Me llamo Pearl. ¡Mucho gusto!
I started my 1st 2 lessons of basic Spanish in the past week, and the above was the very first Spanish sentence I learnt. Basically, it means "Hello! What is your name?" "My name is Pearl. Nice to meet you!"
After contemplating over which 3rd language to pick up, I finally decided on Spanish, probably due to my exposure and liking for Latin songs in general. It also helped that an ex-colleague had that same interest, and it's always nice to have some company in endeavours like these.
So, we signed up for Beginner 1 Spanish course offered by this school Las Lilas which specializes exclusively in the Spanish language, recommended by a friend who has been attending classes from here.
It was rather exciting to be learning a foreign language in a classroom setting, where all of a sudden most of the words that sprout out of the teacher's mouth simply make no sense. Very unlike in my almost 20 years of formal education where everytime I entered a classroom with a pretty good sense of whatever language that was taught. And imagine our bewilderment when we, complete beginners with totally no knowledge of the language, were given textbooks and workbooks that were totally in Spanish! In fact, whenever people asked me how my first lesson went, I would usually say, "ever watched Mind your Language?"
Nevertheless, I'm enjoying lessons so far. I don't think I'll ever gain mastery of the language, nor do I think there really is much use for the language commercially as Latin countries are not very valued in Singapore's commercial and diplomatic world. Still, it'll be nice to at least gain a basic grasp of another language and in the process understand another culture and its people.
Wish me luck!!
Oh, by the way, some interesting trivia I picked from Spanish class:
- A Spanish individual has 4 names officially: the first 2 names are the person's given names, while the 3rd name is the father's surname, and the last name is the mother's surname. Hence, the name of the writer of "Love In A Time of Cholera" is Gabriel, while Garcia Marquez are his surnames.
- In saying a person's nationality, one's gender matters. The general rule of thumb is that if you are a guy, the word ends with an 'o', whereas for girls, it ends with 'a', as in Mexicano for a male Mexican and Maxicana for a female Mexican.
- Spanish has plural and singular forms!!!! Call me 'sua ku' but that was something that I really didn't expect.
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2 comments:
Choosing to learn Spanish is a good choice since it is the 4th most spoken language in the world after Mandarin, English and Hindi! Spanish is spoken in Spain, South America, Central America, United States and many other places. It is also included as being one of the most romantic languages in the world alongside French and Italian! :) (Information source: Internet)
Pearl, one thing I'm interested to know about is whether Spanish has dialects. For example, would someone from South America be able to understand and speak with people from Spain? If there are variations, then which dialect/variation is being taught in the class you are attending in Singapore? It is interesting to know because English from any country can be basically understood around the world, but Chinese dialects, even though they may use the same words and written language, can be quite different from one another. I have heard that people who speak French in Quebec, Canada cannot understand people who speak French in Paris, France!
Btw, how many languages and/or dialects can you speak and understand? I, myself can speak English and Bao On Hakka fluently; understand Cantonese but not speak it fluently; and understand minimal Mandarin and practically cannot speak it at all. It's funny because the first time I went to visit my relatives in Malaysia, some of them were speaking Ho Po Hakka and I couldn't understand a single word!
Good luck on your lessons! Adiós amiga!
my, I'm not too sure of that but my Spanish teacher is actually Latin American and she has told us that sometimes there are some words used in Latin America which are not used in Spain. However, she does say that they all understand each other so I guess there are probably variations in terms of verbs and accents but no seperate dialect.
I speak Mandarin and English, mainly. I speak Cantonese too though not every fluent but I understand it fairly well. I also understand some Hokkien and Teochew. My maternal relatives are Hainanese but I can't understand a word of it!
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