The First Spanish Lesson

This is my new Spanish book. Now I'm the student!

Learning a new skill is always rewarding and in my opinion, there are few things more rewarding than learning to speak a new language.
It's not just the new found ability to converse and communicate in a different dialect, but it's the insight it gives in to a new culture. It highlights the differences in how people see things and have seen things for hundreds of years.

An example of this happened only last night, when I was telling my mum to meet me at the end of the platform at the train station. In English, a platform has two ends, in Chinese, the platform has a beginning and end (or 'head' and 'tail'). So really, I should have told her to go to the beginning of the platform.
Ah, the comedy of confusion.

Yesterday's lesson: a lot of words and professions.

So, being in Spain, the natural step is to learn Spanish. The school I work for is so generous, they offer free language lessons to the teachers. Of course, I'm going to take full advantage of that! I have two hours a week of Spanish and one hour of French. Yes, I'm going to learn French too!

I had my first class yesterday and it was really tough. There was another girl who already knew all the vocabulary and all the sentence structures so I felt very stupid. The teacher asked me questions and I could tell she was asking "How old are you?" But I had no idea how to respond. Bah. First class is always tough though. It's helped me sympathise a lot with my beginner class. It just means that I'll have to push myself harder in my own time to catch up. Which really, is fine by me. Hopefully before the end of the year, I'll be able to write a whole post in Spanish! Even if it's "I like Spain, it is beautiful, I play football."

I'm very excited to learn more Spanish and French too!

This Friday is a public holiday, so no lesson, but next week, French: part one!