10 things I've learned while speaking Spanish

Just a short list of tidbits gathered so far in my first week speaking Spanish almost 24/7

10.  I am terrible at temporizing in Spanish.  ie. it's hard to be wishy-washy.  Much easier to say 'yes' or 'no' rather than 'well, I guess sort of... but not really'.

9.  If the person you are talking to doesn't understand that you want to play Taboo with them to figure out what word you don't know, (since you want to use that word in the sentence you are trying to say) it's rather difficult.  You must convey that you just sequenced yourself, or the whole thing goes up in smoke.

8.  Occasionally, English syntax should be thrown out the window.  It will only confuse things.

7.  Trying to start a sentence about 6 times to say something that you really don't know how to say might just make it worse.

6.  Be grateful that you don't need to make the genders of *anything* agree in English.  It can be a huge pain.  And confusing.

5.  Spanglish only works with others who speak English fluently.

4.  False cognates (words in Spanish that sound like English words but mean totally different things, best example: embarazada does not mean embarrassed in Spanish.  It means pregnant) are mean.  And confusing.
**note: I have not told anyone I'm pregnant, but rather learned from the past mistakes of others**

3.  It is difficult to spell things out loud in Spanish, or have someone spell them and write it down correctly.  'E' is Spanish is pronounced like the English letter 'A' and 'I' in Spanish is pronounced like the English letter 'E'.  Hence it takes way too many brain cells to get a word from your ears through your brain and onto paper.

2.  Words that have just as many letters as those in English seem to have double the number of syllables in Spanish.  This makes it exponentially easier to lose a couple in your mouth before spitting out the word.

And finally,

1.  When you are utterly failing at getting a concept across, and the look on the face of whoever you are talking to (your host-dad for example) is one of utter non-comprehension, sometimes it's best to just give up, throw a mini-tantrum so they know you gave up, and have a laugh about it together.  Then find something else to talk about that uses vocabulary and tenses that you know.

With any luck there will be another list of more things later.  And since blogs are way more interesting when they have pictures, here are some more llamas.  Fluffy llamas.