Day 21

I jumped into Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. Es muy interesante!

The great things about studying reading Harry Potter in Spanish are (1) I know the story already so I’m not completely lost, and (2) I have literary images to solidify vocabulary terms in my head. Por ejemplo, “Los Dursley estaban orgullosos de decir que eran muy normales, afortunadamente.” I’m not very familiar with verb tenses, but that all the verbs were introduced in the imperfect tense helped me with real-life examples. Also, just on the first page they use the term for “to be called” twice, which allowed me to look it up once in the dictionary, and then review it again immediately for practice.

…una empresa llamada Grunnings…

…un hijo pequeño llamado Dudley…

Day 20

I powered through to chapter 10 of Fundamental Spanish, just trying to absorb as many grammatical points as I could on the first round. I’m just hoping that the ideas behind their usage are floating somewhere in my sub-conscious waiting to be recalled as I read them in genuine materials later on.

I’m getting to more abstract language usage in the book now, and I know for sure I’m just going to have to repeatedly see the points in use to drill them into my memory; things like reflexive verbs. I’m satisfied with my progressing “feel” of the language, though. I wrote a lang-8.com entry and the only mistake I made was in not matching the sex between a single pair of words. Just one letter wrong.

Day 19

You make plans, lay out a schedule to abide by in any endeavour you take upon yourself, and then life hijacks the flight controls and sends you spiraling out of control down towards the great blue.

I haven’t given up! Actually, I’m so eager to jump into Harry Potter in Spanish that I’ve reformatted my attack plan to focus on grammar, as a dictionary at my side while reading will compensate for unfamiliar vocabulary I encounter.

I haven’t had the chance to study for nearly two weeks because of social responsibilities, but I’m feeling like I can get back on track pretty easily. No longer will I worry about the vocabulary terms I come across in Fundamental Spanish. Instead, all of my energy goes into digesting basic grammar. There are 10 units left in the book, and I can easily get through at least one unit per day at this rate.

Day 18

Twelve years ago I was kicked out of my Spanish class one day for answering the question, “How do you say ‘to sleep; to dream’ in Spanish?” with, “Esleepodreamo?” In hindsight, from a psychological point of view, I wasn’t being a smart-ass for the sake of being a smart-ass, but I was embarassed in front of my peers because I didn’t know the answer and tried to compensate for that by presenting an answer that would elicit laughter from my classmates, and having been kicked out of class immediately after my response only further acerbated the situation, causing me to sink further into disinterest of Spanish; even more than that, causing me to hate the class and, therefore, the language itself.

Well, I got over my teenage years and I’ve come to love studying languages, despite whatever opinions my former Spanish teacher had of me. In fact, I took it to the next level and decided to study Japanese as my first serious second language. Now, obviously, I’ve decided to return to the language that I once felt spurned by, and I’m enjoying myself.

This episode popped into my memory because I finally got around to looking up ‘to sleep; to dream’ in Spanish, only to find that the dictionary offers separate words for each phrase – dormir and soñar, respectively. This whole time I thought there was a single Spanish verb to use for both of the English verbs. Turns out my Spanish teacher was just bad at English! (Despite, or because of, being born and raised in the U.S.) ‘To sleep’ and ‘to dream’ are presented in their infinitive forms, where the answer he was looking for had been ’sleep; (a) dream’ in their nominal forms, which share the term ’sueño’.

I got through all of the vocabulary that had been piled up from the first 3 chapters of Fundamental Spanish. SAIL ON TO CHAPTER FOUR!

Day 17

I powered through two decks of vocabulary cards. I still haven’t had the chance to get some new cards, though, so I’m limited in what I can do at the moment. I might end up just cutting up some postcard-sized printable sheets from my office, and try to find a hole-punch so I can get on my way. I want so badly to jump into the next chapter of Fundamental Spanish, but the terms I don’t have down on cards are holding me back. When I get through them, I want to go over the 3 or 4 readings in the book, also.

Side note – The way I remember the word for lawyer in Spanish, ‘abogado’, is I imagine an avocado wearing a suit.

Day 16

I found myself swamped with a bunch of vocabulary that seemed familiar but didn’t immediately reveal its meaning to me, so I decided to put them on notecards and drill them. Thing is, I ran out of notecards, and the university book shop where I buy them at is closed till Monday.

Having just written the words on cards once acted as a review in itself, and I find myself able to recall some of the terms off the top of my head:

la pared – the wall
la ventana – the window
el comedor – the dining room
la piedra – the stone
la madera – the wood

Not exactly rocket science, but it’s a start. It’s getting easier to string together short phrases, too:

la mesa de madera en la casa de piedra (the wooden table in the stone house)
Una ventana grande es en el comedor, y las paredes son blancas. (A large window is in the dining room, and the walls are white.)

If anything, I might be able to sell real estate in Spanish…not that I have any desire to do so.

Actually, when “la madera” popped into my head, I felt like it meant “the wood”, but I had to double check the dictionary to make sure. That’s actually a good sign – Instead of translating in your head, it’s much better to “feel” the language.

Meanwhile, Harry Potter en español is still waiting on the shelf. I’ve got to have patience and wait to jump into the book until I’m done with Fundamental Spanish, when I’ll be pretty well grounded in…well…the “fundamentals”.