Spanish

I lived in a state where over half of the population speaks Spanish.  "It would be nice to understand and speak Spanish."  I volunteered at a local university for a course: Spanish for beginners. Professor told me, "It'll help with your English."  Sixty years old woman sat between two decades old, fast thinking students, and many of them already had some Spanish basics. I didn't.  "Como se Llamas?"  "Hola! Como te Llamas?"  "Me llamo es Maria."  I knew that I would have a moderate reaction that I planned to replace with a hard work. I immediately bought a textbook and CD, and the first evening was listening to the CD and was studying the first lesson.  The next day my colleague showed me an article. The article was in Slovak, and I volunteered to translate it over the weekend to the English language. The article was about the lab report, where they were teaching a ram to live on urea. The report read like a detective story. I did not know how to translate all ruminants stomachs into English so I translated them as the first stomach, second stomach, etc. I was sorry when the ram at the end of the other wise successful experiment died. I had fun to translate the article, but what I was to do was to learn Spanish, so that I could answer questions without thinking. I should also prepare myself for the second lesson. I went to Spanish class, but I was ashamed of myself. That was my last hour of Spanish.  Miserable ram - and to make matters worse it passed away.  Copyright (c) Marie Neumann Stephenville, 2007