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!