Chile, Day 7

I fully support any type of marriage that doesn’t involve me.

Our Spanish teacher is wearing a very colourful poncho today as if he wanted to celebrate the weekend that is about to commence. Fitting the occasion, we drop the usually more matter-of-fact way of learning and instead hold a Question and Answer session. When you spend so much time in class together you naturally start wondering. How old they are. Where they have been before. Whether they are married. How much money they make a year. So we wrote down our questions – to get answers and to practice forming questions in Spanish. I was surprised when I heard that Philippe had travelled to no more than two other countries and never to a single English-speaking country. His English is as close to perfect as it gets and he seems curious and insightful about the world. How lucky we are to get to learn about the Chilean culture and language in the place it all happens: in Chile.

In an article online I once read that in English just 300 words make up 65% of all written material. It was one of these “Language Learning Unlocked” or “Learn a Language in 12 Days” kind of articles that are mostly full of nonsense, but this one* was genuinely good. Likewise it seems that the few words of Spanish I have picked up during the last 7 days together with what we were taught by our teachers at the Universidad Tecnica Federica Santa Maria suffice to understand many things and say a few.

* 12 Rules To Learn Languages In Record Time: https://fhww.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/12-rules-to-learn-languages-in-record-time.pdf

This is story 3/5 of my Chile short stories. Read Chile, Day 9 now.