Spanish class

Spanish class number four last night. Going pretty well in general, though this one was a bit of a slog. Like French, Spanish has three basic kinds of regular verbs, and we learned how to conjugate one of them. Memorizing the endings is the easy part. It's the concept of conjugation that about half the people in the class -- I'd wager it was the half that have not been exposed to any foreign language at all until now -- had trouble with. Trying to figure out, on the fly, what person and number the sentence they are trying to say is in, and remembering the proper ending. This is where my French helped tremendously, so I was bored trough about half the class. This, by the way, I think is evidence for my highly unscientific idea that foreign languages should be taught "situationally" rather than analytically. Having read, and said, enough phrases with enough occurrences of pagamos, viajamos and cocinamos, most people will make an intuitive connection when to use llamamos and tocamos, and will use them correctly, without having to reason through the fact that this is first person plural and therefore must end on an ...amos.

More generally, a curious pattern is emerging among students. Some people just don't get it. They can't put together the simplest phrase or answer the simplest question. Some people sound so awful when they talk, and their accent is so hopelessly American, that even I, who doesn't know the language yet, cringe. The two sets of people, however, are almost completely disjoint. A certain young blonde whom I mentioned in a previous post speaks with an accent that screams not just "American" but "Valley girl," yet she makes very few mistakes, answers questions with minimal hesitation, and absorbs most of the vocabulary on the fly. Examples in the opposite direction are less striking (people who can't put together a sentence rarely have really good pronunciation), but still, on a couple of occasions, once the instructor walked them through the answer word by word, they sounded somewhat convincing. Evidence that analytical and auditory information are processed by different parts of the brain?