Having moved to a new town, and with time on my hands, I felt the time was ripe to enrol myself in a night school class. I confess to fancying myself as a linguist, though I really shouldn’t as my conversation skills in reality only extend to please and hello in about 5 or 6 languages, a paltry collection of Japanese phrases and just enough Italian to get by and crack the odd joke.
I decided that being the second most spoken language on the globe, Spanish would be a useful one to learn. I like a challenge, and since I had spent a month in Spain last summer and picked up a few words I was loathe to enrol in a beginners class. I had visions of being in a class of slow pensioners and assorted dimwits and spending week after week reciting ‘me llamo Kristen’ until everyone got it. How wrong was I. After week one in ‘Spanish 2′ I realised I had rated my intellect and language abilities far too highly, and seriously underestimated that of my future classmates…
Contrary to my visions of a class full of dimwits, it was geek central. My error was to underestimate the average IQ of well-heeled and scholarly North Oxford and so there it was, me with a bunch of overachievers, for half of whom the class was too damn easy.
Our sweet Columbian teacher also unfortunately subscribes to the immersion method and so spends the lesson conversing with us in rapid fire espagnol with onewordblurringintothenext (‘you have to learn how to understand it because that’s how they speak in Spain’). Hmmm I’m sure it is Teach, but cut us some slack will ya’?
So even though I suffer the humiliation of being absolutely and utterly the worst in the class, I have stubbornly refused to drop out, and my Spanish is improving (albeit not as fast as I would like). If anyone’s wondering why I haven’t posted on flatwhite in a while, it’s partly because I’ve been spending every spare waking moment cramming Spanish in a vain attempt to catch up with my geek amigos. I don’t seem to be making much headway unfortunately, as I seem to be progressing at the same rate as my classmates, but what the hell.
I’m not sure what the point of all this is, but I guess if you want a moral for this story it goes like this. It’s good to challenge yourself even if it means humiliating yourself in the process. After all not everyone can be top of the class. Someone has to be the worst, so it may as well be you! It’s also good to get out there and learn something new, and I have met some nice and interesting people amongst my class of geek overachieving amigos, although I do fear they are only being nice to me as I get the sympathy vote for sucking at Spanish.
Adios.