There are several things that I will blame this year´s complacency on... ok so i dont really have a leg to stand on. I probably should have started learning Spanish when I was in Australia to have made this a little easier. And if anyone has ever seen the Monty Python movie "the life of brian" you can appreciate how difficult a language based on latin is. There are apparently 26 ways to conjucate a verb and no real rules on how to do this. But I´m getting ahead of myself here - I´m still on the page of "where is the toilet" and "do u have a room?" - i´m not even really sure how i conjugate a verb in English.
One of the biggest problems for me seems to be stopping the ever present stream of consciousness, picking one sentence, converting it to Spanish and then finding someone patient enough to listen - about as fun as pulling teeth. I dont think the problem is them though - my biggest problem is just getting in there and trying. I worry about getting into a situation where my small amount of Spanish is going to run into the ground and where just putting an¨"el" in front of something doesnt really make it into a word. But I guess - this is all part of the journey and definately a different experience to the one I had in India. In India - the national language is Hindi but then there are 28 states with numerous different dialects and languages to go around - so I never really tried to learn to speak because there wasnt a lot of point. I was there for 2 months, either my HIndi was really bad or the people I spoke to were ignoring me but I found the words I did know didnt go very far. But here is the rub. India was an English colony so many people spoke English. South America was a Spanish colony (mostly) and so of course if you dont speak the native language you speak Spanish not English. A difference that I only recently picked up on.
But anyway, it is coming along and Spanish is a beautiful, melodic language which is crucial for me to learn if only to understand these people enough to get a can of coke but certainly to appreciate the richness of this country and the friendliness of its people.
