Spanish class

A couple of weeks of Spanish class to catch up on. Going well, mostly. Several people have given up, so the class is now noticeably smaller. This is a good thing -- everyone gets to talk more. Last week, more than half the class was spent on nothing but speaking. The instructor conducted a relatively extensive (by intro standards) interview with each student, using everything we have learned so far, plus additional words and expressions that he defined as he went along. Two patterns emerged.

One -- most students are extremely frustrated not to be able to say what they think. They are thinking in complex terms -- full vocabulary, past and future tenses, etc. Of course, they have none of this in Spanish yet. But they seem to be unwilling, or it just doesn't occur to them, to simplify intentionally and reduce their answer until they can say it, even if that leaves the nuances out. They try to say it all, and immediately get stuck. This is annoying, but I can relate -- my initial reaction is to go complex too, especially since I could say it all perfectly adequately in French, and some part of my brain somewhere must think "If I can say it in one foreign language, I ought to be able to say it in another." Takes some effort to accept that it doesn't work like that.

The other pattern is far more irritating -- when students can't say something in Spanish, they immediately blurt it out in English. To them, it's better to say it in some language than not to say it at all, and they are either too lazy, or just too overwhelmed, to pause and ask. To me, it's infinitely better to use ¿Cómo se dice? five times in a sentence than to use a single English word, but evidently others don't feel that way. That drives me crazy, but what can you do...

Last week's exchange of the evening:

Instructor to student: ¿De dónde es tu esposo?
Student: De Toledo
Instructor: ¿Si? ¿España?
Student (pauses): No... Ohio