Spanish Lessons in Bolivia

Charlie with one of the tutors

In the morning, we filled our hearts with prayer and the Word, our stomachs with a simple breakfast and then left the spacious guest house to fill our minds with Spanish. It was the primary purpose for which we came to Bolivia this time.  By lunchtime, our minds were bursting with conjugations, preterit vs. imperfect, double verbs and subjunctive tenses until it felt as though our heads would explode.

At the end of the first week, Charlie wondered why he was not making faster progress. I was coming to terms with the difficulty of correcting grammatical errors that had become bad habits. Then we realized we had only been here for a week and we still had three more weeks to go. That was reassuring. As Charlie gained confidence in his ability to communicate, I became more fearful that every time I spoke I would be saying something wrong again. But my teachers assured me that this was a sign of improvement.

After we had been here about three weeks, we ate lunch with IPM's missionary, Jose Antonio Jordan and his family.  During lunch, Charlie carried on a conversation with him, and he commented on how much Charlie's Spanish has improved.  I heard it too. This improvement will help us as we continue to make trips to Latin America.

On Thursday and Friday nights I taught a teacher training class.  I took the notes from a class I taught a couple years ago in Mexico and went through them, making changes as I saw the grammar errors I originally made.  Then I took my lessons to my language school teachers and they went over them with me. When we finished, I said to Alicia, my teacher, "Prepositions are getting me into trouble."  She agreed and added, "They seem to be difficult in any language.  I have trouble with them in English."

On Thursday night I was so concerned about my grammar that I had a very difficult time, so all day on Friday, I asked God to give me facility and freedom as I shared some of the things He had laid on my heart.  While my grammar may not have been any better, at least I felt like I was communicating better because I was freer and more fluid.

A month is certainly not enough to learn a language, but it has helped us move forward to becoming more fluent.  We now feel more confident that we can go somewhere alone without the aid of an interpreter for Charlie. I am far from fluent, but at least I will do better than I would have before. When I translated for him on Saturday night, I realized that I need to work on my vocabulary as well as my grammar. I also now have a better idea of what I need to do in order to keep improving and how to progress so that I will not fall back into the bad habits.