Hi all! I registered on the forum for "fluentin3months" for extra motivation to continue learning Spanish. I figured I should probably include any posts from there on this blog to keep you up to date with my progress, so here's the first:
Before I begin, let me first say that the title is quoted from lyrics of an English song whose Uruguay-born, US-raised writer also released a version in Spanish. So if "armo" sounds a bit iffy, don't blame me, I preferred not to alter the lyrics for consistency's sake. :)
Now on to the meat of the quesadilla:
¡Hola! My name is Emily and my goal is to be comfortable having a 5 minute conversation in Spanish with a native speaker by December 21, 2012. Originally I picked January 1, 2013, but considering that a decent number of tin-hatty types are convinced we won't be around by then, I decided that it'd be great to at least achieve bilingual fluency, even if I don't get to leave high school (Class of 2013, haha).
A bit of my background learning Spanish: I received a letter in 7th grade inviting me to take Spanish the next year and I did just that. Even though we had plenty of speakers in the beginning who encouraged us to give it our all and reap the benefits of knowing a second language, I was at most, half-heartedly inspired. I continued learning Spanish in high school as part of the International Baccalaureate program. As much as I tried my hardest to really absorb the material, the high pressure atmosphere created by my other courses just wasn't the ideal learning environment. The loosely-enforced "¡No Inglés! rule in class proved fruitless once our oral presentations had been submitted. On May 17th of this year I tested out of Standard Level IB Spanish. My official obligation to the language was over.
This summer, an abundance of free time and a previous interest led me to this website. Oh boy, was I inspired. Since then I've explored programs like busuu, Duo Lingo, and Anki. My game plan for the next month includes watching movies in Spanish without subtitles, listening to Spanish radio, improving my grammar and conjugation, and if I'm brave enough, venturing outdoors in the morning to speak with the yard workers. I live in Florida, but I won't have a good connection to the Hispanic community until school starts again in August. During the school year, as a member of Spanish National Honor Society, I'm hoping to take advantage of opportunities like Spanish tutoring and interpreting for parents at elementary school parent-teacher conferences.
Though I usually have quite a problem with seeing things to the end, my motivation seems to be more than enough to carry me through this goal. After I get make it over the "hill" of conversational fluency in my first foreign language, I'm looking forward to beginning my journey towards being a polyglot very much. I've also recently started a blog which is likely to include comments on my progress. Feel free to . :) Otherwise, I'm hoping to post here at least once a month and more often if appropriate.
"Querer es poder."Thanks for reading and sorry for any redundancies!
No comments:
Post a Comment