Glee!

[tacit]

I am beside myself with glee over all the fic up on the Big Bang site. My preference is always for long stories over flashfics or other shorts, and there are sixteen new beauties to entertain me. Sixteen! I don't know where to start.

In other news. I'm back from Barcelona, where I took 40 hours of Spanish lessons and learnt how to talk in tenses beside the present tense - this comes in handy when trying not to sound like too much of an idiot. Can now strike up conversation in Spanish, as long as the other person is willing to talk slowly, and occasionally mime. Met lots of new people and had an awesome time, despite bag getting stolen. I was left with no passport, money, cards, phone, makeup or camera. I am one of those women whose bag could sustain a small family for a month. Had to go to the British Embassy and get them to ring my parents and ask for money for an emergency passport - Dad very traumatised by phone call out of the blue that started 'This is the British Consulate in Barcelona'... Hurray for wonderful parents though - they sent me sympathy cash and don't want me to repay them, so the rest of the holiday was free!

It was fun to go away, but I realised again how cool my job is that I was actually excited to get back to work. Excited! This is weird and wrong.

Courses of bricks laid (And we now have concrete floors! No more mud!)

24 / 58 (41.0%)

Comments

[sapote3.livejournal.com]

Estoy encantado conocer a otra estudiante de la bella lengua de Cervantes en Livejournal. Pero ?hablas con accento Castellano con un theta? ?O no? Yo hablo con puro accento de campesina Hondurena. Y si no, como una gringa. Una gringa media-borracha.

Sorry, I have to do things like this from time to time.

[sapote3.livejournal.com]

p.s. spot the grammatical errors! I've got three so far.
And I've been speaking Spanish for years. ::facepalms::

[tacittype.livejournal.com]

Hablo con puro accento ingles, por que !mi espanol es malo! Los professores eran catalan, tambien.

Ha, a 'gringa media-borracha'... I'll remember that one, it's about right! For some reason the spanish classes tended towards themes like being drunk, and flirting, rather than 'at the weekend I go to the park' and all that nonsense - it was a lot of fun. I'm impatient to be fluent now. I understand a lot of it, but am a bit crap when it comes to producing sentences that aren't riddled with errors. How long did it take you to learn?

[sapote3.livejournal.com]

erm.... two years in middle school, two in high school, a year of college intermediate, six months in Honduras, one lit class, and two months in a translation-related job, so far. At this point I'm pretty much down to the accent and specific vocabulary - I came out of Honduras with a pretty good ability to discuss corn farming, for instance, but say I were to work in medical translation, there's a whole different vocabulary.

I would say a couple months of good effort and you'll be able to get by okay. Also, I'll bet where you are there are things like Spanish-language audiobooks - I'm an auditory learner, so I had to just listen to a lot of Spanish, but since Spanish-language materials are thin on the ground here I pretty much just ripped the sound from the Motorcycle Diaries and listened to that over and over.

My username is actually a joke about my Spanish learning process. In short ::eyes very long comment:: this is a subject I like to talk about?

I'm sorry about your bag getting stolen, though yay for sympathy cash!