Español

Back before I retired, I worked for a investor owned public utility. I never mention them by name to save them the embarrassment of having the general public know that (1) they hired me and (2) they kept me on the payroll long enough for me to retire. Besides, most of the folks that read this know who I am talking about anyway. The company was and is a pretty good sized outfit and like most big companies, they had something they called employee development. The idea is a good one, keep your employees learning something new, that way they don't grow stale. In practice, I fear it becomes an opportunity for the training department to increase their size and budget.

Being the contrarian that I am, I tried to formulate my annual developmental plan with a minimum of conventional corporate training. Now keep in mind that the developmental plan had to be reviewed by higher ups so it could not be superficial and they were accustomed to seeing a lot of corporate training courses. Sometimes it took a bit of doing to come up with something worthwhile that didn't fall under the corporation's training department.

I usually tried to include the reading of some good books, often self help, business or management related. Those were pretty well accepted and I have to admit I learned quite a bit from some of them. After a couple of years, it began to get to be even more challenging to come up with meaningful studies. One day while I was brain storming on what I could include, I hit upon the idea of learning Spanish. I had a couple of semesters of French when I was in high school, but no foreign language courses in college. When I came up with the idea, the south end of the town where I lived was developing a sizable Hispanic population, we had an all Spanish radio station and a Hispanic supermarket. I figured I could learn a new language and actually have a use for it. I bought a tape, a couple of CDs and a book and set out to learn Spanish. Over the course of the next year, I did manage to learn several Spanish phrases and a lot of nouns. My favorite noun was esparrago. I would walk down the isle of the grocery store and when I passed the asparagus I would very quietly say esparrago. I just liked the way it sounded. In all truthfulness I did not learn a great deal of useful Spanish that year but I did manage to minimally accomplish the stated goal in the developmental plan.

That was quite a few years ago because I have been retired for ten years. Occasionally, over the years, I would come across a label in a store and would recognize some of the words in the Spanish portion of it. Then a few months ago, I decided that maybe it was time to renew my study of a foreign language. Since Spanish still seemed like a good idea to me, I began to explore my options. Someone suggested Rosetta stone as being quite good. I soon discovered that it was quite pricey as well. One of the problems with learning Spanish was and is pronunciation. I discovered that Google Translate has a little speaker symbol in the lower right hand corner of the translation box. If you click on that speaker, the word or phrase that was typed in or translated is spoken back to you in the appropriate language. That was a major coup. Now I could get any word I wanted pronounced correctly. Next I needed to find an organized method to set about learning the written language. I did a bit of searching and came up with a program called Anki. It is a flash card based program that feeds you new information at a rate you set for yourself and as you learn the information, it gradually introduces new information and periodically reinforces the old information. Fortunately someone had devised a card set for Español. I down loaded the file and started to work. When I got to a card that had a word I could not pronounce, I would paste it over in the Google Translate box and click on the little speaker symbol and get the correct pronunciation. It really worked quite well.

I've been at it now for several weeks and while I would still have to say to anyone speaking Spanish to me, "Por favor, hable despacio, mi español es malo", I can pick up bits and pieces now and then. Reading is much easier than understanding the spoken word. So far as the writing goes, it is currently very difficult and conjugation of verbs, well forget about that for now. I think if I keep on going at the rate I am going, in 2 or 3 years I may be able to have a simple conversation with someone speaking Spanish. Of course, at the rate the Alabama Legislature is going, by that time I may have to go to south Texas to find someone to have that converstion with, but that is a subject for a different post. For now I will say simply, adiós.