At the beginning of the year, I knew next to no Spanish. I was interested in learning the language because I wanted to be able to speak better Spanish to customers near my work and with friends of mine who are fluent. The things in class that best helped me at the begging of this year. In terms of projects, the most fun to do were the videos, as I far prefer speaking in Spanish to writing this video I recorded over zoom as one of our first projects. It was a big improvement in my Interpersonal Communication skills to be communicating with a classmate entirely in Spanish.

The difficulties from the recording software made this video very hard to record, so We ran through the script many times before submitting, and in a way I’m happy for the distraction, as we learned our scripts very well and were able to do the video very cleanly once we were done with our technical difficulties.

One thing I learned this year was never to use short cuts or websites to learn words, and always use my notebook to write words and definitions so that I have them as muscle memory. The best part about using lingro learnings was we got large sheets for words and definitions.

Exploring culture

This year we learned many things about Spanish culture, but the most interesting to me was when we explored how Spanish speaking countri3es use the internet differently than English speaking countries. Using sites like Bing and Whatsapp more than us, while still using sites like Youtube a similar amount. This made me feel closer to the other cultures now that I know how they spend their time.

Engaging in Communities

To engage with your local community is incredibly valuable, and learning Spanish will help me do that because many people in my hometown speak Spanish, so I feel that now that I have a more form grasp on the language, I may be a more valuable part of my local scene, and I should be better at my job, as I will have to ask less of my Spanish speaking coworkers for help when the customer is Spanish.

Interpersonal Communication

My interpersonal communication skills mostly improved as a way to study for my speaking tests. The speaking tests are set up more like a conversation, so to study for them I watched videos of conversation to better understand the flow. Talking to fellow students also helped me understand how words have specific circumstances where they should be used, and I learned to use discipline and not just throw out words I thought might make sense, as they often made the other person confused. for the best results, I learned to listen in spanish farm more than I speak, and I can speak to anybody that I want.

Presentational Speaking

My ability to speak Spanish in a presentational way has improved greatly this year. Below is the video I made for our final project, and I was able to memorize all my lines for this video prior to recording, rather than reading the words of a sheet of paper. This helped my Spanish because it forced me to fully understand the words by repeating them over and over again in preparation phases. The things I said in that video I will most likely never forget because they are so ingrained in my memory, which is great for both memorizing the words and feeling more fluent in the language.

Interpretive Listening

Being able to follow class every day necessitated that I understand how to hear Spanish well, and to practice this we had lingro learning challenges about being able to hear a d=word and identify it. These activities helped a lot because I had to think about how to spell, say, and define the words all at once. We didn’t do it too often in Lingro, but it was always helpful. Below is one of the ones I went through.