Back to the Books
I have been out of Spanish class for a while now, not having taken Spanish since my high school level 3 Spanish class back in junior year. Now that I'm an SIS major, however, I have to take a language and why not take the one I have the best background in and that will likely be most useful? So I'm taking Spanish this semester. What I would never have guessed when I elected to take Spanish is that I would be placed in an Intermediate II course right off the bat. The whole course is taught in Spanish, and let me tell you, I'm a little more than a bit rusty on my Spanish. It's an absolute struggle to force myself to comprehend each instruction, and it's an absolute embarrassment when I can't understand an instruction and sit there looking busy until my professor comes over and has to explain to me what we're doing exactly.
Being in this Spanish class has really increased my appreciation for International Students. To sit through just an hour and fifteen-minute lecture in a foreign language is completely mentally exhausting - to sit through hours of class taught in a foreign language, with no help, and then to step out of class and be still surrounded by people speaking that language is completely incomprehensible for me.
For instance, we're learning right now about subjunctive commands. What does subjunctive even mean? I had to look it up for this blog, but it means verbs that express what is imagined, wished, or possible. I've had a hard time learning what seem to be complex rules that change depending on who you're talking to, but then I thought about just how convoluted my own language is. Unlike in Spanish where each verb ends with an ir, ar, or er, English verbs do not have such a distinguishing feature. Each verb in English is completely different.
When reviewing how to take an English verb and simply just put it in the past tense, it seemed like the best rule to follow is "when in doubt, add an 'ed.'" A lot of words follow this rule: followed, studied, yawned, walked, etc. This definitely does not work a lot of the time though. Take "to stand" for instance. If someone said "I standed over there" to you instead of "I stood over there," you'd likely look at them as if they were a complete moron. How about the word "to put?" Does it even change depending on the tense? "I put it over there," "can you help me put this in the corner" - it's the same despite the tense and context having changed. I'm not an English teacher, but grammatically that "ed" rule seems to be generally correct, except in a lot of cases.
My point here, and there is one - I'm not just rambling - is that language is incredibly complicated, but it's hard to appreciate that fact until you're picked up and dropped outside your comfort zone. This mental exercise has made me wonder if I'm even very fluent in my own native language because despite being able to use it fine, I had to look up different conventions in standard everyday English in order to write this blog post.
Being in this Spanish class has really increased my appreciation for International Students. To sit through just an hour and fifteen-minute lecture in a foreign language is completely mentally exhausting - to sit through hours of class taught in a foreign language, with no help, and then to step out of class and be still surrounded by people speaking that language is completely incomprehensible for me.
For instance, we're learning right now about subjunctive commands. What does subjunctive even mean? I had to look it up for this blog, but it means verbs that express what is imagined, wished, or possible. I've had a hard time learning what seem to be complex rules that change depending on who you're talking to, but then I thought about just how convoluted my own language is. Unlike in Spanish where each verb ends with an ir, ar, or er, English verbs do not have such a distinguishing feature. Each verb in English is completely different.
When reviewing how to take an English verb and simply just put it in the past tense, it seemed like the best rule to follow is "when in doubt, add an 'ed.'" A lot of words follow this rule: followed, studied, yawned, walked, etc. This definitely does not work a lot of the time though. Take "to stand" for instance. If someone said "I standed over there" to you instead of "I stood over there," you'd likely look at them as if they were a complete moron. How about the word "to put?" Does it even change depending on the tense? "I put it over there," "can you help me put this in the corner" - it's the same despite the tense and context having changed. I'm not an English teacher, but grammatically that "ed" rule seems to be generally correct, except in a lot of cases.
My point here, and there is one - I'm not just rambling - is that language is incredibly complicated, but it's hard to appreciate that fact until you're picked up and dropped outside your comfort zone. This mental exercise has made me wonder if I'm even very fluent in my own native language because despite being able to use it fine, I had to look up different conventions in standard everyday English in order to write this blog post.
When you gave details about how languages have different grammatical constructions (and how we don't know them), I thought of this chart that compares features of English that may appear differently - or not appear at all - in other languages. http://college.cengage.com/english/raimes/keys_writers/2e/students/eslcentr/transfer_errors.html
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