Random observation: I find it a little strange that students here don't address the teachers at "Mrs." or "Mr." whatever, they just say "Maestr@" (teacher). Another thing: the "@" symbol denotes a masculine or feminine adjective or noun. I just thought about that because a student walked into the teacher's lounge and said that...
Today I don't have all that much to do other than conversation hours with teachers. I'm not going to the music class today because they have a test, so I'm just hanging out in the teacher's lounge. I'm lucky to have internet and a little café at my school, too, so I can relax while I'm not doing anything in particular. Today I've been looking at El País online, which is one of Spain's biggest newspapers. I have an enormous list of vocab just from reading up online.
The most helpful resource to improve my Spanish is chatting with the professors, especially the ones who are bilingual. Usually they will speak to me in Spanish, though, but that's good for me. I keep freezing up every so often and I can't think of even one sentence in Spanish...so frustrating. Good to know I studied Spanish for years on end and I still stress out about subjunctive verbs, especially when they're irregular or in any tense other than present. I really need to review subjunctive...I should have brought my Spanish grammar books with me to Spain. I'll have to get those when I go back to the US. Not to mention I'll have to bring a bunch of English books with me in order to teach it better for my tutoring classes.
Speaking of tutoring, yesterday I got two calls from the fliers I have been putting up. One call was from a lady who teaches at one of the language institutes here, and she was p.o.'ed that I put up a flyer for classes near her school. OK, lady, it's a public place and it wasn't like it was right on the door of the school or something really brash like that. Another call was from a lady who wants classes for her 8 year old daughter, but I was really distracted by the music playing at Mercadona (grocery store), so I have to call her back to talk about today. Tonight I'm going back to teach Marta and Paco, at seven.
I met other professors' children last weekend -- Beatriz invited me to go out with her and Daniela in the parque, and we ended up seeing Elvira and David with their daughter, Ana. So I got to play with little kids, which was a lot of fun.
I learned some new vocab words there, too, such as columpio, which means "swing." Tobogán is "slide." And the little rocks (roquitas) on the playground, which Daniela wanted to put in her mouth, are "caca." Clearly.
What else is going on...oh yeah, big news in Spain today: two of the leaders of ETA ("Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna," which is the terrorist group in the Basque country here in Spain), were captured and put in prison in France. The main guy's name is Txeroki, which is pronounced like "Cherokee." The Basque Country is a small part of Spain where they speak Basque and Spanish, but some of them want to secede. Basque, by the way, is a completely different language from Spanish. Unlike Catalan, Valencian or Galician, which are all separate languages spoken in regions of Spain, Basque doesn't derive from Latin. In fact, it doesn't have a known parent language. I don't know much about it, yet, but I've seen the terrorists doing their...terrorism (?) on the news. It's weird, too, because a lot of the things they show on the news here would never be played in the US. And when they show the terrorists being arrested, it's the cops who wear ski masks so they won't be recognized and hunted down by other ETA members. Loco.
Y ya está por ahora. Or...that's it for now.
Posts
1 comment:
I wondered about the Eta. . . we only hear when they blow people up which is frightening.
About the lady who got angry about your flyers. . . is there no competition in Spain? I mean it sounds like Emily is overloaded with extra work so there is plenty to spread around.
Post a Comment