We have completed another 9 weeks of Spanish school. After four months off to travel and relax, we returned to the classroom on October 22. We were a bit nervous to see how much, if any, of our skills we had lost during our long break. We were surprised and relieved to find that we really hadn’t lost too much, and it didn’t take much time to readjust to scholastic life again. We jumped back into the C1 level, which is the highest level in the school. This does not mean that we are anywhere close to fluent though. We still have a long way to go to achieve fluency.
It is hard to explain the process of learning a language and how one measures progress, especially for middle-aged adults who are diligent students but not over-zealous about their studies. As we’ve discussed before, youth and speaking more than one language are two huge assets we lack. In addition, we are not motivated by a specific target, such as a test to enter university or obtain a job. Because we are more “casual” students, and are not pressured by a deadline, our progress is slow but steady.
One of our greatest accomplishments is the ability to read the local daily newspaper, the Diario Vasco, without having to lookup many words. We are often surprised to finish reading an article and realize that we understood the whole thing and didn’t rely on the dictionary once. While we still struggle with articles about politics and economics, we can page through the paper and easily get the gist of most headlines, sub-headlines, and stories. This really makes us proud of our progress. (The DV is probably written at a higher level than USA Today, but it’s not The New York Times or anything.)
In addition, in a movie or TV program that is shown in Spanish, if there are Spanish subtitles, we can follow along and understand almost everything. Whether it’s a movie we’ve seen before, such as the Star Wars movies that were broadcast this month, or episodes of The Big Bang Theory, or Netflix programs that include Spanish speakers, we are pleasantly surprised at how well we do. We do not think we can see an entire movie in Spanish without any subtitles at this point, but we might be willing to try a foreign language film that is shown with Spanish subtitles soon.
And, we finally can conjugate verbs smoothly. Although we may need to pause to think a moment for some of the trickier, irregular verbs (of which there are many), those pauses have gotten minimal.
We are currently a class of 6 students. Of course, we are the oldest. The other 4 students include a 39 year-old Chinese woman who is married to a Basque man, a 26 year-old Russian woman, a 20 year-old from Iceland, and a 17 year-old French girl. Another very international class. Almost everyone speaks better than we do but we hold our own.
We have now completed a total of 44 weeks of school and currently plan to do another 11 (through the end of March with a 1-week break), possibly adding 2 more weeks at the end. We still won’t be fluent after a year of classes, but perhaps we’ll be up to the movie challenge.
Hasta luego,
Shana & Jeff
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