So last week I committed myself to memorize the basics: the verbs “to be” and “to have” in their present tense form. I can say that I was immediately confused because Spanish has two “to be” forms: ser and estar. Ser is for permanent states and estar is for non-permanent. Here is a link to an article to explain the difference: https://www.thespanishexperiment.com/learn-spanish/to-be
I focused only on ser for this week, next week or the week after I’ll dive into estar but my brain could not handle both and the verb for “to have”: tener. Tener also threw me for a loop because it looks like tenir in French which is more like “to hold”. Anyways, in my search for help I met my new best friend, Teacher Catalina, who broke down the verb and gave me examples of its usage.
In addition to being on day 14 of my Duolingo streak, I had a big moment of validation this week when my second language methodologies class visited a Spanish 9 teacher at Vic High this week. She was showing us how she uses TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) in her classroom. She conducted the full hour and 20 minute class in Spanish and I understood about 90% of what she said, so I am feeling like I am on the right track. However, it is worth acknowledging that words I had not heard before I was able to infer what they meant because it sounds so similar to Italian. I think near the end of this inquiry project I need to do some research and post about the relationship between Spanish and Italian.
ADIÓS
