This semester alone I feel like I have grown tremendously as a Spanish speaker and writer. Spanish vocabulary has always come to me a bit easier but conjugations, past, present, and future tense, reflexive or not reflexive all of that usually goes right over my head and confuses me. I have taken a lot of extra time this semester to focus on the topics that are more of a struggle for me and I am happy to say that I have gotten a lot better at some of the things that used to be weaknesses for me. The thing I am most proud of from this semester was my infographic project. I created it in ios pages and it turned out really well! Of course, there were some errors I had to fix but overall in the end I am really proud of how the finished product came out.

My main obstacle for Spanish class this semester was my own mental health. I had a lot of mental blocks which made it difficult for me to have motivation to study and complete my assignments. To counteract this I took off one Friday so I could have a longer weekend so I visited my family. After that long weekend I felt very refreshed and I got my motivation back and I was able to power through even more.

The image above is the Spanish project that I am very proud of. I spent a lot of time designing it so I’m really proud of how it turned out.

Being able to take time after every unit to reflect on what I had learned helped me to better understand what I had thoroughly grasped and what I still needed to work on. I personally enjoyed the reflection portions because it gave me a chance to see how far I have come in that one area of Spanish. At the beginning of the semester, we did a project where we described our families. Since that was our first real project for this class I remember being nervous but after watching some of my other classmates projects it helped with my nerves a bit. I commented on Elk’s project because we both have cats so that made me happy. Being able to reflect on a project from a few months ago like that showed me that I still have retained the knowledge fro that previous unit and it makes me happy that I am absorbing the information from this class.

Exploring Culture

In each of the units on LingroHub there was a cultural section. Some of the cultural assignments had me do some research online while others had me do some readings. I found that I learned more from the specific readings in the activities other than doing the research on my own because the readings given were a bit more concise. Honestly LingroHub is not where I learned the most about culture in the Spanish speaking world. I learned the most about the culture through my boyfriend and his family because they are Spanish speakers. While being with my boyfriend he has taught me a lot about his culture, traditions, how he lives, and even how he speaks. For me I learn best by doing and practicing so having my boyfriend involve me in his culture and traditions has not only a better understanding for it but a love for his culture as well. Most notably I have picked up on speech patterns and specific phases that his family uses. The biggest one that comes to mind is that his family always says “hasta pronto” to one another when leaving which means see you soon. Most other people would say adios or hasta luego which means bye or see you later. He told me that the main reason his family says hasta pronto is because even though it may be a long time before they see one another again they are promising to always return and support one another no matter what. This experience showed me that his culture really values family and that is something that I really respect.

Interpersonal Communication

This semester I had at least two projects where I had to make videos where I spoke about the unit we just completed. I enjoyed these projects because they gave me the opportunity to practice met pronunciation of words which I know is really important. Even though I understand the importance of recording your own voice so you can hear your mistakes I will still to this day hate hearing my own voice on video.

TalkAbroad was something I was new to this year. I thought it was cool that I would get the opportunity to talk with someone from a different country from my own. Of course it was so nerve-racking because I wanted the person I was talking to to understand me but in the end I was proud of myself for being able to carry a conversation in Spanish quite well.

Throughout the semester I feel like I have grown a lot as a Spanish speaker. Even though I struggled a little with the first TalkAbroad session because I was so nervous by the time the second session came around I was a lot more confident in myself and my abilities.

Presentational Speaking

This semester there were at least two assignments where I had to make a video of me speaking. Like any person learning a language of course I made mistakes but since it was a video I can always replay it and learn from my mistakes in the future.

Sadly my computer is being finicky and won’t let me upload the particular video I was talking about above 🙁

Presentational Writing

For the writing aspect of this course I do have a project of mine that I am particularity fond of and that wound be the infographic I made a couple of units back.

Even though I am really proud of how this particular project came out there were a lot of obstacles I had to overcome to make it turn out this good. For starters while I was still in the drafting stages of this assignment I was struggling a lot with the commands and how to write them the correct way. Something I struggle with in my writing is using the correct endings for things such as commands, past tense, present tense, future tense and even conjugations of words. Even though I struggled with those things for this particular project in the end I was able to figure it out and I am glad I was able to problem solve through it.

Interpretive Listening

Honestly the listening activities every unit were a bit of a struggle for me. I have a short attention span and the longer audios where I had to listen for certain words and conjugations was difficult for me. It would take me quite a few run throughs of the audio to get a firm grasp of what words were being said and when. The audios that would trip me up the most were the ones on LingroHub where they would take off 0.5 points for every wrong answer. These were always the worst for me because they were long so I was easily distracted throughout the recording but sometimes the words they said in the audios I would have to conjugate mentally before I could click the correct answers below.

Interpretive Reading

Some of the assignments in LingroHub were focused around reading a bit of text and either picking particular words out of it or using what I learned from the text to help me in the next step of the assignment. The reading assignment I found most interesting from this semester was the one about skimming the readings. This assignment is particular taught me the essential skill of how to skim a long body of text while getting the most important information out of it at the same time.