Hi I’m new to SSIS, having done some SSIW over the past couple of years and greatly enjoyed that.
I just returned from Menorca last week, where I was getting very frustrated with my Spanish!
Bit of background; nearly 40 years ago, I studied for A Level Spanish (3 years course to A Level, 2 years to O Level) but had to give up after the O Level as I was doing 4 A levels and it was killing me! By that time, we were reading Calderon (El Alcalde de Zalamea comes to mind) as well as contemporary texts, but having finished studying it, I have never ‘done’ anything with my Spanish, and sadly let it drop away.
If I spend 1-2 weeks in Spain, enough comes back to increase my frustration.
Last weekend in a light bulb moment, I remembered Aran talking about SSIS on the SSIW forum, and so, with only about 50 weeks to go before we hopefully return to Menorca, I’m 5 lessons in and counting.
All good stuff so far, with a lot of ‘yes, I know that’ mixed with the occasional ‘ooh I’d forgotten that’ or ‘well, I never said that back in 1978’! Coming from a background where I knew all the grammar (once upon a time) and understand pronunciation, it’s refreshing to start actually speaking the language.
The ‘S’ sound in ‘decir/hacer’ etc came as a bit of a shock, as we did strictly Castellano at school, and I’m now trying to decide whether to hold out for my traditional ‘Th’ sound, as an extra challenge to my listening and speaking, or to go with the SSIS flow. Funnily enough, going to Menorca makes the S sound more relevant to the Catalan ear!
So onwards and upwards and here comes the next lesson.
Finally, just in case anyone takes offence (as this is a Spanish forum), my user name has nothing to do with Spanish dictators, or any admiration thereof. It’s short for ‘Francophile’, denoting my abiding love for all things French, and I tend to use it across social media. Hope that’s OK. If you prefer not to use Franco, you can always call me Stephen!
