Unfortunately, all the pictures of karaoke were lost in a fire, so you get a picture of my sweet flashcardsIt’s been a good week. Over the weekend, I went to karaoke with 5 Colombians and we sang Spanish karaoke.
Cultural note #1: Most Colombians live with their parents until they graduate from college and get a job. This resulted in us (the 3 guys aged 22, 23, and me at 25) having to park around the corner and wait for the 3 girls (ages 18, 21, and 22) so that they could sneak out of their houses. Seriously? Are we in high school here? Not that I ever snuck out during high school…
Cultural note #2: Most college students have motorcycles, not cars. Combined with Cultural note #1, this means there’s not really a lot of privacy convenient to most kids. Public displays of strong affection seem to be much more socially acceptable. At least, that’s my theory based on the fact that Sergio ate his girlfriend’s face the entire 3 hours we were at the karaoke bar, and none of the other 3 people I was with even blinked.
Other happenings: Wednesday and Thursday I went to initiation meetings for Sonar Despierto, which means “Awoken Dreams” and is the Colombian equivalent of the Make a Wish Foundation for college students. Seems like they do some pretty cool stuff, so I’m looking forward to working more with them.
Spanish Vocabulary! People keep asking me how the Spanish is coming, which is kind of a difficult question to answer well. I have a box of 1,000 flashcards that have the most frequently used Spanish words on them, and I finally finished my first "run through" of studying them and decided to give myself a massive review test. Each card has an average of 2.5 words on it.
Completely Correct Cards: 75.2%
Cards with 1 Tiny Error (i.e. getting the gender wrong): 3.7%
Cards with 1 Significant Error (i.e. got the “main” word on the card correct, but missed a subword): 15.8%
Completely Botched Cards: 5.3%
So, in total I got ~85% correct out of 2,500 words. I was hoping for >90%, but that’s not terrible.
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