Spanish Lessons

Since I first arrived in Ecuador more than three years ago, my Spanish has improved exponentially mostly through lots and lots of trial and error. I've also learned a lot by listening, especially to Andres and his family. I was repeating what I heard and hoping it made sense. But after Andres and I moved into our new apartment, I wasn't spending so much time practicing or listening. To add to my Spanish plight, Andres became more interested in practicing his English. So my Spanish suffered. And then last Fall I really started to notice a plateau in my skills. I just wasn't improving, I was making the same mistakes over and over and never knowing how to correct them.

So I finally decided to make a change and make a really effort to get beyond pretty good to great. My friend had been taking lessons with a local tutor, who she said was fantastic, and the proof was in the pudding because she hadn't known much Spanish at all before coming to Ecuador about 4 months before, and after a little time with her tutor, she was already using tons of new vocabulary and verbs tenses. I gave him a call, which was a little less successful than I had expected because I mixed up his name and asked for someone else the first time I called. He said I had the wrong number, so I hung up, confused. Then I asked my friend what his name was and realized I had made a mistake. I was too embarrassed to call back and tell him what happened, so I waited for Andres to get home and called on his phone! Well, I finally managed to make a time to meet, and I was delighted by my first lesson. We started just with some questions and conversation so that he could get an idea of my level and my mistakes. He is a larger than life character who is want to jump out of his chair in order to explain some vocabulary word, and is always laughing and smiling. I knew that it would be a good set up for me.

He told me that my level was very advanced (so flattered!) but that I was still making some stupid mistakes (my words, not his), so we started with some very basic stuff, like gender pronouns and ser and estar. This turned out to be really great though because he explained ser and estar to me in a new way, which I finally understood, and also explained several uses/differences that I hadn't been aware of. For example, if you use estar + participio pasado it indicates that the action has already happened and finished as in "él está muerto." If you use ser + participio pasado it's like the passive voice in English and implies that someone performed the action on the object as "el pavo de navidad fue hecho por Becky." This was mind-blowing for me because I never even thought about the distinction between those to structures, let alone understood it. Now I know why you say "las cobjas están hechas de lana" and "las cobijas son hechas en Otavalo." ( I really hope I didn't mess that up, I'll have to double-check with my tutor, feeling sheepish)

It's always frustrating when I find out I've been making a mistake for ages without realizing it (Hello, saying hago errores instead of cometo errores!) but it's also amazing when something clicks and I am actually able to integrate it into my knowledge of the language. Right now I'm learning phrases in order to say things in a more interesting way, but I feel pretty silly for learning this now because if I had just studied more in school, I would already know them (for example, it is taking me WAY too long to figure out that sin embargo means nevertheless; I'm pretty sure I was supposed to learn that in high school)

I'll keep you posted (haha) on more Spanish breakthroughs as they come up. I shall be the little engine that could