'Vaqueros' is Spanish for Jeans

On learning a new language as a mom in mid-life.

I’m fresh off a five-day Spanish language intensive and basically fluent en español now. Just kidding. I can barely count to 100. But what an experience. Want to hear about it? (Si si, por favor, you say because if you just say, Si, it means “Yes, but not really.”)

To start, there are seven of us in the class – four French-speaking African priests (from Cameroon, Uganda, Burkina Faso, and Togo), a Russian architect, a woman from Shanghai who speaks near-perfect English, and me. Our teachers – there are two; one I really like and one I can’t follow at all – are native Spanish speakers. They know very little English and zero French, Russian, or Mandarin, so all instruction is in Spanish. Sometimes, because the Russian and Africans speak a teensy bit of English, and I speak a smidgen of French, we help each other out. But a majority of the most successful learning happens visually – in writing and through the use of big gestures and our 101 workbooks. Sometimes we break into groups and pr…