Discovering a new life in Costa Almeria

Several months on and it can sometimes be difficult to see the progress I am making. OK, so I can ask questions now and understand the answers, I can have basic conversations with people in shops and bars and I can occasionally understand the general topic of conversation between two spaniards, although not the detail but it still seems really hard work to put together a straight forward sentence and having tried watching a couple of Miss Marple DVD's in Spanish without subtitles - I still have a long way to go. 

Well, for the last few weeks I have been helping my friend Lucy to get started with spanish and it's a great way for me to revise the early chapters from the book I use and also to appreciate how much I have really taken in. It's one thing to learn and try to understand yourself but quite another to explain it to someone else.

When I was at work (gosh, that seems a life time ago!) I was told that I was not good at teaching people how to do new tasks as I used to jump stages and assume they knew more than they did. Well, I hope Lucy is able to fill in any missing gaps but it does help if we are at least using the same book. We both have books from the series Practice Makes Perfect - Verbs and after only 2 lessons I had said Lucy would be able to complete the exercises upto page 7 so I was surprised when she told me it had taken her 2.5 hours to complete one question. Tonight we met up to go through them and see where any problems may be. It didn't take too long to identify 2 key problems. Firstly her PMP Verb book is not the same as mine so although we both have a series of 40 questions to do on page 7 - they are not the same questions and secondly, the manner in which the questions were phrased in her book suggested the use of 'Gerald's' as Lucy likes to refer to them (in english they're called Gerund's and for all those who don't now what these are they are the 'ing' words - speaking, walking, talking etc) We english use 'ing' words all the time but the spanish tend not to - 'I speak' and 'I am speaking' are both the same in spanish, hablo - simple when you know how but when you don't hey, 2 hours later!!!

And also, when you ask a question you just use the same words, mix up the order and put and upside down ? at the beginning of the sentence so the reader knows it's a question before they get to the end. So 'él habla inglés' He speaks english turns into '¿habla él inglés? - Does he speak english - no extra words needed. Simple when you know how but difficult to start with as there is the urge to make it more complicated than it is.

So, all being well our Monday nights down in the bar at La Venta will work for both if us - Lucy will start to see an improvement in her spanish despite my poor ability to teach and I will gain extra revision time which will help my confidence in what I have actually learnt so that when I have my own classes and feel totally at odds with things, I can compare to where I was several months ago and at least take heart that progress is being made, as the spanish tell me 'poco y poco' - little by little.