Learning Spanish and Organizing
¡Hola! ¿Como Estás? Me llamo Timotheo. Me esposá, Rebecca, y yo estamos aprendando Español por un viaje.
I think that’s something like:
Hello! How are you? My name is Timothy. My wife, Rebecca and I are learning Spanish for a trip.
We’ve been using a program called Anki for studying spanish flash cards for several months. We really enjoyed sitting down and expanding our vocabulary a few nights a week. Now we’ve stepped it up and started taking classes every week with a local language instructor. Our spanish has been improving at a good pace.
It’s surprising to me how much I actually enjoy doing this. I don’t really remember liking spanish this much when I was in high school. I think learning a language scratches an itch in my brain. Expressing myself verbally is so fun, that learning whole new way to do it is truly exciting. So, now we’re learning a lot and hoping to become conversational soon.
The big reason that we’re motivated to learn spanish, is of course our upcoming trip to Peru. We are going in October and will be working to bring Celebrate Recovery to churches there. It’s quite exciting to imagine trying to use this in a conversation with a native speaker and hoping to understand them at their incredible rate of speech. I’m also enjoying the process of setting up website and using tools for organizing the trip. Right now our tools include, blogs and PayPal donations of course. And then we’re using Trello for a lot of basic task management. Then I’ve been using another website called Managed Missions to track our fundraising progress and communicate our internal deadlines and meetings. Sorta. It’s hard to follow through with all of that, since this is the first missions trip we’ve organized and we don’t know everything to do for even the few people that are coming.