life’s not a paragraph

since i have already written about my studio classes, i though i would also give you a little idea of what classes are like at suffolk proper. since this semester i had my spanish course and my ethics course, i can only really describe those. obviously, i am going to start with my spanish course.

so advanced spanish conversation and composition is the next class offered after you learn all the grammar and verb tenses. basically, after all of my 100 and 200 level courses, i should know all the verb tenses, how to conjugate verbs, and all the grammar; now, to improve, i just have to practice. hence, the conversation and composition part of the course title.

our textbook had six chapters filled with short stories, vocabulary, short films (well stills from the short films), and lots of homework questions. hahaha my professor assigned us certain films to watch and certain cuentos (stories) to read, then, like most classes, we had to answer the questions for homework. in class, we would talk about the articles and the movies.

we actually covered some very interesting and controversial topics in the class like cloning, globalization, and paranormal activity… a wide variety of topics. haha but i learned some great vocabulary and we had some really god discussions in the class.

i find that while learning a language it is a lot easier to pick up on reading, writing and listening to the language than speaking it. most of the people i’ve asked have said the same thing. speaking is the hardest part. despite my experience in spain, i still got very nervous speaking for the first time in front of everyone in my class. i didn’t want to make a stupid mistake, or say the wrong thing. it took me a while to adjust and get comfortable, especially since there were some native speakers in my class. i know they weren’t judging me or anything, since most of my classmates were experiencing the same thing (even though you couldn’t tell from their behavior). but either way, it’s intimidating.

one day in spain i thought about how i try so hard to be perfect when i speak my spanish that, often times, i trip myself up because i get so caught up on the grammar rather than what i am saying. i thought about all the foreign people i have encountered in my lifetime who speak broken english and i realized that i probably sound the same way when i am speaking spanish. and it’s not a bad thing at all. personally, i don’t judge people when they struggle to find a particular word in english. if anything, i want to help them.

it’s kind of a strange concept, relating how i sound in spanish to how others sound in english. i can’t really fully wrap my mind around it. i probably never will. but the idea comforted me somehow. i put a little less pressure on myself. it’s hard, though, to remember that i am still learning when faced with a group of twenty faces listening to your every spanish word.

at least, in this class, i have learned to be a little more comfortable when speaking spanish to large groups, and i am pretty sure that’s the goal of the course! i know that my writing has gotten better. i just wrote a six and half page paper all in spanish. i read it over about five times, and it sounded pretty good. now i just have to wait for my grade…. and i’ll be biting my nails agitatedly until i get it.