I am taking an entire year of introductory Spanish to fulfill my language requirement at the university because in high school, nobody told me you needed 3 years of high school foreign language in order to fulfill the requirement at university. I ended up taking only 2 years in high school. Sooo here I am taking Spanish all over again and wasting valuable money/time at the university. But it’s okay, I guess. Brushing up on a foreign language and hopefully learning more will help me in the end.

It’s going to be a time-consuming class because it meets every single day of the weekday. Most classes either meet only on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, OR Tuesdays and Thursdays. That means homework every single day and class time every day. Hopefully since I am only taking introductory courses and I’ve taken a bit of Spanish before, this won’t be as hard as it would normally be.

Since I am in the introductory class, there are a lot of beginners and sometimes the mistakes we make are pretty darn hilarious.

One day we were supposed to describe our family members. To say “brother” in Spanish you would say “hermano” but one of my classmates said, “mi hombre” which means “my man.” LOL!!! She said it with such confidence as well, when she really meant her brother. It was pretty funny.

In Spanish, as with many other languages, pronunciation is extremely important because if you change your tone, you might be saying a completely different word. For example, one of my classmates meant to say that his mother cooks well. “Mi mamá cocina bien.” You would pronounce “cocina” as “COH-SEE-NAH” but he pronounced it as “COH-CHEE-NAH” which would be “cochina” and that translates into a “pig.” My professor was like, “Oh no no, that would be calling your mom a pig.” Lol, I was cracking up to myself.

My professor also stressed that to say “mother” and “father” you must pronounce it with the accent and stress the last vowel, or else they mean entirely different words. If you say “papa” that means potato. If you say “papá” that means father. If you say “mama” that means “to suck” and “mamá” means mother. >_<

Good times.