Just kidding! (And yes, that really is my middle name)!
Roman philosopher, Seneca, once said "While we teach, we learn." Research proves that "teaching is a fruitful way to learn", and it was this logic that motivated the next step in my learning project. I wanted to "teach" something in Spanish in order to support my learning of the language. This endeavor proved to be much more difficult than I originally expected, but I can say with certainty that the results were much more fruitful than I expected!
Roman philosopher, Seneca, once said "While we teach, we learn." Research proves that "teaching is a fruitful way to learn", and it was this logic that motivated the next step in my learning project. I wanted to "teach" something in Spanish in order to support my learning of the language. This endeavor proved to be much more difficult than I originally expected, but I can say with certainty that the results were much more fruitful than I expected!
A couple weeks ago, I took a big step in my learning project by singing in Spanish. It was an awesome experience, and this time I wanted to challenge myself further. While singing, I memorized lyrics written by someone else (which was no easy task); but this time, I created my own script, which proved to be much more time-consuming and challenging (hence why it took me almost two weeks to get this post together). I decided to create a script about something I know. Inspired by classmates Ellen Lague and Justine Wheeler's cooking/baking blogs, I decided to create a script about one of my favourite recipes: Agua Chile. Agua Chile is a Mexican ceviche with a spicy kick.
First, I decided to write out the script in English. I then created a table and began to translate all the words that I knew in Spanish. I was surprised by all the words I could recognize due to my work on Duolingo (a leveled language-learning site/app). I was also surprised that I was able to conjugate some of the sentences for subject/verb agreement from one of my Spanish books I bought and gave up on (out of frustration) many years ago. I then drew upon the expertise of my PLN that I have developed through networking tools such as Mixxer (a language exchange website), Linqapp (a language exchange app), and Skype, to help me piece together the (many) sentences I was struggling with. After a lot of consulting and collaborating with my PLN (and a final read-over from my husband to be sure), I came up with the following:
I wanted to accompany my speaking with a video of me preparing the recipe so that even if you aren't a Spanish speaker, you can still follow the recipe. It took me a considerable amount of time to work on my pronunciation for this video. For pronunciation, I referred to Rocket Languages, my PLN, and my husband. My speaking is still quite choppy, but I'm pleased with my progress. Below is the result!
It is still quite shocking to see two weeks of work condensed into a mere 3 minutes and 16 seconds. However, it illustrates why the process is infinitely more important than the final product!