So I have been learning Spanish for a while now, or should I say, I have been trying to learn Spanish.What I'm mostly doing is using pimsleur, (when I don't forgot) and reading from the travel blog ¿Donde andan estos?. At the beginning of course I tried to implement a Spanish environment by listening to Spanish music, watching movies in Spanish but as much as I wanted to do it, keeping the Spanish environment turned out to be more difficult than expected. Each time that I was starting to do something in Spanish, I wanted to do it in Korean instead.
Having my Korean environment on is something absolutely natural for me. I can switch it to Japanese without problem when I'm studying my kanjis or decide to watch Japanese cartoon. I also don't have that much problem to switch it to Chinese. But with the Spanish for some bizarre reasons, that completely different. I can watch a movie and listen to some music, without too much problems but after a while that becomes kind of painful and stressful. I think the reason is that I'm not that much into it.
Reading the blog in Spanish is easy. I'm not saying that I understand everything, I'm saying that with my background in French, Italian and Latin, understanding most of it is really easy. That should make me happy but at the contrary I find it extremely frustrating. The words are so close to the one I'm used to, the sentence structure as well, but I don't remember those words as Spanish words, I remember the translation. It's like my mind is translating everything all the time. I don't really feel that I'm learning something.
And now I realize how important that feeling is. That's probably what keep me going with the Korean environment and the kanji repetitions, that sense of achievement when I finally, (accidentally ?) understand a sentence or remember a kanji without struggling.
With the Spanish I didn't feel anything like that yet. Maybe I need to be more Spanish, to have more fun in Spanish. It's a bit of a conflict between something that I really like and enjoy, learning Korean, because I completely felt in love with that language sometimes ago for no particular reasons and Spanish that I'm learning a bit because I feel that I have too.
Getting ride of my Korean even for a short time to do some Spanish feels more like a core than like something really helpful.
I'll keep on trying, we'll see how it goes in the future.
