Learning a Foreign language

For the first nine years of my life, I lived in Mexico. When I was nine, my parents and I moved back to the US. At the time, I was fully bilingual in Spanish and English. In the years since, that ability has atrophied to the point where I can make myself understood in Spanish with some difficulty, but am not at all comfortable with the language.

The problem is that neither of my parents were originally from Mexico, and so Spanish was never really spoken in my home growing up. Once we were no longer living in a place were it was used constantly, I had no reason to use it and keep it up.

I considered taking Spanish classes in college, but laziness kept me from getting the motivation to sign up for more work. Which is probably a good thing, since if I had signed up, that same laziness probably would have kept me from getting anything useful out of the class. Oh don't get me wrong, I would have passed the class. But I would have done it using the bare minimum of work to get a B. Since I can still get the pronunciation right, and I do have some vocabulary, that wouldn't have been hard. The problem is that once the class was over, I would still be in roughly the same position I was when I started. So anyway, I never did sign up for a class.

At this point my Spanish is very rusty. I can understand, and read it with a bit effort. And I can also speak it with about the same effort. My accent is about the only thing that hasn't gotten rusty. I have no trouble pronouncing words, even ones I've never heard before. Sadly, my very rusty and half forgotten vocabulary is that of a nine year old. So there are a lot of words I've never heard.

I've decided though, that I am going to put some effort into updating my vocabulary and into practicing so that i will become more comfortable in the language. To that end, I've taken to attempting to read, hear, and speak more Spanish.

The reading isn't that hard to find. Wikipedia has thousands of articles written in Spanish that I can spend an hour or two reading each day. And if I get tired of Wikipedia, there are tons of Spanish websites and blogs I can read.

Hearing Spanish is a little harder. I did find a few podcasts in Spanish that I can listen to. You can find most of them here: Foreign Language Lesson Podcast Collection
None of them are all that great. What would be best is some spanish television or radio. I'm going to go on an active search for some this week.

Finding places to speak it is almost impossible. I just don't know very many people who speak spanish besides my parents. And I don't have anywhere I can go to just hang out with people and speak it. I'm definatley going to have to work harder on this one.

Hopefully, with a little work, I can upgrade my rusty spanish skills. Of course, laziness may kill this whole project before it really accomplishes anything. We'll see how long my motivation lasts.