I have been studying Spanish (with Duolingo.com) for 30 straight days. Maybe that doesn’t sound like so much or so long, but it is for me. It really is!
      And okay, so I have a terrible accent (as per usual) and a real Spanish-speaker probably could not understand a word I say, yet I feel like – every time a new lesson starts – I really know what I’m doing!
      Sometimes I do have to stop and really think about the vocab (not so much the nouns and verbs, but the prepositions and conjunctions) but mostly I feel like when I see “Veo a tu maestro entre los estudiantes” I know that I can figure it out.
      Veo… I see. Got it.
      a… I’m not clear on it exactly, the personal a, maybe?
      tu… your.
      maestro… teacher (male or neuter).
      entre… with? No wait… in between? Oh! Among! Among, got it.
      los estudiantes… the students (plural).
      I see your teacher among the students.
      YAY me!
      It is so…awesome to feel like I understand this – a little. I mean, a very little, but still…
      And there are so many lessons yet to come, so my 298 words will increase (of which, I’m fairly sure I know 200!) and I might even be able to hear someone speaking and understand… assuming they are willing to speak suuuuuper slow for me.
      Like, glacially.
      Actually, they’ll probably need to write it down.
      Because like with German and with Japanese, I do better writing than speaking. Hells, that works for English too, which is why I blog, not vlog!

Note: Image is “Spain Map 2″ by (dariuszman) from SXC.hu