Me gusta …


Tonight I had a Spanish lesson after work, to make up for the one I missed when I was in Hong Kong. It was quite a different dynamic to going to class on Saturdays; for a start, I was in an evil temper after work, and my mood wasn’t improved by getting lost on the way to the class, taking rather more trains than necessary to get to Bugis. After a day of thinking about things, I was worried that I wouldn’t have any brain power left for learning Spanish, but happily the part of my brain that is necessary for languages is quite separate from the part that handles databases and revenue optimization. So hooray for that.

The class was quite different: much younger than at the weekends. The other students seemed to be about 18, although knowing how hard it is to play Guess The Age Of The Singaporean, you can never be sure. Given that three of them arrived with identical National Service backpacks, I guess at the weekend they have to be tramping around the woods so they can’t be learning Spanish, and maybe all the other people who work in the week can’t make it to Bugis for 7pm. And I feel guilt for abandoning my wife with La Serpienta Negra.

The actual class felt much easier than other ones during this course: hopefully that means something is sinking in. I suppose once you’ve started conjugating irregular and reflexive verbs, remembering pronouns when parsing gustar feels a lot simpler.

Gustar is hella easy, because you don’t stick special endings on it; yo me gusta, tu te gusta, el se gusta, etc etc, and there’s only a few verbs like that (doler was the other example) so that was something to savour.

It felt like we were going over some older material; I am sure I remember doing a lot on gustar before, but it all felt slightly different. I’m not going to complain about feeling competent, of course.

After two hours, I fled home. My wife had managed to handle the child without me, and also made some sweet potato cakes from The Feed Zone Cookbook, a set of recipes for people doing lots of exercise (especially cyclists) that I got for Christmas. I’m very excited to try these out and see how good the recipes are; if they’re great, I will try to report back tomorrow. If they’re not great, I may say nothing. If they’re really good, of course, I might just spend my time eating more of them, so there may be some mystery surrounding them.


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