Life in Culebrón

Sometimes I think my Spanish is OK. Other times, I despair. Most of the time, when I have a longer session speaking Spanish, despair is the overriding sensation.  Right at the beginning, it was verb tables, pronunciation, grammar, trying to understand the structure and learning vocabulary. Even today I try to find a few minutes a day to read through my vocabulary books. Every now and again, as I stumble over some verb tense in a real-world conversation, I go back and have a bit of a read through those verb tables or something on object and subject pronouns because I seem to be a little confused. It amazes me how difficult it is to retain some of the basic grammar, learned vocabulary or phrases after all these years. My Spanish is miles better than it was when I got here, but it's still terribly pidgin. The only place where I still can fall completely apart is on the phone; but even there I generally manage to scrape through nowadays. In general, in a normal sort of conversation, I ...

This is the fourth in the series about the very ordinary things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in the Spanish angle. This one doesn't quite fit into the "job" bracket but, well self imposed rules are easy to break. If you've ever read any of my blogs, or talked to me, you'll know that I jabber on about my hand to hand combat with Castilian Spanish all the time. My joints may ache, my breathing may suggest that the end is nigh but I'm not giving up indeed I'm working on the principle, so clearly outlined in that old Anglican hymn, Christian answer boldly. While I breathe, I pray.  The impetus to learn Spanish came from the difficulty I had in buying a beer the very first time I visited this country. For years, I didn't really put much formal time into that learning - going to a one hour a week evening class in Spanish at the local tech doesn't really add up to much over the year. The real point of those early years i...