I’ve been taking Spanish classes every Monday night for the past three months. Tonight I started the level 2 intensive course – 2 hours every Monday and Thursday for the next six weeks. Back when I signed up, I figured that I’d be over the busy part of the semester by now. Look how well that prediction turned out.
Tonight’s class seems a huge step up from the previous level. The tutor spoke in Spanish almost the entire time, and there were lots of things that other students seemed to know that I’d never come across before (like words for animals and fabrics). However, I’m not too badly off – there were a few others there who seemed to know even less than I do.
Tonight was mostly about reviewing the basics – greetings, numbers and letters, introductions and basic personal information, the verb ‘to be’ and conjugations for a few of the most common regular and irregular verbs. At one point, we were going around the class describing our personalities and one guy says ‘Soy caliente’. Caliente means hot in Spanish. He was trying to say he’s hot-headed and impulsive but we laughed a bit because we thought he was saying that he’s hot (as in attractive). Turns out that if you use caliente in that context, it actually means ‘I’m horny’. The tutor was too embarrassed to translate it out loud but he wrote some of the letters on the board until we got the idea.
Then he was talking about how someone would refer to themselves as being hot, as in attractive, and made me rate the guy as to how attractive he was, asking if he was a 60 or an 85 and saying he wouldn’t move on with the class until I’d given him a rating. I said cien (100) and everyone laughed and the guy made a great show of thanking me. When it came my turn, I described myself as optimistic, and everyone laughed when the tutor said that my rating the guy 100 was an example of that.
We have to do a regular writing exercise to practice our sentence composition skills. Currently we only know how to speak in present tense, so we have to keep a diary describing our daily activities in present tense only. Here’s my first week’s exercise (I have no guarantee that this is in any way correct):
Yo vivo en un apartamento en el centro. Me levanto a las siete y media todos los días. Mi trabajo es muy cerca de mi apartamento. Por la mañana enseño en la universidad. Hay ochenta y ocho estudiantes in mi clase. Por la tarde trabajo en mi computadora. Por la noche, mis amigos y yo bebemos tequila.
My intended translation is this:
I live in an apartment in the city centre. I get up at 7:30 every day. My work is very close to my apartment. In the morning I teach in the university. There are 88 students in my class. In the afternoon, I work at my computer. In the evening, my friends and I drink tequila.
My love of tequila is a running joke in the Spanish class, and the tutor makes frequent reference to it. Another student is travelling to South America to meet girls, and so the tutor often makes reference to him being sad because he’s single and mentioning him finding a girlfriend.
May 15th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Very impressed toward anyone who is willing to learn new skills and language especially someone who has stable stressful life as is. I also like the charming response you gave in the class. How many people are in a class?
May 16th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Awesome, it’s cute that your tutor was embarrassed, you must find ways to embarrass him more by saying suggestive things in Spanish =D
May 17th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
@Doug: There were 20 people at the start of my previous class, but only about 10 attending by the end. This level 2 class had just 8 people. The smaller group size is awesome – we get a lot more talk time.
@Stephen: It’s normally him who is trying to embarrass us, although we hassle him about his extensive knowledge of celebrity gossip and fashion tips. He’s very familiar with the contents of women’s magazines – he says it’s for research purposes.
He was also a bit embarrassed at the beginning of class when he invited us to ask him questions (practicing our general meeting-someone routine). One woman asked him how old he was. He tried to dodge the question for a few minutes before finally confessing to being 33.