Kimme: Which language first?

Friday, April 24, 2015


I was supposed to formally begin learning Spanish this week.  My daily exercise habit has become routine and I figured that Spanish should be the next project that  I throw my energy at.   But it is now Friday and I have only opened my Spanish book once.  I have some issues about learning a new language that I need to work out.  I am going to give myself a week to think this through and restart my Spanish program next month.   I know I should dive right in but I find myself in a panic when I find it is time to open the book.  And when I do open it, everything is a blur and gets put into the I will remember that later category in my brain.   

I think this project is going to take a lot longer to warm up to than I thought.  I don't even know that I want to add a new language to the mix.   I feel that I just got comfortable with English and my Chinese still needs  a lot of work.  I can have conversations with my mom in Chinese but just the other day I asked her what she was was studying in her Buddhist texts and she said that she wished that I knew enough Chinese to be able to read it because she thought that I would find it interesting.  It made me realize that by choosing to go through the American School System I lost out on a lot of Chinese culture.   My brother who also went through the American school system had both the aptitude and interest in learning Chinese was able to do it in two years by studying  full time with a private tutor.  I also wanted to learn to read and write Chinese but did not show enough dedication and follow through for my father to invest in my training. 

Spanish is going to be a lot easier for me to learn than Chinese.  I just have to get over my issues.  Frankly I am not even sure what they are.  I just know that I really would rather spend my time learning about plants today.  Michael and I had a great scouting trip in the Totomas cloud forest on Wednesday and I thought about how I would really like to study the plants here and how that is something that I have no doubt would be a worthwhile thing to learn to do.  Anyway, it is obvious that I am procrastinating.  I just told Michael I was scared about learning Spanish and he said to look up the word scared in Spanish.  So that is the plan for today's lesson.  I will make a list of all the emotions I can think of, then translate them to Spanish.  And it wouldn't hurt to remind myself how to say them in Chinese.  Then I will let myself look into plants...which is a whole other language.