I have a minor in Spanish from college but am not by any means fluent. It's very hard to become fluent in another language as an adult, especially when one has never had an immersion experience. I can think only a few words in Spanish first and have to translate the rest from English to Spanish in my head which is very slow. I can often tell you how something is said but that is very different from being able to keep up in conversation.
The Lone Star Girl had some very inadequate Spanish instruction in elementary school and started taking Spanish classes in middle school. She takes Spanish seriously and has learned a great deal, but still is nowhere near fluent.
The Lone Star Baby, with her Spanish immersion schools since the age of 18 months, is pretty fluent in Spanish.
Lone Star Pa is from North Texas and does not speak any Spanish at all.
He and the Lone Star Baby decided to do something about that. She has been giving him Spanish lessons. She is quite the amazing little teacher, too.
The other evening, he expressed an interest in learning what the Spanish words from her weekly spelling list meant. She told him maybe later - that they were having a lesson on articles first. She then proceeded to explain the difference between definite and indefinite articles to him and to teach him each in Spanish. It was really something.
2 comments:
Cool! I would have loved to have heard LSB explain grammatical constructs.
Wow, that's cool. Can just imagine the dinner-table convos in your house. My oldest is just starting Spanish in MS...we'll have to have him teach us as he goes (all my Spanish is from Sesame St., which surprisingly gives me much more fluency than two years of HS French!)
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