School's Out

As of March 29 we are finished with our Spanish classes at Lacunza. After 55 weeks of classes (about 800 hours of instruction) spread over 20 months, we reached our limit. We felt we had learned virtually all of the important concepts of Spanish grammar and we were spending most of our time learning new vocabulary. While this is important, we felt that classes were getting a bit repetitive and because the classes are quite expensive it seemed like a good time to stop our "formal" education. So, you may ask, does that mean you are fluent in Spanish? Well...not exactly.

As we have talked about in previous posts, learning Spanish has been an interesting and humbling experience. We are very proud of the progress we have made and are happy to be able to call ourselves "bilingual." Although we are very comfortable with Spanish now, I don't think you can say we are fluent. We remain better at understanding what we hear and read than we are at speaking. And we still make a lot of mistakes when speaking and writing. But we hope with more time and practice (also known as living in Spain) we will continue to improve. 

We do plan to enroll in the Official Language School in the fall as a way to continue the formal learning process. While it clearly will not be the same intensive learning experience, with much larger classes and many fewer hours of instruction (just 4 hours per week), it also only costs $25 each for the year (!). You can't beat the price.

So, what are we going to do with the abundant free time we have now that we do not have to go to class every day? We are not worried about filling the hours with interesting opportunities -- for example, this week there is a small film festival focused on human rights. The spring and summer months once again include significant travel plans that will take us to France (twice), England, Croatia and Montenegro. There is also the Jazz Festival in July and, of course, the Film Festival in September. We hope to read a lot more books (in both English and Spanish), read the newspaper in Spanish most days and see more movies in Spanish (or at least with Spanish subtitles). All-in-all we don't expect to be bored.

And, of course, we will continue to blog about our many adventures here in San Sebastian starting with a day trip to a couple of nearby villages and attending a professional basketball game. So, stay tuned.

Hasta luego,

Jeff and Shana