This is María Paz.
You may remember that she dropped everything to come with me to the hospital on Monday after receiving a frantic last minute phone call from me when I found out Flor couldn’t make it. And so she was with me when I had the awful appointment with the oncologist and she was very supportive – at least I knew that I wasn’t just being oversensitive and that the insults were not imagined. Another positive thing that came out of that hospital visit was that I vowed I was not going to let Dr Ana get the better of me again in May simply because my Spanish is rusty and, especially when nervous, it takes me some time to put my thoughts and palabras together.
And so yesterday I called up María Paz and asked if she’d be interested in having English classes with me. She said she’d love to but it would depend on how much they’d cost. When I told her the cost would be an hour of her time once a week having Spanish conversation with me she was delighted. And so am I. The past couple of years I’ve barely spoken any Spanish, and I’ve always been better at understanding than speaking anyhow (those damn verbs!), which I realised on Monday was a situation I want and need to rectify.
We start today…
casa azahar 
You never ceae to amaze me! Nothing and no one will ever get the better of you. Fingers x’d on feline front. xxx
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Don’t get mad, get even … that’s my motto. 😉
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I’m amazed that you manage so well living in Seville if your Spanish isn’t good – I’m sure its better than you give yourself credit for. 🙂
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My Spanish is good, but I’ve never been truly fluent. I have no trouble understanding people when they speak, but I am sometimes flustered (and frustrated) when I am speaking, especially in stressful situations. Bottom line – I’ve never taken a Spanish class and I rarely have real conversations in Spanish. Most of my interactions are at the supermarket, with students, doctors, vets, etc.
The good thing is that I know what I need to know, so I can organise the grammar stuff I’d like to have explained. But it will mostly be practice-practice-practice.
Today we’re going to split this first hour 50/50. But for future classes we will have the whole hour either English or Spanish, one class a week each.
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Mmm, let’s see…
Mi aerodeslizador esta lleno de anguilas.
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I hate when that happens! 🙂
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Your netname should be Amazing azahar, you know. I’ve taken a couple of dives at Spanish classes, and learned more from just living in Southern California from my neighbors. Used to have two neighbor ladys, one from Cuba and one from Italy, and we managed to have conversations that resembled coherent, if you didn’t mind the obliterated grammar…
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Have I mentioned how much I admire your resourcefulness? You just go ahead and do things and make things work for you and it’s a hugely important, under appreciated trait.
/aside/ You probably know that English is not my first (or even second!) language, but I’ve been in the UK for so long now I sound vaguely English, and am basically at native speaker level. Except for odd little gaps (like your medical discussion problems) where I just don’t know something or I know the words in several languages, but I just haven’t mapped out which words are the same thing (i.e. knowing a type of bird is called one thing in English and something else that I also know in another language, but haven’t made the connection that it’s the same bird…).
It’s particularly obvious at the moment as I’m struggling with geometry and trigonometry for my degree program. I can do the maths, I know the formulas and so on, I just don’t know the technical words for things in English. Yesterday I looked up what a 3d oval is called. It’s an Ellipsoid. /apologies for the long aside/
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Oh you polyglots!
Yeah, I know that if I’d started working or studying here in an all-Spanish speaking environment then I’d have been fluent in no time. But in fact most of my students ended up speaking more English in a week than I did in Spanish. And yes, I could have tried harder, studied harder (or at all), but Life™ kept getting in the way somehow.
It’s never been easy living here … but it’s always been worth it.
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^ points at the first paragraph ^ in my last post ^
Then shakes head and sighs.
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😳 Umm… thanks!
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