Hasta Luego

For years, I’ve been saying I was going to learn some Spanish.  Recently, Hutchinson Community College advertised an evening class in Community Spanish, using  Command Spanish so I decided to enroll as did one of my sons.  He actually took Spanish in high school and believe me after one night of class, I can see that he will have a real advanatage over me, even though he says he didn’t learn much in his high school class.

I’m very interested in the approach to our instruction.  Essentially, the focus is on learning to speak and understand functional phrases.  To that end, we will be focusing on phrases that either give simple directions such as “sit over there, come in here, wait…” or we will be asking questions that elicit simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ responses.  Because the focus is not on learning to read or write Spanish the phonetic spelling and pronunciation is key to our instruction.

I’ll close this blog post with an example of what how we are learning.  The  title of this post means, “Until Later.”  In our books we focus on reading AHS-tah/LWAY-goh.  (Caps inidicate where the emphasis is placed.)

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