From Hola to Hablo

Welcome everyone!

Join me on my adventure as I dive into the world of learning Spanish.

Back in 2016, I spent roughly 5 months travelling through South America. Within that time, I traveled to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. I can honestly say this was the best time of my life. I was captivated by the beautiful culture in these Latin countries. This stemmed from how smooth and romantic the native language is, which is why I chose to learn Spanish through our semester in EDTC 300.

Machu Picchu
A photo of Machu Picchu taken by me in Peru.

As I did travel to Spanish speaking countries for 5 months, I did not learn as much Spanish as you would think, or that I was hoping for. As a solo traveler, I would often stay at popular hostels to meet other tourists from all around the world. As this was a great way to meet people, the default language we would always speak was English, hindering my learning of the native language. I would say I do know more than the average Joe but not as much as I would like to know. My vocabulary is decent, especially when it comes to a restaurant setting, as I needed to learn this quickly to be able to order food when I went out on my own. I also have a pretty strong understanding on how to conjugate verbs but could definitely improve on that area as well. Where I lack is forming fluent sentences. When I attempted to speak Spanish, most locals had an idea of what I was trying to say because I could piece together a few words, however I was unable to make them flow smoothly into a sentence. I also found that the pronunciation on many worlds could use some work.

A picture of me looking onto the city of Quito, Ecuador after hiking a volcano
A picture of me looking onto the city of Quito, Ecuador after hiking a volcano.

Throughout the last couple of years, I have used the app called Duolingo. As I have used this in the past, I don’t think I have ever been overly consistent while using it. Once again, I found this app was great for the vocabulary aspect but not great from sentence structure. Maybe as I get further into the app, this would change. I have also taken one Spanish class here at the University of Regina. Outside of that, I haven’t really explored any other resources to assist me in learning the language. Throughout this semester, I am hoping to not only become a more consistent user on Duolingo but am also eager to find other online resources that can assist in my learning. As of now, I am unsure in what resources I am going to explore but will keep you all posted in the up coming weeks! If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!

Until next week, bye.