Nuestra Escuela!

Poor Alphonso tries to make sense out of our palabras!

Well, we've started school at I.C.O. with our instructor Alphonso and four other classmates. The grounds are truly lovely here and the school is full of lively students all working away at different levels of Spanish language acquisition. Based upon our "examins",  both of us are in the same class. There is a wide spectrum of skills and language comprehension in our group,  so the first day or two of practice and conversation were a little chaotic. Now things have settled into a very busy communal effort to help each other get as much as we can out of the experience. By the end of class, we are wiped out and have to have little siestas to recharge brain batteries. Our instructor has been extremely patient and very good natured. There are times when we've wondered how he has managed not to rip every last strand of hair out of his (or our) heads as we slice and dice his native language, but we ARE learning poco a poco. The immersive process is great! The real barrier right now seems to be our own native language. Most of us are at the stage where we are still trying to translate in our heads - or recall from past classes, etc. One Spanish teacher from long ago called it "typesetter Spanish": first you arrange the little pieces of communication in your head and then hit "publish".  It's all pretty messy until one finally gets enough of a handle on the structure of the language and the vocabulary to do some "Zenish" so to speak. Alphonso keeps encouraging us "not to think, just respond as best you know how." It's a great approach. It really starts to break down that barrier of trying to translate words one-to-one (ala typesetter style). As we all get to know each other, we are more comfortable making mistakes, using the wrong "palabra", getting the tense wrong, etc. etc. which further erodes the barrier. On top of that, when we venture out into the street, we are thrust into an overwhelming cacophony of sound,  only a tiny bit of which we can comprehend. But as time goes by, it seems possible to get into the flow of it all and just let it happen as it will.