Spanish

Sorry for not posting in a while….I´ve been hard at work on my taxes.   

Anyway, I haven´t mentioned this before, but I´ve essentially given up on learning any more Spanish.  Since leaving Guanajuato, I´ve learned exactly two words – tamaño (size) and cascada (waterfalls).  I´ve made some half-hearted attempts to learn more but I was completely exhausted after my weeks weeks studying Spanish in Guanajuato.  Anyway…one last post on why I find Spanish  such a challenge to learn.

First, I should mention that English has a reputation for being difficult to learn.  In some ways, that reputation is deserved.  Because English isn´t a phonetic language, there´s no way to look at a word and know how it´s pronounced.  That´s a problem.  But in many ways, English is a very simple language.  Let´s look at verbs.  Now, I mentioned before that there are only six tenses in English (actually, I said seven…I was wrong…there are only 6).  Here´s the thing…you really don´t need to know much to conjugate verbs in English.

Take the verb “to shop”.  In order to conjugate that you only need to know 4 words – shop, shops, shopped, and shopping.  Now…compare a similar verb in Spanish – comprar (to buy).  To conjugate comprar, you need to know (if I´ve counted correctly) 37 different words.  Holy crap!

Now obviously, that´s not the full story.  If you want to use the verb “to shop” properly, you do need to know other words.  After all, we don´t go around saying “I shopping”.  We say “I am shopping” or “I was shopping”.  But the same holds true for Spanish and once again Spanish has a lot more words you need to know.  The main helping verb in Spanish is Haber.  Well guess what?  In order to use haber properly, there are 35 different conjugations!!!   And that`s just for the main helping verb.

I was going to talk about direct and indirect objects in Spanish but I think I`ll skip that.  I really have no idea how anyone learns a foreign language.  I`m particularly impressed by all the Japanese people I`ve seen studying Spanish.  They seem to do quite well at it despite the fact that it`s obviously very different then their language.  Anyway, I`m glad I learned the Spanish that I did…it`s been helpful on numerous occasions.  I just don`t have the energy to learn more at this time.  Not until someone develops a “language pill” that confirms instant fluency!