6: February – Learning a new language

In those six month my spanish improved a lot. I studied it in middle school, but I was very bad at the time, and in the next thirteen years I lost all my skills and knowledge. When I arrived in Spain, I wasn’t even able to introduce myself. During my first month I was surprised of how fast I was learning. Before the end September I was able to hang out with my workmates, to understand more or less the meaning of what they were telling me and to have basic conversation. I have to admit that probably the proximity between the italian and spanish language helped me to improve faster. From October to December I attended an A2 Spanish class, that let me learn the basic notion of the grammar; after the end of December, I decided to start studying on my own. My priority was not to speack the language correctly, but to improve my communication abilities. I started studying all the verbs, and then I focused totally on vocabulary: every time I did not know how to express myself because i didn’t know a word, I put that word in a list, so I could study it. I noticed that at the beginning I was improving very fast, while after a couple of months my improvement started to be slower, even if I was studying harder. I think this happened because at the beginning I was learning words and grammar structures that other people were using everyday, and so it was easier to memorize; the one I am learning now are less common, and I have to depend more on my studying.
The language was very useful also at work in order to be able to talk to the kids. I noticed that at the beginning the younger were the kids the easier was for me to talk and understand them. After six month I don’t have this problem anymore, and I can organize activities in spanish without too much trouble.