When I was teaching ESL, it was my favorite subject. Now that I'm studying Spanish, I get to dive right into the deep end of Spanish grammar because I know very little about it. I can understand lots of spoken Spanish because of having studied other latin languages, but oh! the conjugations! And the irregular forms! Joy!
Win and I took a little jog and swim this morning after we dropped the boys at school. While we swam and ran, we tried to conjugate the regular -ar and -ir and -er verbs together and I do believe they are beginning to become a little more automatic thanks to the practice.
Also helping our efforts to learn the language is the Cabarete Language Institute. Win started his intensive classes - three hours per day, five days per week - on Monday of last week. Although he has struggled to complete homework assignments due to his own work load and a commitment to spending time with family, he has enjoyed the other students and his teacher Michelle immensely. His classmates have included Americans and Canadians of all ages and he seems to really be getting better at speaking and understanding Dominican Spanish.
I started my own classes yesterday. I will be attending three times a week for two hours at a time. My class focus is on developing more fluent speech but we will have grammar reviews daily (yay!). There is just one other person in my class - Mike, a Canadian who has spent the last 20-some winters here - and we seem to be at more or less the same level, with strengths in different areas. It's great to have the opportunity to speak Spanish with people that will wait for me to form my very sloooow sentences...
Here are some photos from the last few days.
Some pictures taken by the boys on their camera:
Some bad island art
Some shots from school
 |
| Old VW Bug parked in front of the 3 Mariposas |
Have a wonderful day!
Great Pics. Thanks for the call. You guys are having too much fun down there! We really miss you a bunch.
ReplyDelete