I started taking Spanish lessons a couple of weeks ago. I realize that I don’t have any time to learn Spanish right now, but I feel like if I don’t start now, it just gets later and later and harder and harder to remember any words. I found a teacher on italki and speaks 7 languages fluently (omg. 7! – English, Spanish, Catalan, French, German, Italian and Portuguese and learning Gaelic and Swedish) and three lessons in, I’m wishing I started a decade ago. I’m actually not sure I could have started a decade ago – I think I needed to watch Vince just tumble into Chinese and China and having fun with the language knowing only a handful of words and terrible pronunciation. In the past, I would have been too embarrassed to try to speak to a native speaker. But I’m mostly over being embarrassed at how bad my Spanish can be. I was groaning and talking to a friend about all the verb tenses (14? 17?) and how I’ll never be able to remember them all and she said to only learn the present and then modify by saying yesterday or tomorrow. Ahahahaha. A month ago, Spanish just sounded like one long flowing river of sounds. Now, I can differentiate words in conversation. And every once in a while, I can hear – oh yeah, that’s a word I’ve heard before – I should remember that word, but I’ve forgotten what it means now. I can tell that I’m tired now…I can practice all the time at the hospital, but when I’m tired and stressed, I can’t even really go through my simple introduction that I usually give all my Spanish speaking patients. Oh, and I had both Spanish and French speaking patients recently and that is super confusing. All the cobwebbed words from HS French mix with the more recent Spanish.