I'm only asking because I have no clue what I want to be when I grow up. Hell, I don't want to grow up.
I'm looking to embark on an immersion course of some kind so that I can call myself truly bilingual. I have a degree in spanish, and can't call myself truly bilingual because I don't have enough experience listening to spoken spanish and speaking it myself. nMy mind doesn't switch gears and make connections fast enough. Practice would change that.
Maybe I'm just feeling insecure because of all the Cubans I've encountered at work lately. (It's surprising how many Cuban truck drivers there are, y'all, I swear it is.) Have you ever tried to listen to a Cuban speak spanish? It's much like listening to a native Spaniard. It sounds like machine gun fire. Also, Cuban men? They're extremely good-looking from what I've seen. As in so good looking that I don't care what they're saying to me, I could just listen to it and stare at them all day long.
I digress.
I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. And I'm running out of time to decide. I am on the wrong side of 40, after all; and while that has its advantages, it also has its downsides. Like hearing the clock ticking, counting down to my own advanced age and the point where I can't work anymore.
Maybe I'll get some ideas between now and the time I finish some immersion classes.
I have friends who spent their holidays on immersion courses and/or volunteering in Spanish-speaking countries to get their language internalised.
ReplyDeleteI myself only learn languages by practicing them, by being immersed. Years and years of French, both here and for the few months that I lived in Paris, did nothing for me because I did not have a chance to speak nothing but French.
When I lived in Hong Kong, though, and in a small mountain village in Indonesia, I earned a good deal of language skills of questionable quality (though no swearing ... my grammar is very suspect) simply by having little choice but to try.
Can you take a Costa Rican holiday? (Or one to Cuba -- my nephew went there and found it amazing ... eye-opening even.)
Oh, how I would love to go to Cuba. It's on my bucket list.
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