Math and Spanish: Conquering Two Foreign Languages at Once

Hello everybody! Sorry there was such a delay in my posting a new blog.  The last week was pretty much the same as the week before, and I haven’t had anything new to talk about.  Soon I will, because this weekend we are traveling to Rome.  After that friends and I are going to start taking advantage of our weekends to see more of Spain, and bits of Europe.  Tomorrow is the last day of my second week of classes.  I am enjoying them still, and definitely am seeing an improvement in my Spanish already.  The grammar classes are basically a reiteration of what I learned throughout my six years of taking Spanish in the US, but now everything I am learning is reinforced when I am at home, out on the street, and in my other classes.  There is definitely a huge difference when you are learning the Spanish language in the classroom and your daily life.  I am very excited because often times now I don’t have to translate what a person is saying to English to understand.  I usually comprehend what they say when they say it in Spanish.  However, when it comes to speaking, I am still thinking in English.  Before I speak, I have to translate what I wish to say from English to Spanish.  The goal is to eventually be able to think in Spanish both when I am listening and speaking. 

On Monday of this week, myself and three other girls volunteered for an organization called Amigos del Almanjáyar.  The organization is located in the poorer area of Granada, and is an after school program for children in the neighborhood.  They are what we would refer to as “inner-city” kids.  When we arrived at the organization, I was very nervous. I had no idea what to expect of the kids, or what they would expect from us.  We went in and there were only six kids there.  There are two sessions of the program, and it appears that more kids go to the later session.  The kids we met were very active, and my first impression told me they were probably pretty hard to control.  They introduced themselves, although the only name I understood was Sarah.  Then, we introduced ourselves.  The kids thought my name was hilarious, and tried many times to pronounce it without much success.  We told them where in the US we were from, and why we were in Granada.

After introductions had been made, the kids were split into different rooms.  Each room had three kids, two volunteers (me being one of them), and a teacher from the organization.  Seem like a little too much supervision for three kids? I’m pretty sure each room could have used a few more volunteers.  At one point a little boy (who thankfully I was not paired with) picked up a chair and charged another girl.  Then, he threw a pencil at her.  I can’t actually decide if he was the child who behaved the worst.  I lucked out, and was paired with a little girl named Adoracion, who goes by Doria.  She was probably the quietest student there.  We reintroduced ourselves, and she giggled as she tried to say my name again.  She informed me that she had never met a Meaghan before.  I wish I knew how to say “likewise” in Spanish to my new friend Doria.  Doria was doing math homework, two pages of subtraction.  She was fairly self sufficient and just needed me to correct the answers.  I tried a few times to help her, but math has never been a strong suit, and having to explain it in Spanish made it more difficult.  I’m glad it was just subtraction.  Anything else, I would have been in real trouble. 

After we finished Doria’s math homework, she went and got a puzzle.  You had to match animals to the habits they live in, and so Doria taught me some pretty useful vocabulary.  She was very patient with the language barrier, and repeated herself as many times as I asked her to.  It was especially hard, because of the Spanish she spoke.  I have only ever been exposed to proper, grammatically correct Spanish.  Just like the English you encounter in an inner city school in the US is very different from proper English, so was these kids’ Spanish.  They also talked very fast, because I am not sure how aware they were of the language barrier.  By the end of the hour and a half, Doria and I had figured out how to communicate, and she was excited to learn I would be back every Monday for the rest of the semester.  It certainly will be something that will add to my study abroad experience, and give me another aspect of the Spanish language that many students don’t encounter.