All That Vocabulary!

A major stumbling block for those trying to imbibe another language is vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary. Spanish is especially prone to causing frustration in this area because there are many, many dialects; reading literature from different Spanish Speaking areas exposes you to an enormous number of words that are vital for understanding. This causes me to read a book in Spanish much more slowly than I would read the same book in English. It takes incredible patience to attain true knowledge of the Spanish language because after you put aside the first basic textbook, you realize that nobody in the world speaks or writes (real books) in Standard Spanish.

I am planning to start a blog where I write almost everything in Spanish, but I am not naive enough to believe that I can do it without making mistakes and scrambling lots of meanings. I hope that people will politely point out my mistakes to me. Laugh if you want! It is not my fault that I was not born a native speaker, but I am very optimistic that I can come close.

Finished! In Less Than a Hundred Years

I finished Cien Años De Soledad (One Hundred Years Of  Solitude) By Márquez. All in Spanish. But I can't brag, because I didn't really absorb it the way I wanted to. I was so busy looking up words I didn't know that I tended to lose my train of thought. It will take a re-reading to truly get it into my mind, get the genealogy straight, etc. But I'm  not going to re-read it right away. Next, I am planning to read "Inquieta Compañía" by Carlos Fuentes. It is a collection of short stories that really interests me.

I apologize to anybody reading this blog who feels that I don't have my act together with reviewing these books. I have to go into this slowly. Remember it is the capturing the nuances in the Spanish language   that interests me the most, not the story lines of the literature, although they interest me, too.

Although it is getting easier and easier for me, I still get frustrated that, while reaing a literary work, I have to stop and look up a word. And then another word, and then another word...