Learning Spanish the Friendly Way

Fiorella is quite satisfied with the language-learning set-up she's put together. She watches a Spanish language soap opera five hours a week and thus observes the language in context. It also helps her pick up rhythm, accent, and cultural behaviors. Her telenovelas are backed up with a Spanish textbook, a "Spanish in Ten Minutes A Day" book, Google's "Translator," and crib notes in Spanish taped on everything in the house.  Most important, though, are friends and relatives who speak Spanish: Rachel Sonntag, Raquel Luna, Jane Perrine, Fernando Barriga, Patricia Carando, Anne Marie Valerio, and the many kind waiters, sales people, and strangers whom Fio has imposed on.

Linguistic training and a good ear have also helped. When one has learned bits and pieces of German, French, Russian, and Spanish as a child, then studied Latin for five years, then added a semester of German, two semesters of Hindi, two of Sanskrit, three years of Telugu, and passed a French reading exam after only six weeks of study, you can bet the mind involved has figured out how to learn languages.

Looking back, Fio doesn't think the standard classroom would have worked for her. On line programs certainly didn't--she found them repetitive, boring, and not at all related to her life--but the combination of telenovelas, textbooks, Translator, crib notes, and friends and relatives seems to be doing the trick.

Wish Fio well.

Aftermath

I joined Facebook a couple of years ago because my agent told me to, but I soon learned to enjoy it for itself, reconnecting with old friends, and making new friends. And now it is my major comfort. Not only have FB friends wept along with me, but they've used directed lasers at a couple of mean-minded attackers. Patricia, Shiloh, Tommie, Clara Sue--THANK YOU!

Carando to the Rescue

The rider on the white horse who rescued Fiorella?  None other than Patricia "T" Carando--again. She has been Fio's electronic savior too many times to count this past year, and your faithful correspondent is muy grateful.

What happened this time, you ask.  Fio's icons wouldn't open.  First she lost access to her email icon (again), and then she lost access to all her other programs except (whew) the one for the romance she is writing. Fiorella promptly sent out a panicked SOS to T and met with her at Starbucks, where all good writers meet.  The mighty T began by wrestling with Fio's email situation, which was caused by the failing mechanisms of Windows Live Mail (no longer supported by Microsoft), and which will necessitate Fio changing to gmail in the near future.  Then, while Fiorella raced back home to pick up her credit card so she could buy chocolate chunk cookies, T restored her other programs.

All is now well in Casa Fiorella, thanks to T Carando.  Well, T Carando and chocolate chunk cookies.