Language School!

Praise the Lord we made it through our two weeks of language school!!!  I must say I was REALLY excited to start language school and get further in my Spanish learning but after our these first 2 weeks I’m not AS excited anymore…lol  By Wednesday of our first week I was waking up with the thought in my head “I don’t want to go to school today.”  Thankfully, we’ve heard from several people the it gets better after a few weeks…can’t wait for that to happen!!

We spent the majority of the first week making and reviewing vocabulary lists and practicing verbs.  I have a pile of OVER 300 Spanish vocabulary words that I had never heard before or that I can’t seem to retain.  That’s not including my smaller (well over 50) pile of verbs that we learned our first week!!

The back two piles are my vocabulary words and the front pile is the verbs that I need to learn in addition to the vocabulary!! Please pray for me 🙂

Last Monday after our first day of school we came home and after eating immediately crawled in bed to rest our brains.  This resulted in a nap that lasted a couple hours and when we woke up I still felt foggy in my brain.  (ok, ok, no jokes about me being that way all the time..haha)  The rest of the week went better.  However, by Friday afternoon we were completely exhausted again and VERY happy for the weekend (or fin de semana in Spanish).   The people who told me that learning a new language is hard sure weren’t lying.  And to think Spanish is actually one of the easier languages to learn!!!  Poor Dylan is going through the same things only on top of it he is fighting against his Arabic that keeps trying to come out as he’s learning Spanish AND he’s been sick the last 2 weeks!!

We attend language school at Centro Linguistico Maya which is a school that is used by all of the New Life Children’s Home missionaries and interns.  It is a great school!  The director Arturo goes above and beyond to make sure you are completely happy with your teacher and host family.  It is very important to him that his students are rested well and taught well because he understands the challenges of learning a language as he has learned English.  In addition to the language training our tuition also includes salsa lessons every Wednesday evening (we just might become salsa experts…and yes we’ll be SURE to post pictures…lol) and excursions to different areas in Antigua every Tuesday and Thursday evening to learn more about the Guatemalan culture and to practice our Spanish out in the “real world.”  We haven’t done any of this yet but are looking forward to it once Dylan is over his cold and once making it through a day of school doesn’t completely exhaust us!!

Me with Yoly my Spanish language teacher!!

Dylan with Lydia his Spanish language teacher!! Notice that I’m the one with my books open and was obviously busy studying in my picture but Dylan’s books are closed and he was just sitting there talking with his teacher…slacker…lol

My teacher’s name is Yolanda or Yoly (pronounced Jo-lee) for short and Dylan’s teacher’s name is Lydia.  They both work at the language school and have second jobs teaching else where.  Yoly, is also currently going to university herself to further her degree.  They both speak very little English but know enough to help us if we are stuck on something.  This is a bit of a relief as we were told the teachers speak no English (and some of them don’t) so I was concerned about how they would explain things to us if we don’t understand.  Even though they give us a couple hours of homework EVERY night we both like our teachers very much so we are very thankful for that.  Some teachers barely give any homework and while it’s not always fun doing it we are thankful that we get it so we will learn more.  We just won’t tell that to Yoly and Lydia…hahaha!!

We are definitely surprised at how much we have learned so far.  We still feel like we want to know more and more because there is so much to learn but we keep reminding ourselves that it’s ONLY been 2 weeks!  Yoly and Lydia have told us both that we are learning things fast because we only took one day for each thing we learned our first week and most students take 2 days…Thank you Rosetta Stone! 🙂  We are encouraged by this but still impatient!  Spanish language school has REALLY made me wish that I would have paid more attention during English grammar.  I never thought I would have need for: presente (present tense), contracciones (contractions), adjetivos posesivos (possessive adjectives), adjetivos demonstrative (demonstrative adjectives), and verbos irregulares (irregular verbs) again in my life.   As I write this I find myself wishing I could find a way to send this blog to everyone BUT my parents because I know they’ll say I should have listened to them back then…hahaha

Thank you all for your prayers for our language learning and we ask that you continue to pray for God to open our minds and make this language learning easy for us OR give us the gift of tongues in Spanish….we’ll take either! 🙂