Saturday, September 27, 2008

I'm so happy!

Chris called me tonight on his own accord! Totally a surprise! We had a lot of laughs about memories we shared together as young 'uns and I just genuinely loved hearing from him especially since we don't get to see each other hardly at all and probably won't see each other for Christmas :(. He did say that he gets 2 weeks vacation this year so he may try to swing a trip to Idaho for some snowboarding sessions. We have a free day pass for him whenever he decides to come out.

I had my class weekend. My head pretty much was jam-packed full of stuff after today. The professor thought it would be beneficial to speak in Spanish for about 2-3 hours of class time today and yesterday. He was trying to create what is called a "din in the head" which means that once someone's been immersed into a language, after about 15 hours or so, they start hearing the phrases over and over again in their head and then they try to find ways to use those phrases with other people. Interesting, huh? Anyone that's learned a language before and then that has possibly visited that country probably has experienced this. You just hear all these different things (phrases, words, etc) in your head and then you start to repeat them out loud to other people! I really could identify with this because after having studied German for so many years and then finally going over there and living with a non-English speaking family, I constantly was hearing it all around me and also in my head. It felt like an overload for the first week or so of living with them. Let's just say that I was so exhausted and couldn't wait to go to sleep every night. Now I can sorta understand what an overload that new English speakers might experience while they're in school. Also that's why if you might come across some ELL children and they come up to you and start saying, "Hi! How are you? How old are you?" You can now know that those phrases are probably haunting their minds everyday--hahaha.

Back to the Spanish--fortunately for me, I still have my listening comprehension for the most part for it. My speaking abilities however....I was a little less confident than when I was in college and learning it all the time in my classes. Once again, I kept wanting to switch to German and that's why I had to stop taking Spanish in the first place. It was confusing for me. Maybe I should pick Spanish up again though. I still have all my books from the classes. I should reteach myself to the level of proficiency that I was before I decided to switch back to only German.

I better go now though. I have my friend, Karen, coming over to watch "Sex and the City" with me. Kyle's working so what's better than having a girls' night???

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