Language School Update

Above: Lucy enjoying some TCBY at the July 4th party.

(The picture has nothing to do with the post, just a fun picture.)

Amazingly, we have already passed the halfway point of our first full trimester here at the Spanish Language Institute. Though at times it feels like we still don’t know a word of Spanish, when we look at where we were when we started, we see how far we’ve come.

Here is a glimpse at some of the things we’ve studied.

Language Class: Vocabulary of jobs, clothes, animals, weather, seasons, food, transportation, outdoor recreation, the classroom, the house, numbers, the family, and the body parts.

Phonetics Class: Alphabet, inflections, unions, vowels, consonants, combinations, accents, diphthongs, lines, and syllables (all to help our horrible gringo accents).

Grammar Class: Nouns, articles, adjectives, present indicative tense, different “to be” verbs, paraphrases, direct and indirect objects, reflexive verbs, intransitive verbs, preterite perfect (one past tense), preterite imperfect (the other past tense), and the different uses between the two past tenses.

It is amazing that though that list is as long as it is, we still speak Spanish like young children. Learning a language is both humbling and encouraging, and we need both of those things!