El Aula Digital: Día Uno!

Huzzah!  I’m in a language class again!  I really can’t stress how much this is one of my favorite places to be, regardless of what side of the desk I’m on.

My teacher is Rafael from Salamanca.  He’s probably my age or a bit older, and teaches for both the Cervantes Institute and University College London.  I really appreciate the fact that he didn’t so much as bat an eye at my wanting to use non-binary language to describe myself in Spanish, and he immediately did so without slipping up even once!  Despite the fact that he’s been living in the UK for yonks, he’s got a pretty heavy Spanish accent, but it does lend him a certain cachet as an instructor of the language.

Our class is quite small, just me, three men, and the teacher.  We have quite an age range, from a young man on his gap year to a recent retiree.  I can tell that I’m still quite dysthymic, because despite how much I was enjoying myself and that I had a slight leg up on my classmates in terms of how much Spanish I came in knowing, I didn’t have to rein myself in hard to keep from accidentally dominating the class.  (Which I definitely did when I was doing advanced German classes online in 2020, apologies to all my teachers and classmates!)  All of us have some background in French, and one currently lives in Portugal, so fortunately none of us are new to the idea of grammatical gender or having to conjugate verbs, despite all of us being native English speaker.

The wall between my Germanic languages and Romance languages seems to be intact – the only way I could see my German having any influence on my nascent Spanish is that I kept trying to capitalize things that didn’t need it, like nouns and nationalities.  For all that my German and my Danish love to do that whole “peanut butter on my chocolate / chocolate in my peanut butter” thing, it’s too soon to say whether my Spanish will have such an influence on my French whenever I use it next.

Here’s a small text using the language we learned in class yesterday.  I haven’t gotten corrections on it yet, but I’ll ask Rafael or a native speaker friend to do so soon.

Me llamo Mickey.  Soy de Estados Unidos, pero vivo en Alemania.  Tengo cuarenta y siete años.  Soy profesore freelance/independiente de Inglés, pero ahora estoy desempleade debido a descapacidad.  ¡Soy lingüista y bloguere tambíen!  En mi tiempo libre me gusta hacer punto y ganchillo, jugar videojuegos, y leer libros de ciencia ficción y fantasía.

Dear reader, you obviously can’t see what is happening as I’m typing this, but I’m composing my blog entries in Google Documents before copying and pasting them into Blogger, and the program automatically detected that I was writing in Spanish and corrected words!  A bit annoying when I was trying to use the non-binary gender endings on nouns, but super useful for putting in accents when I didn’t realize there was supposed to be one!

Stuff to study and drill:

• The alphabet

• Numbers to 100

• Novel phonemes

• ‘v’ and sometimes ‘b’ /β/, the voiced bilabial fricative

• ‘j’ and ‘g’ before an e or i  /x/, the voiceless velar fricative

• ‘g’ in some contexts /ɣ/, the voiced velar fricative

• ‘ll’ /ʎ/, the voiced palatal lateral approximant

• ‘ñ’ /ɲ/, the voiced palatal nasal (this one’s not really that tricky)

• ‘y’ /ʝ/, the voiced palatal approximant, or /ɟʝ/, the voiced palatal affricate

• Fortunately I can already do a trilled r and a tapped r, so it’s just a matter of practicing those in context and minimal pairs.

• Conjugation in present tense of:

• ser

• estar

• tener

• llamarse

• Common professions & workplaces

• Relevant countries & nationalities

Meta-level stuff:

• Find a good program/app for spaced repetition flashcards: Memrise? Anki?

• Find a good app for practicing verbs: ConjuGato?

Well, this is certainly enough to be getting on with, and I need to shower before a friend arrives at lunchtime.  ¡Hasta pronto!