Here my grammar teacher, Ana is letting my conversation teacher, Marianella know what she was teaching me.The other picture show the bus that we take to school. It costs about 12 cents.
Spanish Lessons in Cusco
We’ve been taking Spanish classes from an organization called FairPlay that offers individualized lessons in a unique style. All the classes are 2 hours in length. All are taught one on one, one student to one teacher. You can start lessons any day of the week and take classes on as many days of the week as you like. The suggestion is to take 4 hours a day, 5-7 days a week. If you choose the recommended 4 hours a day, then for 2 hours you learn grammar in a classroom setting and 2 hours a day you have practical conversation. We each have 2 teachers, one teacher for grammar and the other for conversation. All of the teachers at the school are single moms. They charge by the hour at two rates depending on experience. All start with about 10 months of training. Those with less than 18-24 month of actual teaching experience charge at $2.50 an hour. Those with more experience charge about $5.00 per hour. In our second day in Cusco, just before we planned on signing up for lessons, we happened to share a lunch table at a popular crowded restaurant with 3 women. By the end of our meal we wondered how the young Polish women happened to know the Spanish women she was dining with, She was obviously very close to and fond of them. She let us know that they were her teachers from FairPlay. She knew almost no Spanish 2 weeks ago and it was impressive that she could carry on a conversation in just 2 weeks. It was clear that her teachers knew no Polish yet had been able to teach her very well. She was very happy with what she had learned and wished she could stay for another week. She had hired the less experienced teachers. Based on what we learned from her we were confident to go with our choice to study with FairPlay and decided to use the less experienced teachers.
We commute from our apartment to the class room. Since our classes start at 8:00am we ride a city bus packed with students and many folks heading off to work.
Jeffrey and I are in separate rooms for our grammar classes where we learn things such as conjugation of verbs, the rules for how to tell is a word is masculine, feminine, singular, plural, adjectives and such. We do this for 2 hours. It’s pretty intense. There is no English spoken during this time… well maybe 2 or 3 words in 2 hours. My teacher just keeps patiently hacking away at things until I understand. For example, the first day, my teacher wanted to tell me what the day’s date it was in Spanish but of equal importance was to teach the Spanish word for “date”. So she asked me many questions such as what day I was born, if I was married and what day I was married, if I had any children and what day was the birthday for my daughter and what was the birthday for my husband. This took a while because all the questions were in Spanish as were my answers. After a while I began to see that she was not just making conversation but there was a trend to my answers. They all included a date. It was then only a small jump to learn the word for “date” and confirm that I understood. It had been a work out to learn that one word and I had to concentrate a lot. The class goes on like this for 2 hours.
Other tools that my teacher uses to teach me words are to draw a picture on the white board or to mime them. Rarely she knows a word in English and/or will use it. Once she was explaining to me that a hummingbird was a sort of bird. The Spanish word for bird that that she used was different than one I had learned previously. It may be a regional thing as in some countries in S America there are different words used for the same thing. I was a bit confused not really sure from her miming if the Spanish for humming bird was maybe really describing an insect or butterfly. I tried to ask if the word for bird she used was the same as the word I knew. Perhaps my pronunciation was way off. She tried to use the English word “bird” and said it fairly well and then doubting her pronunciation decided to write it on the board and wrote “beard”. I mimed a beard; we laughed. I helped her correct her spelling. As I said, it can take a while to learn just one word and then after that to learn the grammar that goes with it such as if it is masculine or feminine.
Many of the objects in the room such as chairs, table, wall are labeled but that only helps with less than a dozen words.
After 2 hours of grammar, we switch to a different teacher for 2 hours of conversation. Jeffrey and I each have our own conversation teacher. We leave the school to go outdoors but the four of us stay pretty close to each other during those 2 hours. It is difficult to carry on 2 hours of actual conversation with such a limited vocabulary. After we leave the school, we walk, take a bus or taxi to some district. It is super hard for to try to carry on a conversation while navigating uneven cobblestone sidewalks laden with dog poop, crossing busy streets and speaking over the traffic noises. But it makes it all very real. Since my vocabulary is very limited my teacher keeps it simple. She may point to a tree and ask what it is. If I don’t know, she tells me. Then she asks if it is masculine of feminine and I strive to remember the rule. Then she may ask what color it is and if it is large or small. I try hard to remember the new words she teaches me. Sometimes she drills me on things like conjugating irregular verbs while we are walking. It is nearly impossible for me to remember the complex rules for conjugating irregular words that I was recently exposed to.
The first day our conversation teachers took to the big San Pedro farmers market near the Plaza de Armas. The Plaza de Armas is the name of the main plaza in each city. In Cusco it is flanked by a Cathedral on one end and a large church on the other. I think the church is now a museum. At the market, we saw the many, many, many stalls … meat, vegetable, fruits and such. With the help of our teachers we bought things for making breakfast such as quinoa, oatmeal, puffed kichwi, pecans, brazil nuts, raisins, apples and bananas. Jeffrey has been making us some really tasty breakfast since we purchased those items. Our teachers also taught us the names of many fruits and vegetables but I’ve already forgotten many of them. Luckily, when you go to a market, you don’t really need to know the names of the fruits and vegetables. You can simply point to them.
And so each day our Spanish lessons continue like this. My grammar teacher also gives me homework to do using a workbook we purchased from FairPlay It is usually taks me 2 or more hours a day to do the homework, looking up the rules she has taught me and trying to apply them correctly. I find that it is much harder to be a student and do homework at my age than it was 45 years a but it really helps a lot to do the homework and yes, I know a lot more Spanish than I did a few weeks ago.
