Monday, July 6, 2009

Why am I learning Spanish?

Why am I learning Spanish?
In one sentence, I think I have a nut loose up there.
But it is amazing how things work out.

There is a sweet lady in Bangalore who runs a book shop called Strand.
She has Strand Book Festival every December.
I regularly visit this annual affair.
I go just to browse and end up buying a bunch of books.
That is the purpose of the book festival min any case.

About 4 years ago, my wife and I were browsing books in the Strand Book Festival when I came across two tiny packets, one called Learn French and the other called Learn German. My wife always wanted to learn French. SO she encouraged me to buy both. The packet consisted of a tiny booklet and a small-length cassette consisting of assorted phrases. I started learning French and I found it exceedingly difficult. I mean, after all, one cannot start learning a foreign language by just listening to some random phrases, can they? And one fine morning I misplaced the French lessons. I search and search but no, it was nowhere to be found. So I picked up the German packet and to my surprise I could pick up a few words straight away. One thing led to another and today I have a passable command (an oxymoron, I suppose, "passable command") on that language.

What aided in my learning was that shortly after I started learning German, I visited Germany. The company I work for got its first German customer. I visited Germany many times thereafter.

I am hoping the same with Spanish :D
Now that I have started on Spanish - Madrid, Barcelona, Lima, Beunos Aires, and most importantly, Machu Picchu, here I come.

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2 comments:

Italian Learner said...

Hey there are a lots of interesting books in your library, well thanks for sharing your experience.

Michael Lee said...

Your article seems quite interesting to me, but what I feel is that you need to increase the length of this article and put some more content in this article.

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