Encouragement

I finished my fourth week of intensive language classes!  And to be honest, I just feel like I have tons of information floating around in my brain and little to no ability to use it accurately or effectively.

This afternoon I was wandering aimlessly around the house trying to decide what to do with the couple of hours I had before meeting with my language exchange partner.  My brain was/is fried enough that it needed a break from studying - so that was out. Fortunately, a neat friend had sent this book with some neat visitors that came to Madrid this week!  Also fortunately, Nikki was there to suggest that I go read it for a while.

My Life in France by Julia Child
with Alex Prud'homme

Briefly, one thing that's important to know is that Julia Child is one of my absolute culinary heroes.  When I end up involved in a game of "If you could talk to any famous person, living or dead, who would you choose?"  My answer: Julia Child.

Anyways, I was reading and trying to banish frustrations with language study when I came across this.

"The longer I was in Paris, the worse my French seemed to get.  I had gotten over my initial astonishment that anyone could understand what I said at all.  But I loathed my gauche accent, my impoverished phraseology, my inability to communicate in any but the most rudimentary way."

Yay!!  Exactly!!  Why is that encouraging, you may be asking yourself?  Because eventually, Julia did learn to speak French fluently and then she ended up changing the culinary world.  So, maybe I can eventually learn Spanish :).

Then I went to meet my language exchange partner, whom I haven't seen in about six weeks.  We started chatting, and she was pretty shocked.  Her words "Stacy, your Spanish speaking has improved so much!"

So, you know, apparently things are going better than I thought they were!  And that's a nice way to begin the weekend, wouldn't you say? :)