Spanish

As regular readers of this blog may know, I've been studying Spanish since November 9, 2020. I really began studying it before that, but I've been studying every day since that date. I use Duolingo and I have a 228 day streak going. That is to say, I've studied Spanish for a few hours every day for the last 228 consecutive days. Yay!

I have a Spanish tutor, which is good because learning a language is difficult. At least, it is for me. First, there are all those words to learn! And then verb conjugations and verb tenses. In Spanish (and often in English, too) a verb changes depending on the person speaking. In English, the word "Go" is easy to conjugate. I go, I went, I am going, I have gone, I will go, I will have gone, I was going, I had gone, I will be going, I have been going, I had been going, I will have been going, That is twelve tenses. English has twelve tenses and Spanish has fourteen tenses. But the example I just gave is only for the first person point of view. There are other points of view. In Spanish the points of view are: I, you (informal), he/she, we, you (formal), they and you (plural).

One of the "fun" verbs to conjugate in English is "to have," with conjugations like "I had," "I have had," "I had had," I have been having", "I will have been having," "I had been having," etc. Spanish is no different. There are points of view for each verb, and there are different tenses. But my Spanish tutor is always ready to help me.

An aside:

I should mention that my Costa Rican friend's name is Nuria, so I won't have to keep calling her "my Spanish tutor." I'll just call her Nuria. Here's an interesting factoid: in Costa Rica, people have four names. They have a first (given) name, and a second (middle) name, just as we in America have. Then they have a third name, which is their father's last name, and a fourth name, which is their mother's last name. When a woman gets married, her name does not change. She does not adopt any part of her husband's name.

Nuria was married in America, so her U.S. marriage certificate shows her last name as her husband's last name. But in Costa Rica, her full, legal name is the name on her birth certificate. Her husband was (he is deceased now) an American and she lived and worked in America, so she has a Social Security card with her husband's last name, and she has a passport with her own last names (birth names), so working with government agencies in the two countries always carries the possibility of confusion or misunderstanding.

But I'm off topic. I was talking about the difficulty of memorizing tenses in another language. Some verbs are rather easy to learn. But then there are the "exceptions."  For example, let's use the verb "to go" which in Spanish is "ir."

Here is the present tense:

yo voy	I go
tú vas	You (informal) go
él/ella/ello/uno va	He/she/one goes
usted va	You (formal) go
nosotros vamos	We go
vosotros váis	You all (informal) go
ellos/ellas van	They go
ustedes van	You all (formal) go

But wait, that's just the present tense. There are thirteen more tenses to learn. Here's the preterite tense:

yo fui	I went
tú fuiste	You (informal) went
él/ella/ello/uno fue	He/she/one went
usted fue	You (formal) went
nosotros fuimos	We went
vosotros fuisteis	You all (informal) went
ellos/ellas fueron	They went
ustedes fueron	You all (formal) went

 Two tenses down and twelve to go. Here's the future tense:

yo iré	I will go
tú irás	You (informal) will go
él/ella/ello/uno irá	He/she/one will go
usted irá	You (formal) will go
nosotros iremos	We will go
vosotros iréis	You all (informal) will go
ellos/ellas irán	They will go
ustedes irán	You all (formal) will go

Okay. Enough of that. You have the idea. So I'm doing this Spanish thing every day, usually two to four hours per day. The only thing I'm learning is that I'm easily confused. But it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble. And I'm writing this blog when I get time, which is why I began writing at 4:30 AM today. 

Another aside: Nuria used to work at an optical shop. The man she worked for, the owner of the shop (and a good boss, at least to her), just died. He had Covid and was hospitalized for three or four days before he died. He was 38 or 39 years old with a wife and two young children. There is Covid vaccine in Costa Rica, but his religion (Jehovah's Witnesses) forbids vaccinations. Just like far-right groups in the U.S., including some members of the GOP, these groups are killing off their own members by giving them bad advice. Yet at the end, each one of us is responsible for our own health and our own life.