Quarantine time part 1 - Learn a language

If you had told me some months ago that we would have the "Contagion" movie turned into reality, I would tell you that you are a lunatic.
Still it happened! And we are all closed up at home everywhere in the world. (Well, almost everywhere).
Some people don't have a job anymore, some people work from home. We stopped socializing, we stopped spending time outside, we stopped wasting time.
To speak about myself, I continued working online, but still some of my students (or their parents) didn't want to continue this way, hoping this thing will go away fast. It didn't.
Suddenly I found myself with less students and more time since I didn't have to waste time to commute from one place to the other.
Time though is not enough. Teachers who work online will understand me. You have to prepare material, presentations, organize your time in your lessons, create games, create activities, write notes for the students so that you make sure that they will study, correct essays looking at photos of the actual essay.
If you add all the housework (since we clean the appartment more often now), there are a million things to do and sometimes I really can't understand how the day has passed.
Sometimes though I found myself being idle and with no motivation, so I had to do something about it.
I see people on Instagram and Tik Tok and I really didn't want to be that person who lets herself be bored. So I had an idea. Why don't  I ask teachers to exchange lessons with me?
I wrote it on a Teacher FB group and there were so many people wanting to share their knowledge. I didn't only find somebody for me, but a lot of teachers found a couple to learn the language they desired.
I have overdone it though and now I am learning 4 different languages!!!  I thought I could write something about how I am experiencing it!

I have started with Bulgarian about a month ago. I wanted to learn this language for years and I kept nagging my friend and colleague Bobby to teach me. Now we found the chance. The first shock is the Cyrillic alphabet. Looks like the Greek one, but it has so many different phonemes and you have to remember all the z and b and s sounds. But I loved it and I can say that I read most of the words correctly now. I haven't learned any verbs yet, still learning reading, pronounciation and chunks of language. I have a long way to go, but luckily I have a fantastic teacher!

Russian? I said why not? Now that I am familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet, I could give it a try. Lots of things are common with Bulgarian, some are very different, but I can say that I spent less time on the alphabet and I could read words faster. I just had one lesson and I learned how to say "This is ..." with different objects and also the negation. I have to study the words of course but I am very enthusiastic about it! My teacher is very organized and well prepared, so I can't wait for my next lesson!

Spanish... Oh well! I had started learning Spanish 20 years ago. I had reached B1 level, I also passed the exam successfully and have a certificate on my wall. I have even continued for a couple of months to reach B2 level but somehow I stopped (life and too much work I guess). I have always understood when I read and listened, but speaking? It's been a looong time! When I sent my new teacher a message, she immediately started talking to me in Spanish and I pushed myself sooo hard to communicate in this language. So in our first lesson I read texts and we congugated verbs and I am glad that I remember a lot, but I need a lot of work to actually be able to speak and write. There is a difference between receptive and productive skills - that's what I tell my students and this is what I am experiencing now. I believe with lots of effort I will be able to make it.

French. When my son was a baby (this is looooooong ago), I started French. I continued for 3 months. I really hate this language, I can't stand it. Everything is wrong. The pronounciation does not suit me, the grammar is difficult, the vocabulary is awful, the sound of  is terrible. Still, I thought I should give it a chance again. I still don't like it. My new teacher tries to make me pronounce stuff right, I really can't. So far I have remembered simple verb congugations and tried to create some sentences with nouns - articles - verbs.  I still have lots to study. Maybe some time I will be able to communicate in French, the basic stuff at least but I don't think I will ever like it though.


Well that's about it. Trying to keep my spirits high.

Next time - new suggestions.