Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Colombia Bogota: Day 7


We just finished flying over a patch of the Caribbean & we are now looking down at (I am guessing) the shoreline of Mexico. Along the edge the water is shallow &  intensely turquoise. In 2 hours, if all goes well, we should be landing in Houston.

We were up early this morning because we had to catch the cab to the airport no later than 6 am. I can see that my colleagues are both sleeping right now & I’m drifting in & out of sleep myself. So tired! It’s been an intense week for me & the 2 colleagues I’m travelling with were in Bogota a week before me.

It’s surprising just how much mental loading is added by working in more than one language. It’s somewhat harder for me, I think, with such a limited working ability in Spanish: I have to listen so carefully in order to collect short phrases & words I understand & then put them together (often incorrectly) to create a cohesive sentence or statement. By then, of course, the conversation has galloped far beyond.

It seems to be far less difficult for someone like Xavier, a member of the CEGEP St. Laurent team whose ability with languages is a bit of a legend among his peers. He speaks 5 (or is it 6?) different languages, fluently. The story goes that he was being assigned to a project in Mozembique &  so wanted to understand Portguese. So he studied it for a couple of months, several hours a day & by the time they landed in the country he could speak it so well, he was able to translate for others who had been learning it much longer. I’m going to try to employ a few of his tips for learning a new language: always carry a little notebook which is indexed alphabetically (like an address book) & write down any new words you learn. Carry a standard phrase book too & highlight words you think will be handy. And most important: read ALOUD in the target language. Read aloud a lot. As long as you have the pronunciation more or less right you will learn it a lot better from hearing it, even from yourself.

So now I am almost dozing in my seat on the airplane, listening to the mix of Spanish & English conversation going on around me, & thinking about when I might see Colombia again - hopefully with better Spanish.


1 comment:

Sylvia Currie said...

Hey Gina, I had an adventure in Colombia as well --back in December. Wonderful trip! I love your tips for language learning. I plugged into Collins Spanish with Paul Noble ahead of my trip, and thought I was doing great until someone actually spoke to me and I had to respond! :-)