Spanish class

¡Buenos Noches!

Mike and I are enrolled in an Intensive Spanish I class held at a local community college. We go for 2 hours a night, twice a week and tomorrow is our final class.

Neither of us speaks Spanish (although I took classes YEARS AGO) and it has been challenging! We are learning lots of vocabulary, grammar, verb tenses, masculine vs. feminine usage and plural vs. singular usage. The class size has dwindled over the 5 weeks and only 6 students attended last night. So what does that mean?? It means our professora calls on each of us more often! YIKES One of us (I won't say if it's Mike or me) studies more diligently and has a “relatively easier” time when called upon. The other of us "wings it" and has made some hilarious mistakes which have resulted in making the entire class laugh and applaud.

Our final assignment is to bring in a magazine (Mike’s bringing a Harley HOG Tales and I have a Realtor magazine – who would have guessed, huh?) and we will share our magazines with the other students and describe (in Spanish) the people we see in the magazines.

We'll get a certificate tomorrow night and we plan to register for Intensive Spanish II for winter quarter. We try to use Spanish at home (and with Sitka, our perro) as much as possible, but we both tend to invent our own words when we are stuck. And sometimes I'll throw in some sign language when I am at a loss for the Spanish word. My former sign language teachers would cringe I am sure...

So even though people have advised us that we don’t need to know Spanish to move to Mexico and teach English, we have made several trips to Mexico and always wished we could better communicate and now we’re giving it our best shot.