speak spanish fluently

I’m moving this goal up the list. It is a top 10 goal now.
1. Practice Spanish every week.
+ attend weekly free classes at the library
+ seek out 1 person each week to converse with
+ do 20 minutes of exercises in workbook each day
2. Read Spanish every week.
+ read Spanish newspapers
+ check out Spanish children’s books from the library
3. Speak Spanish with my grandparents each month.
4. Keep learning by carrying a notepad with me every where I go, jot down words I do not understand

I am now comfortable giving clients directions to our office in Spanish. Baby steps.

I am going to enroll in Spanish Over Coffee here in Austin, a program which guarantees that participants will be comfortable attempting and eventually fluently speaking Spanish. It’s going to be a bit expensive but I’m so excited about it, and it is absolutely going to be worth it. Imagine the career benefits alone!

I saw an asian doctor speaking broken spanish with one of her patients a while back and it made me realize that I’m the only thing holding myself back on this goal. Her understanding/grasp of the language has to be more limited than mine based on the way she spoke. But for me, there’s all this pressure because I’m Mexican and I don’t want anybody to know that I can’t speak well.

But that’s my old attitude. Now, I don’t give a shhh what anyone thinks about my accent, pronunciation or the fact that I don’t speak Spanish very well generally.

When I move back to Austin or Houston this summer, I am going to do Spanish Over Coffee and start getting real on this.

Ok, I am signed up for a class called “Tertulia de Espanol” at TCU, taught entirely in Spanish. This will be challenging! It’s been a few years since I’ve even attempted a conversation in Spanish and I’m way rusty but this will be worth it! Will be digging out the old Espanol textbooks to prepare.