Nee's Language Blog

According to my Lonely Planet's Latin American Spanish phrasebook & dictionary, 300 million speak Latin American Spanish as their first language and 100 million speak Latin American Spanish as their second language.

I have been learning Spanish for approximately half a year. It is going well so far. I can understand basic daily conversation phrases. However, the grammar, such as tenses, is giving me tension. I began to be attracted to Spanish when I found out that there are many similar words between Indonesian and Spanish. Moreover, there are many Spanish-speaking students here at the university. Most of them come from Central and South America. It is quite interesting when I can understand what they are talking about.

I was surprised when I read the news about this polyglot. It was amazing. His name is Alex Rawlings from London. He is 20 years old and he speaks 11 languages — English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan, and Italian. I cannot imagine myself speaking 11 languages, still far away from that. I wonder how he can do that. 

I have prepared so much for this test as soon as I finished the previous test in November last year. This is the last level of Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL). Therefore, it is indeed not easy. It is called Level 5 or equivalent with C1 in Common European Framework Reference for Languages (CEFR). I passed Level 4 on the previous test on November last year, which means my level is B2. 

Recently I have been challenging myself to study Spanish in Mandarin! After failing the last Chinese (Mandarin) proficiency exam (I will write more about it in another post), something has triggered my enthusiasm to do more with Mandarin. Back to the Spanish, you can see the book that I am using for Spanish in the picture. I choose easy material at the beginning. This book contains daily conversations, such as greetings, transportation, restaurant, etc. I still can understand much without looking at the Mandarin translation so far. Therefore, everything is quite good for now.