"Learn Spanish" they said. "It's easy" they said.....

Most of my life when it came to someone talking about learning Spanish, they would always say it’s easy.  “All the letters only make one sound,” is a phrase I’ve often heard.  Well, for the most part they are right.  The vast majority of the time there is only one sound for each letter.  Learning to read Spanish is pretty easy as a result. 

Learning to understand what you are reading…. Well that is a bit more difficult.  You have to memorize the meaning of a ton of words and grasp the sentence structure.  It is difficult, but do-able.  It definitely helps that several words sound quite similar to English words; for example, “contento” would be happy (content).  “To deduce” would be “deducir.”  Having those cognates strewn throughout what you are reading makes understanding what you are reading significantly easier; still difficult, but easier.  

However, to understand what someone else is speaking to you……  Well that sometimes seems impossible.  We recently learned how to break apart words into syllables.  It was more or less the same as in English, so I picked it up with relative ease.  Then we started discussing how, when words end a certain way with the following word beginning a certain way, you couple those words together and say them as one.  One example is that to say “my sister loves” you would say “mi hermana ama.”  But since the first word ends in an “a” and the second starts with an “a” you would say only one “a.”  “mi hermanama.”  Also, since “mi” ends with a vowel sound and “hermana” starts with a vowel sound (the H is silent) it would be said “miermanama.”  While this occurs in English speech as well, people aren’t taught to say it that way. I can’t help but wonder how on earth anyone is supposed to understand this language when you have an insanely limited vocabulary and people only say half of each word anyways!  A phrase I have learned though, is “que dificil es hablar en español.” (How difficult it is to speak Spanish!)

“El libro está en el estante” (The book is on the shelf).  How would this sentence broken into syllables?

1.        El   li   bro   es  ta   en   el   es   tan   te.

2.        E   li   broes  tae  ne   les   tan   te. 

Answer number 1 makes perfect sense to me.  Answer number 2 is the correct answer. 

Overall I am doing fairly well in class and it is coming fairly easily, but after learning what I have so far it definitely explains why I could hardly understand two words of what people were saying when I would hear people talking in Spanish.  Angela has made it to the point of understanding Spanish as a second nature, and I am sure I will too.   God has called me to be a missionary in a Spanish speaking country so he will provide the ability to minister effectively….. but that seems like a difficult undertaking at the moment for sure.