Conjugation for the Nation

So what I have I been spending the last week doing? Well, apart from work I have found myself scribbling down the regular Spanish conjugated verbs that end in ‘ar’, ‘er’ and ‘ir’. I have been writing these out as part of the learning process and objective to learn all the important regular conjugations off by heart. I had learned them once before, but if I don’t practice or use them regularly, they fall out of my head.

It’s important for me to learn as much Spanish as I can. Currently, I can get by. My ability to translate Spanish is good, I can definitely get by talking (although in-depth discussions about river dams leave me perplexed), my reading is ok and my writing is atrocious. It is the rules that I now crave to learn and etch into my subconscious mind. I want to construct perfect sentences and use appropriate tenses; otherwise I will never be able to move on.

I sat in a meeting room on my own three weeks ago, mulling it over. I have completed a Spanish course, I have read Exacto! A practical guide to Spanish Grammar and did all the exercises. Granted, that book was immense and opened up the rules of the Spanish language. But like everything we are not really good at or completely confident in, complacency takes over and after I’d passed my Spanish course and read Exacto, all the learning stopped. In my mind, I could hear this little voice saying You need to carry on learning Spanish, you need to push it. But I didn’t, I revelled in my accomplishments and put it to one side.

After a few months I reasoned with myself and concluded that I should not forget all that I had learned. I had been on a roll but momentum will stop if I do not help myself. So I decided to test myself and write out all the conjugated verbs of the word ‘Hablar’ whilst eating my Wheatabix. Surprisingly, I got almost all of them right when I went to check. I moved onto ‘Comer’ where I did ok in that to. I was going to be late for work but I really wanted to test myself on ‘Pedir’ so forgot about time and wrote down all the combinations I could remember. I did not do so well with that one but I was buoyed by the fact that most of what I’d learnt was still there.

The little voice came back and I agreed. I should not let the momentum roll to a standstill. As mentioned earlier, three weeks ago I looked up a private tutor on some webpage and went to the empty meeting room. I made the call and arranged private lessons.

Today I am reflecting upon my decision, it hurts the pocket book and yes it eats into ‘my time’ but I do feel like I’m learning. Also the fact I’m paying for it makes me motivated to move on, because if I don’t do the homework (yes, I get homework) then we spend the following lesson doing the homework when I should be learning something new.

Complacency looms, it is true. When I’m tired or have a headache it comes knocking on my door. In the meantime, when I see a scrap piece of paper lying around I start writing down regular verb conjugations to test myself. My hope is by the time complacency overpowers me and I quit everything I would have been able to learn some of the rules and verbs off by heart.