Throughout this course, I have learned the essentials of verbal and nonverbal communication associated with speaking beginner-level Spanish. Going into this class I wanted to be able to speak with my friends in Spanish and be able to understand what they were saying. Where I live and work when I am not at school is full of Spanish speaking communities and I hope that I will better be able to communicate with them with these new skills that I have learned from class. I had the misconception that Spanish would be almost impossible to learn but I now know that it shares some similarity to English and I feel very confident that I can speak with native speakers of the language.

For interpersonal communication, I ended up using Spanish with my roommates almost every day. The use of Spanish in these situations helped me build a strong base and learn how Spanish is used differently in every culture. Back home I speak mostly to people originally from Mexico but my roommates are both from El Salvador and they use certain terms differently then I heard from who I usually spoke with in Spanish.

My first speaking presentation was just a basic conversation with my roommate. https://drive.google.com/file/d/141qvR28tY3Q_nOLPHx4-b5gXvBhv2LCQ/view?usp=share_link

This video was hard as it was my first time speaking in this context so it was hard to remember what I had to say when having a basic conversation. If I did this again I would practice my Spanish more before recording the video to make it a bit more fluent. It was hard and I had to record it multiple times just to get a good video it definitely pushed me outside my comfort zone.

The first written project I did was about me at university and the classes I take.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oy7C6aplod3sbgfqt1-uGMO2YcNhccpWZwitHB1sdHk/edit?usp=sharing

When I first started writing this I made a lot of grammatical errors and it took a lot of revisions to get the final draft. The most important thing I learned in this project was writing in Spanish was a lot harder than I was expecting it to be. After writing in English for 19 years it was hard to learn how to write in Spanish. I feel that I now have a much better grasp on how to write in Spanish.

For listening I got my roommate to speak with me in Spanish as often as possible so I feel that I learned a lot from him speaking and he helped me a lot with understanding things. I also listened to him and his perspective on Spanish which was very helpful and let me expand my culture. It was always cool for him to tell me stories from El Salvador in Spanish.

The last project I did was about my favorite places on campus.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Cy6Xjiq8I9-bjL4TT5dpX4zYAsTtB-TO?usp=share_link

This allowed me to share more about myself and what I like to do in my free time. I enjoyed making this project as it felt a bit more personal than the other projects I had done to this point. This felt very rewarding to do and was probably my favorite video to film and I felt much more comfortable when I made this video and it felt much more fluent.