Entry 3

 Dear Meowmeow,

Yesterday, my teammates and I started to learn Spanish. We had lunch together after the English teaching class and went to the Dahsian Library. We reserved a discussion room and we sat in a circle to start our learning journey. Our learning process began with the alphabets. We listened to a cute alphabetic song and we soon picked up the pronunciation of all the alphabets. Next, we started to learn about some basic rules in Spanish. For example, the stress of a word should be in the second syllable from the back. Unlike English, Spanish has its own way to extinguish the stress. What’s more, all the vocabulary in Spanish has two forms, male and female. When the subject is a female (no matter a person or an animal), the verb has to end with an “a.” A lot of South American and Spanish female’s names end with an “a, “too. That is really interesting because here in Taiwan, our names don’t end with a certain letter. After we learnt the basic rules, we started to learn the numbers. Uno, dos, and tres are one, two, and three in Spanish. We spent a little more time figuring out all the numbers since they were quite different from the ones in English. I still can’t remember some numbers like thirteen, fourteen, and so on. When we generally knew how to say all the numbers, we decided to play a little game. Each of us listed out some functions on a paper and we flip one a round. The person who got the answer and pronunciation right at the same time got to win the prize, which was a treat to a restaurant near NCCU. Finally, I won the prize but I didn’t really ask them to treat me for a meal. The last thing we learnt was the greetings. We used an app to help us with that part. We should say hola when we are saying hello to other people and say adios when we are waving goodbye. We ended the Spanish class because we all had other things to do but I thought we had a really fulfilling period. Although we were only there for about two and a half hours, we got to have a really basic chat with a Spanish. This was only the first class but I’m already feeling much enthusiasm and excitement. Another thing I learned from this experience is that I got to know the obstacles students might encounter when learning a language. For instance, there is an alphabet “rr” in Spanish. However, in order to pronounce it, we have to flip our tongue really fast, but only some people are able to do it. Even three of my classmates were not able to make it. It made me think for a long time since I didn’t really know how to teach them. This is a certain situation that I might face in the future classroom. I hope I can figure it out soon before the teaching at the end of the semester.