Seeing as how my last post was about one entire post too long, I’ll keep this one on the shorter side.
I took my first Spanish class today. It was fairly horrible, but only because I’m an imbecile.
My professor Gabriel is a very pleasant young man whose patience and whatever pacifistic leanings he might have will undoubtedly be put to the test this week. My classmates are two American women in their early twenties. They have already been taking classes for two weeks. While they are by no means fluent, they at least seem comfortable in the classroom.
Our first assignment was to read a short story about a woman named Beatriz who cooks here at the school. We then had to answer aloud ten questions about what we’d just read. In answering the first two questions, I managed to tell Gabriel and my two classmates that the only thing I think women can do is make babies, and that I know what human flesh tastes like.
They started laughing and explained my errors.
They stopped laughing when I explained no errors had been made.
I spent the rest of the class time floundering in a sea of incomprehensible Spanish jibber jabber. I didn’t understand instructions that were given to me. I didn’t understand the following explanations that were offered me five different ways. By the end of the day I sounded like David Duke on a Costa Rican recruiting trip. “Que? Que? Que?”
I used to think a constitutional amendment making English the official language of the United States was ridiculous. Now I’m beginning to think other countries should give it a try, too.
My homework tonight involves a lot of vocabulary memorization and writing sentences based on various pictures I’m given. The pictures are crudely drawn cartoons aimed at five-year-olds. The people in them are slightly out of proportion and lacking any significant detail, which lends them a slightly androgynous look. I’m supposed to use the future tense to describe what might be happening in each drawing.
The first picture shows a young man in a convertible parked at the side of the street. He is talking to a person wearing a dress.
I wrote, “Juan Carlos va a comprar una prostituta transexual.”
I’m anxious to ask Gabriel tomorrow, “Una prostitu-ta transsexual, o un prostitu-to transsexual?”
Exercises like this might not make speaking to the grocery store clerk any easier, but it will certainly make class fly by.