set was slow.  By the time I reached the 100th number – I kid you not – I typed like a native.

From 0 to 20 that is.

My effort sort of paid off.  Anna, our Spanish teacher, asked me to write some Spanish on the white board.  Guess what I wrote?  OK.  You get the drift.

I like today’s lesson.  We all shared with each other what we studied and what our professions are.  Overloaded with Spanish words, certainly.  But it was fun not in a Bingo sense like the last lesson.  But getting to know some new friends that is.  There were four of us working in the banking industry!  Amazing.  Time to pass the CV around!

Now, why do the nouns ‘office’, ‘restaurant’, and ‘factory’ take the feminine word form while ‘hospital’, ‘supermarket’, and ‘hotel’ take the masculine word form?  I still haven’t got the hang of it.  To further illustrate, a female architect is arquitecta.  A male architect is arquitecto.  When Anna taught us that a male lawyer in Spanish is abogado, I couldn’t help but screamed ‘avocado’ as a reflect action.  That got everyone laughing.

Oh well.  Baby steps.  I know I can do this!  ¡Adiós!

If I was single and in Spain, by the end of lesson three, I shall be able to go beyond hi-how-are-you, what’s-your-name, where’re-you-from, when’s-your-birthday, to … what’s your telephone number?

Except, I wouldn’t be able catch 100% what her number would be.  D’oh!

The reality is this: Last evening, Cynthia and I have spent an hour or so to do the Spanish homework.  One activity was to listen to a recorded track and learn how to speak 0 to 20 in Spanish.  I swear by the second repeat, Cynthia was able to memorize all the words and started to speak.  I was like … wait, what is after uno again?!  Actually I do know the answer.  Simply because it spells like DOS – disk operating system.  D’oh!

Again, what excited me today was when our teacher Anna talked about the origin of Spanish language, how it evolves from Latin and Greek.  As for the rest of the lesson, I was doodling most of the time.  I didn’t get the whole class feeling hungry like the previous time.  Someone asked our Japanese classmate in Spanish on how to say the word ‘chicken’ in Japanese.  We ended up talking about Chicken (Tori) Teriyaki.  Everyone was suddenly very animated.  I think we shall forget about the number 0 to 20 and go straight to ordering food in Spanish.

Oh well.

We played Bingo in Spanish and need not to say, I was utterly lost.  Cynthia won two games as I suspect that most of us were kind of lost too.  Anna gave us a preview of the various verb forms and I went uh-oh.  Here is an example for you.  ‘I speak’ is yo hablo, ‘you speak’ is tú hablas, and ‘he/she speaks’ is él/ella habla.  The fun begins with nosotros hablamos (we speak), vosotros hablais (you [in plural] speak), ellos hablan (they [men or a mix of men and women] speak), and ellas hablan (they [women] speak).

On a lighter note, my pair of Avril Lavigne tickets has arrived!  It’ll be on el siete de Septiembre.  Fun time it will be in exactly one month’s time.

OK.  Time to go to bed and dream of … cero, uno, dos, tres … tori, teri, yaki …

Towards the end of the lesson, as Cynthia was conversing with our teacher Anna in Spanish on the topic of countries and nationalities in a convincing fluency, I was looking at the world map so nicely drawn on my Spanish book and couldn’t help but to imagine a game of RISK with my dwindling troops scattered at four corners of the world.  Soon, in this lost battle of I against me, all I heard was a foreign language that I was clueless about.  As though I was warped into another planet, lost in another reality.

But wait, weren’t Cynthia and I at the same class with supposedly the same progress?

OK.  It was not all hard work.  I like the part about Spanish culture that Anna took some time and shared with us some of the basic demography of España: the ancient Celtric tribes that settled at the north (Galicia), the capital city Barcelona of an autonomous community (Galicia) that borders with France, and the south of Spain (Andalusia) that is just a good swim away from Morocco.  Anna asked us what else we wished to know besides the different peoples in Spain, the Flamenco dance (that is well known as a Spanish dance but in fact only popular in Andalusia at the south), and the 9am to 1pm / 4pm to 8pm working hours (siesta in between), my immediate response was: food.

That got everybody in the classroom feeling hungry, including Anna.  Not my fault!  It was an innocent question!

The hard part was learning the list of countries, nationalities, and the masculino and femenio forms for the males and females.  For example, Spain is España, a Spanish man is Español, and a Spanish woman is Española.  In plural form, we have Españols and Españolas.  The rules that change the nationalities into the two forms are not that hard; the way a nationality is spelled out is.  Some countries are totally unrecognizable.  Who would have thought that the words America and American are Estados Unidos and Estadounidense in Spanish?  I personally wish that the lesson stresses more on the pronunciation of these Spanish words rather than the rigorous exercise of pen-and-paper.

I guess it will take me a long while to memorize and speak what I’ve learned this lesson.  No wonder I spaced out towards the end.  How Cynthia managed to memorize on the spot and speak is totally beyond me.  Perhaps her brain is wired in a different way.

Medic!

You didn’t think I was joking when I said Cynthia is going to learn Spanish after Fernando Torres scored the goal that won Spain the UEFA Cup 2008, did you?  So I join her, under one condition.  Stay tuned and you may hear about it in September this year.

To learn Spanish is one of Cynthia’s childhood dreams.  I honestly have no special love for the language, the music, or the food but I do love to fulfill the dreams of others if I can.  Learning a language is absolutely not my strength and it is utterly one of the 10 things I fear most.  I am not exaggerating.

Exactly what I am going to do with this new skill, I have no clue.  However I am a strong believer that whatever you learn today opens up options you may have in the future.  Besides, I have this impression that Spanish is widely spoken in the Americas and I just learned from a Filipino friend of mine that his country was under the Spaniards for 400 years!  If this new experience hasn’t opened up new options for me yet, it has certainly opened up new conversation topics.  Did you know that Spanish is the world’s second most-spoken language by native speakers after Mandarin Chinese?

I told my boss that I have a Wednesday class in town so that any travel plan in the near future can hopefully be scheduled according to my constraint; I told my team that I am learning Spanish so that they know I have a life and won’t expect me to OT on work that never ends.  My boss sounded supportive and he told me that learning a new language is good to give our brain cells a good workout.  Great!  I think my first lesson was more than a workout.  I was exhaustively euphoric.

Anna is an interpreter by day, Spanish teacher by night and she is a fun person full of laughter.  Las LiLas School specializes in teaching Spanish language at various levels and the learning environment is OK.  I wish the classroom could be more colorful.  Having some refreshments inside the room would have been nice.  Next time I shall bring along my bottle of water and some snacks as well.

I guess all good language lessons begin with hi-how-are-you, what’s-your-name, and I’m-so-and-so.  Spanish language seems to have three extra alphabets ll, ch, and ñ, which is pretty funky.  Cynthia’s mother tongue is Bahasa Indonesia – a language with a certain level of Dutch influence – and she didn’t find the i-pronounced-as-e and e-pronounced-as-a confusing.  That alone confuses the heck out of me.  Fortunately, I am trained in pronouncing the tongue rolling ‘R’ sound of the Indonesian and the throat vibrating ‘R’ sound of the French, I am doing OK with the Spanish ‘G’, ‘J’, and ‘R’ that utilize both techniques.  ‘Y’ in Spanish is pronounced as ‘Y Griega’ (literally means letter Y from the Greek).  Some of these alphabets sound almost like a word to me.  When I was asked to spell out my name, I flipped.  The alphabet ‘W’ is pronounced as ‘Uve Doble’.  Although I seem to be able to get the rest of the tough alphabets right, ‘Uve Doble’ is one tough nut for me.  You know the Spanish dance genre Paso Doble?  It is the same ‘Doble’.  Why English calls ‘W’ double-U?  I don’t know.  Spanish calls it double-V.

Ah … all these confusions.  Thanks to the Tower of Babel.

Oops, exceeded 500 word count for this entry.  Stay tuned for more stories on How I Flunk My Spanish Test.