Well I have just finished my third Spanish lesson (12 hours so far), and unbelievably I now speak worse than I did before. So what went wrong?
When I went to the school for the language skills evaluation I filled out a questionnaire asking me what I hoped to accomplish by attending the lessons. I dutifully checked the box next to HABLAR (to speak) and left the LEER (to read) and ESCRIBIR (to write) boxes blank. The head of the school questioned me on this and I said that I had already reached an intermediate level in reading and writing. Of course she did not believe me, I could barely explain this verbally, so she gave me a written exam, and YES, I am an intermediate. I signed up for five days of lessons, 20 hours, with the promise from her that I would be speaking a whole lot better when I left.
So I went to my first lesson full of hope that I would spend four hours talking about simple things, BUT what did I do? The teacher and I went over the first 5 chapters of the language book reviewing things I already knew: days of the week, months of the year, numbers, present tense of regular verbs, weather expressions, food words, seasons, ordering in a restaurant, what to say when you meet someone etc. Did I learn anything new and did I spend any time formulating sentences - No I did not. I tried to explain that this type of lesson was not the type I needed, but the teachers do not speak English and I guess I did not explain it well enough in Spanish because at the second lesson I did more of the same, plus I had to read out loud and answer questions for comprehension. Answering those kind of questions is easy because in most instances you just reverse the word order of the question and it becomes the answer, and when I tried to branch out and answer differently I was corrected and told that my response was not the right answer.
After the second lesson Geoff and I went to Chile where the spoken Spanish is so different than the Spanish I am used to hearing I might as well have been in Brazil. Not wanting to waste that week I studied from my favourite book, Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish, and I actually learned some new points of grammar and even a few new words, but I did not do any speaking out loud.
Arriving back in Bolivia I now had so many nouns, verb tenses, pronouns, adverbs and adjectives tumbling around in my head that they all got jumbled up when I tried to speak and today the teacher got rather frustrated and a bit mad. Nothing came out correctly and although I tried to force the conversational part of the lesson I ended up doing more easy reading and writing exercises. What I need is a child to talk with so that I am able to practise speaking because school does not seem to be helping me, but most children would not sit still long enough for me to think of a sentence and then say it.
I will not be going to the remaining two lessons because the teachers cannot fit me into their already busy teaching schedules and since I didn't seem to be learning anything new that is really no loss. Back to the books - at least I will be able to read the newspaper.
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