LP’s excellent staycation – Day 48

by LP

As you might know, I’ve been learning Spanish this summer, mostly by practising on Memrise and babbling to myself. “Why Spanish?” you might ask. “Why not?” I say.

But the actual reason is “out of embarrassment”. Last year I was among people who only spoke Spanish and while I was able to understand everything they said (I speak French fluently and also know a good amount of Portugese and Italian), I was unable to answer. I just stood there feeling Le Stupid, wondering if I should say something like “Mi Español es muy rudimentario”.

My only two other sentences “Donde esta la taqueria?” and “Hasta la victoria siempre” also turned out to be of no use at all. The first because all taquerias had huge signs. The second because no revolutions were started. And also because despite the impression consumer culture might give, there’s quite some people out there who hate the dude’s forking guts and pissing someone off is not a great conversation starter.

But long story long: Spanish. I’m half way through the random word list and now have 502 words in my long term memory, or ‘garden’ as they call it in Memrise land. A lot of words are similar to words I already know in other languages and weren’t a problem. Other words were completely new and weren’t a problem either. There were a couple of words though, I just wasn’t able to remember correctly for some reason.

When I made a list of these words, I realised what that reason was: they were all words for either meat/fish dishes (I’m a vegetarian-bordering-on-vegan) and alcoholic beverages (I don’t drink alcohol). Apparently I’m like a regular person in that respect and have a hard time remembering things I’m not intrinsically interested in. The more you learn! 😀