Class

My gramatica teacher--she's the crazy one sitting in the corner (my seat yesterday). Her name is Graciela, and she is very intelligent. More importantly, she loves the Lord and we pray together each day before class begins. For gramatica, we begin at 7:30 and go for two hours. That is my largest class as two sections of students are combined for grammar. She gives us vocab., culture, and history as well--right now, she is speaking some English to us, but she said by the third week, she'll switch to only Spanish. I have a grammar test Wednesday on "la" and "el," which I've already blogged about.




This is Maritza, my wonderful fonetica teacher. On the first day, we went over and over the Spanish vowels--over and over and over again until my mouth muscles got tired! Then she said we must always remember that Spanish is "a language of bowels." As we speak to people, they listen for our bowels, not consonants like in English, but bowels. Then she told us the b and v in Spanish are inter-changeable, it's not important which to use. "But remember, muchachas, in Spanish, people will be listening for your bowels." : )

Maritza is standing on her tiptoes in this picture of us, and I am scooching down. She speaks a little English. She's great. There are only four of us in this class and the next one, which is: lenguaje= language.



This is Marianela, or Nela, my lenguaje professor. She is teeny tiny--and she asked me yesterday how old I thought she was. I guessed 23--it turns out she's 36! She looks very young. She is an excellent teacher as well. She is teaching us conversation--they each are able to tell us the differences in the languages between Spain and Latin America, and also some differences between the Latin American countries. Right now it is all so new to me, it seems like I'll never be able to tell where someone comes from by listening to their Spanish. In Costa Rica, the ll sound ("llamo") sounds like "zhamo" or "jamo." In many other countries, it is pronounced "yamo." Right now I'm delighted if I catch that in conversation at all!