I had only been here in Guanajuato a couple of days, but I figured I had better start getting back into the swing of things so as not to waste time and, probably more importantly, to get into a routine around which to shape my days. I thus decided to head back to school a week earlier than planned, albeit just for four days of one-on-one classes, and just two of those per day. One does have watch the wallet, after all. Still, if one wants to lead a relatively rich life in a new country, the more you learn of the language the better.
For those of you (I used the plural there in case there is more than one person out there reading this), who don’t recall or weren’t following my goings on at the time, two years ago, in March 2016 to be exact, I made my first visit to Guanajuato, and at that time, I studied Spanish for just under two weeks, four hours a day (at a school by the name of Colegio de Lenguas Adelita). Well, I barely had the attention span or diligence to do those four hours then, so I was sure that I would definitely not have such a capacity now. In fact, I was sure I had become too lazy (mentally) to do more than two hours, and so it is upon that number that I settled.
Sidetrack - My Early Spanish Study History
Before going on, I should mention, though I could just as well not (hahaha), that my studies at Adelita were not entirely my first in Spanish. First of all, as a kid, I grew up in a Spanish speaking home. My grandmother, grandfather, mother, and all my aunts and uncles were speakers of Spanish as a first language (we were kept away from Spanish as it was feared we (my cousins and I) would get messed up with gangs, which was a rising problem at the time, or become victims of discrimination and such). Of course, I and most my cousins, heard Spanish all the time, and I, growing up in East L.A. for my first five years of life, meant that not picking up at least some Spanish was just not possible.
As for actual Spanish language study, I had none until sixth grade at Grant Elementary School, Los Angeles, CA, where we had a closed circuit television Spanish lesson every Friday for about 15 minutes. One of the hosts of the show (a Los Angeles Unified Schools production) was actually one of my classmates, and I thought that was pretty cool. I mean she was the first television celebrity I had ever met, even if she was only a closed circuit TV celeb. Although I don't remember her name, I remember she was very cute and always wore big, fuzzy white knit sweaters (or maybe it was the same one) whenever she was on TV, but I don’t remember anything else really about those shows other than the rather ludicrous sentence: El elefante está en la biblioteca. And to drive home the point, there was an illustration of a big gray elephant in the library. I remember wondering why the door wasn't damaged in the illustration as the elephant seemed considerably larger than that door.
After that, I pretty much ignored Spanish, having been lured away by other more seemingly exotic languages, such as German, Russian, Swedish, Chinese and Cantonese. I did not study Spanish again until my junior year at California State University, Los Angeles (yes, the same place where the “reader-based prose” thing was drilled into my head). I remember only two things from that class (which I only took for one quarter - all I needed graduation credit wise): the teacher was very pale and most of my classmates were Filipina nursing students, all of whom became pretty good friends for the rest of my CSULA time, which was nice. . . and the reason I was able to try and came to be so familiar with Filipino food.
After that, there was no more Spanish for a very long time until I had decided I was going to go to Guanajuato and study. I took a night class at Forsyth Tech in Winston-Salem (for you out of towners who might be wondering where the school is). The book for that class was ridiculously expensive - $125. Sure it could be used for 3 quarters, but c’mon - so expensive for a non-credit night class? And the book wasn't even bound - you had to put it in a binder!!! Outrage aside, I bit the bullet, bought the book, and went for my two nights a week, 3 hours a night class. I took the 2nd level class because the lowest level was way to basic, but as it turns out, the 2nd level was an absolute waste of time. The teacher was some American woman who had lived in Latin America as a teen. She conducted the entire class in English, and we were lucky if each person said more than one word of Spanish in the entire three hour period. I decided that I could learn more on my own, so I bought a very good yellow book by the name of Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish ("with Original Illustrations by Andy Warhol"), and after three weeks of that goofy class, I switched to studying on my own every day, memorizing and mumbling to myself during my evening walks. After that, I was off to Mexico.
Almost Back to the Main Thread - My Studies Between my First and Current Stints in GTO
Having filled you in on my studies in the past, it only makes sense to fill you all in on what had been happening to me language-study wise in the time between my two Guanajuato experiences, I had continued taking classes online, at first one hour a week, and then two hours a week. For the bulk of that time, I had been taking classes with teachers from the same school, all of whom were new additions, having started after I left in 2016, and they were all fine. My first online teacher, Johanna, was a good fit for me at the time as she was easy to talk to, though she liked to disagree about things, any things, for the sake of disagreeing. If I said, I human sacrifice by the Aztecs was something dreadful, she'd say something good about it. Hmm. If ever someone invents a time machine, I will gladly give her my place in line for a trip back to those days -- unless, I guess, I were granted some sort of sacrificial immunity in advance of my travels.
OK, OK. Getting off track. Enough of what went on on top of the pyramids in days of yore…..
Johanna was one of those people who had a driving urge to be somewhere else in the world than where she was and thus seemed to be in a constant search for a place, which I suppose I can related to. She thus left Guanajuato to go to Canada for a few months, but after realizing that Nanaimo, BC, is a lot duller than one would imagine, she opted, after less than one month in that Vancouver Island non-Metropolis, to head down to Cancun, Mexico, whereupon she stopped doing lessons. I then was switched to two other teachers who were quite good and, fortunately, quite different from one another, Lucy and Annie.
Back to the Now
Well, and so that leads me up to now. My first lesson was with the teacher I had when I was here before, and she was surprised how much progress I had made in the intervening two years, so that gave me a nice boost in the confidence department, which is important to me since when it comes to language, confidence, or lack thereof, is what keeps me going or sends me back into my cave to grumble. Haha. No, but really. My other teacher was a newbee, even newer than the teachers I had met online, by name of Louisa. She is working on her MA in philosophy, is very patient, and seems, or at least seemed at first impression, like the sort of person you’d see drinking coffee in a little coffee house listening to live jazz music or to poets sitting on a stepladder reading off their latest magna opera:
Liar. I didn’t feel better. It hurt.
Like fire and vinegar and really bad music through headphones it hurt.
No, a couple of movies on Netflix and a bottle of wine didn’t fix anything.
Instead I went out to buy a bag of orange slices at the convenience store.
That cheered me up a bit - comfort food always does.
And then the candy pulled out one of my fillings.
But that took my mind off of things.
Yes, hahaha, That sort of stuff. Of course, I could be completely wrong about all that. She could spend her free time listening to goth metal. Who knows? First impressions are, after all, not always correct. Hmmm.
Anyway, next week I will begin regular classes two hours a week. In that case, teachers often chance each week, so we’ll see who I end up being with, though that in itself is a matter of interest only really to me, and I include it here only to act as a reminded to me, not necessarily to provide you, the reader (are you there?) with entertaining tidbits. I mean, after all, as tidbits go, who my teachers are each week is not particularly entertaining. Well, unless one of them turned out to be a criminal or a famous personality or was really weird in some scary or amusingly odd way. . . like that drunk teacher I had online for a short while at another school. . . Well, enough of that.
Ciao for now.
Comments
Post a Comment