Status update

I’ve avoided posting an update on how the learning is going for fear of somehow jinxing it. But it’s going well enough now that I feel I can risk it.

In general I’m doing really well, we are all doing well and the teacher is great — we’re going at exactly the right pace, and everyone is getting multiple chances at trying new structures and phrases.

Today we started on irregular verbs. Spanish has regular verbs that can be conjugated easily (eg “comer” means “to eat”, and you can say “I eat” by changing the “er” to “o”, and he eats by changing it to “e”, and we eat by changing the “er” to “emos”, so “comemos cada día” — we eat every day”. But Spanish can’t be too easy, so there are a bunch of irregular verbs where those easy rules don’t always work. Unfortunately there are no rules for those verbs, so you just have to remember the exceptions.

So we had fun using various verbs and building sentences using the syntax we’ve learned. It’s actually been a lot of fun.

The one on one tuition I have in the afternoon is… different.. though I must confess, I start off each lesson skeptical of what he’s asking me to do, and end up acknowledging it was really good.

As for what my day is like:

• 06:45 wake up
• About 06:50 have breakfast
• Usually 07:00 do the morning ablutions
• 07:15 dressed and pack bag.
• About 07:20 head to school. 
• Depending how lazy I’m feeling and whether I stop at a bakery, I get to school around 07:35 to 07:55. (It’s a 1.5km walk to school)
• Class starts at 08:00. 
• 10:00 break for morning tea — eat a banana or other fruit.
• 10:15 class resumes — probably more verbs in different tenses and conjugations.
• 12:00 class ends, lunch time.
• Quickly go buy food if I didn’t get any on the way in.
• 12:30 keep practicing, studying.
• 13:00 private 1:1 tuition starts
• 15:00 walk home.
• When I get home talk to my mamá de tico for a little bit.
• 16:00 homework and study.
• 18:00 dinner time!
• 19:30 I usually call it quits for study. 
• Sometimes I then take the lessons and type up charts and rules in my laptop to help make them stick and to use as reference later.
• And/or I watch Netflix. If I’m not totally exhausted I’ll watch a movie or TV episode that I’ve seen before, but dubbed in Spanish. 
• 21:00 bed time, sleeping not long after.
• Then repeat the next day.