When you get to a certain age they say it's good to keep your mind active and try to learn new things. This, they say stops your brain from turning into some gooey mush, so I've decided to try to brush up on my scant knowledge of Spanish. To this ends I enrolled myself and me esposa on an adult education course. We attend this class in the old County Council offices in cross street every Monday. We hope it will help us to get more out of our holidays in the Dominican Republic where we will be going in January.
I did a trek through Peru in 1979 where I learned quite a lot of Espanol. This was rather a long time ago and coming back to it after 30 years is a bit of a struggle but it's surprising how much is still lodged in my grey matter, unfortunately it's not lodged there in any coherent form.
Apart from a girl in her mid twenties we're all late 50's to late sixties, and of course the youngster has much more of a grasp of it than us oldies. One bloke next to me brings a mountain of books and dictionaries, others like me just jot the odd thing down on a pad as an aid memoir.
At the moment we're trying to learn about irregular verbs, and reflexive verbs. Now I don't even understand what these are in English so you can imagine my problem with learning this in Spanish, it makes my brain hurt. Never the less some of it will stick in there, I hope.
When I was at school I was top of the class one year in French, so I must have had some sort of aptitude for languages, if only I'd kept it up, but we brits don't, do we, and all the foreigners want to speak to us in English.
Anyway even if only a smidgin goes in at least I'm taxing my grey matter. Adios amigos para ahora.
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