Dia Once – I think I may be starting to ramble...

May 27, 2009

Noah lost his iPhone today :-( He left it in the computer room and came back and it was gone. We do not doubt it was stolen :-/ Thankfully, he was able to cancel his plan and change his passwords before any additional damage was done, but still, the loss of an iPhone is no small matter. We keep hoping and praying it will show up and/or be returned, but it is in God’s hands.

We found an amazing Chinese food restaurant yesterday. It is a bit expensive, but they give you so much food you can easily split it between two or three people and it becomes very affordable. The food is excellent...not quite US Chinese food, but distinctly Chinese. Es muy bueno.

I have not made my rum cake yet. Last Saturday, when I was planning to make it, they had mí mama tica’s birthday and ordered a cake and I didn’t want to compete with that so I decided to wait a week. So my current plan is to make the cake this weekend.

Tonight was “movie night” at the school. They drove a bunch of students to the theater to watch Angels and Demons. We decided to stay home and see if we could pick up a movie at the video rental store. They had some excellent titles in Spanish and we almost rented Gladiator en Español (because Noah had never seen it) but while they only charged about a $1.50 for a movie rental, they charged $6 for membership. We decided that a 400% increase in what we expected to pay was too much so we didn’t end up renting anything. I brought a few movies; Apollo 13, Star Wars, The Princess Bride, Finding Nemo, and a few others. We are going to watch a few of those in Spanish over the next few weeks. We want to watch something that is actually in enspañol, not just subtitled.

Anyway...concerning learning Spanish itself, I feel like I am hitting a brick wall. The first few days, and to a lesser extent, the first week, I felt like I was learning a lot of new vocabulary and finally being taught the grammar of Spanish, giving a structure to all the vocabulary I learned in Rosetta Stone. This week I feel like I am not getting anywhere. I am sure it is just the feeling that everyone has in the middle of the tunnel when they can’t see the big picture. I am sure I am moving forward, but from the “inside of the tunnel” it doesn’t seem like it. Intellectually, I know that I am learning and incorporating more words and speaking with my family, but I am not experiencing the “wow” factor I had the first week. Much of the grammar this week is very similar to what we’ve learned and now instead of learning new concepts, I feel like it is mostly just memorization. It is good for me though. I just have that feeling that I am not moving forward.

I can’t imagine doing Spanish without immersion. If I was just taking classes during the day, it would be incredibly harder to learn the language. It is so helpful to be able to go back to my Spanish speaking tico family and practice what I learned and incorporate new words in real conversation. If anything, I need to spend more time with my family just talking and less time doing “activities.” I know that there are a ton of things to do here – go hiking, go shopping, see museums and tourist sights, etc. – but I am not here to be a tourist. I understand that it is necessary to participate in some activities and take advantage of this opportunity, but I also need to remember the the purpose of me being here is to learn Spanish, not be a tourist. If I spend all day going on adventures, I won’t get to use my Spanish as much and I will improve much more slowly.

Anyway, that is my random rambling for today. I’ve been trying to cut down on the length of my blog posts so that I don’t become a spammer; too long and posts become just large amounts of text that no one reads rather than an interesting update of the day. The trick is keeping it short and readable yet at the same time full of content. I like writing :-) ...but I need to write more in español. ;-)