Learning a language opens up a whole new world in front of you-a whole new culture- a whole new way of life.
I had started learning Spanish way back in July 2010 right after college got over. I was actually googling for Free online French course when I came across this BBC Languages site. They had an audio course for French while there was a tempting course for Spanish. It was an BAFTA Award winning short film divided in chapterwise model which taught you the basics of Spanish while engaging you in a thriller based in Madrid.
And thus started my trst with Spanish where I would get up early in the morning to avail free download till 8am, download 1 episode each day, pause and repause the episode to get the heck of it!
That was for one month-then in August I went to Chennai-and after 3 months when I went back home, I couldn't even find the notebook where I had jotted down things while watching the course video :(
The tryst with Spanish restarted when I came to Bangalore office and the project client was a Spanish-Latin American Telecom major.
The entire application is in Spanish which blows our nuts off at times when Google translate too comes up entirely out of context suggestions.
The most rewarding experience of being in this project has been the Spanish classes every morning- which turns out to be the best hour of our poffice time.
Our teacher is also a very passionate linguistic who knows Spanish , Portuguese, Dutch , French :)
From then , we have started exchanging pleasantries among us in Spanish, wishing Happy birthday too in Spanish.
The teacher guy tells us how passionate he is about language that even after a Masters in Mathematics , he pursued several language courses just for the love of it .
He admits that the present job of teaching and translation of documents is pretty boring and is his means of funding his travel n expenses if he gets a prestigious scholarship offered by the Spanish embassy.
In the one hour session we not only conjugate hablo-hablar-hablais-hablan but also share stories of Latin America, how you cannot stop Spanish people from taking the siesta, where are the best places to learn salsa in Bangalore, how good the Tapas es are in the El Tablao rest in Koramangala and what our Spanish counterpart Alberto meant to say when he said Oooorgent!