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Showing posts from March, 2016

Learning and Forgetting Spanish

When I first moved to Spain I taught English privately. Since most of my students were complete beginners I had to translate into Spanish many of the concepts and grammatical rules I was endeavouring to teach. Now, this was a grand way for me to learn Spanish, especially when I pronounced the words incorrectly. My students would invariably repeat what I had just said, only with the superb, crisp diction that only a native speaker can possess. I hadn't intended to learn Spanish when I was teaching English. It's just the way things worked out. I had my trusted teeny tiny English/Spanish dictionary snuggled deeply inside a pocket and I'd pull it out any time a student didn't understand an English vocabulary word. I learned an awful lot of new words this way! Fast forward to when I moved away from Spain to live in the United States. I still wanted to maintain my Spanish. All that work and energy I had expended in order to memorise vocabulary words and those pesky irr