Day 32-37: Fun in Costa Rica (or how I bought a bus ticket in español) ...

Ugh, I really need to be more diligent in keeping this thing up to date. So, after departing my week of hell in California, I landed in Costa Rica, and promptly got screwed by immigration (and my own stupidity). Sort have been a running theme of this trip. After a couple days of fighting, I'm in the unfortunate situation of being forced to leave the country and re-enter to extend the number of days (something I'll be taking of over the weekend).

That being said, it hasn't been all negative. While I admit I didn't make much progress in my Spanish during my week of isolation in California, the same can't be said for being in Costa Rica. I decided to attend a local language school (Costa Rica Language Academy), and have been using more Spanish day-to-day.

One thing I've noticed being back in a Spanish-speaking country is there is a distinct difference in being able to speak Spanish, and truly having a conversation. One thing I began to notice in my last classes with Audri is that sometimes things can get repeative, and it can be difficult to work things I've learned independently into fluid conversation.

For instance, in the Dominican Republic, I struggled greatly to buy things in shop because my Spanish was shaky. This is also true in Costa Rica, but less so; I managed to actually buy a bus ticket round trip to Nicaragua entirely in Spanish (with much repetition and very slowly, but it was entirely in Spanish!

I have an unfortunate tendency to want to always speak English when doing something official, and its something I need to get past. Today, I managed to break through a barrier because I managed to get my travel arrangements mostly sorted.

Which brings me to my big news; assuming everything goes well, on Monday, I'll be doing a homestay program for two weeks (followed by a week stateside for the holidays, then hopefully returning to Costa Rica until Christmas week). This will really give me a chance to integrate with Costa Ricans, and really force me to use Spanish in every aspect of my life. I'll be continuing this with 1:1 2-hour a week tutoring and really trying to get back on track with hitting my goal.

I've made good progress, there's no doubting that, but California really disrupted me, and the last week of madness really hasn't helped to say the least. We're coming up on the half-way mark, and part of me thinks I need to reevaluate my progress and where my end goal will be, but no matter what, this has been an adventure, and I have no regrets.

Day 26-31: Up down, left right. Just really coming apart ...

I've made it no secret that the last few days from my update have been rocky to say the least. Between a bad trip to San Diego, combined with a long and exhausting conference, I've completely bounced out of my groove. I didn't even realize a month had passed until it had. Furthermore, I find myself standing on a cross-roads.

As it stands, I *really* just need a place to get settled and then resume work on my Spanish. I've got two radically different paths available, one that will help me in my language learning mission, and one that might help me settled for a longer period of time.

Right now, I need to deal with a personal issue that's been eating at me for awhile, while hopefully continuing with Spanish at least on a maintence level on the intermin. I'll post more tonight, but I wanted to make sure you guys knew I wasn't dead.

Day 23-25: Ugh ...

Got completely killed going to San Diego; I enjoyed time with my family, but the living situation made anything but the bare minimium of Spanish virtually impossible. I did a little duolingo to keep myself focused, and even had a bief chat in Spanish on the street, but it was essentially a total bust.

One thing that did help was working to do translation of articles on Duo's immersion page. I read through the Spanish wikipedia article on the Pan-American Highway (even thouhg the importer kinda butchered it). With myself being at LinaroConnect on Monday, I'm really not sure how I'm going to get back into a routine, but I'll just take it one day at a time.

Day 22: Object Pronouns Are My Bitch!

Sometimes, every once in awhile, you just need to sleep on a problem to make it go away. Such as my mental block with object pronouns. For the past several days, I've been stuck with object pronouns on both memrise (I'd memorize the sentence, but not actually understand it), and on Duolingo.

Today, I'm proud to report I got through it! I'm still a bit shaky, but at some point, it truly clicked how object pronouns go before what they're describing (i.e. te veré; I will see you), and was able to get through the Object Pronoun lessons on Duoling without too much difficulty. Now the only major thing left to open in this section is Verbs: Past, which I feel I will have a good understanding of due to practicing on memrise, and focusing on these with my language partners and tutors.

In addition, I managed a full hour of lang-ex today; normally, I'm struggling to do 30-30, but I managed to get through it. Scheduling my language partners has helped, though its still really shakey, and my disrupted sleep patterns aren't helping any. While I've made excellent progress thus far, I still feel rather short of where I *want* to be.

This combined with tomorrow being yet another travel day (thus unlikely to have any conversations in Spanish), does put a bit of damper on today. Ah well, its always a myth that you will have the perfect study environment.

Day 21: Zip, nada, nothing ..

Hate to admit this one, but there was no Spanish here (I rolled what I did past midnight into Monday). Seriously getting beat up by my sleep disorder. I saw a doctor and got a new script which might help. Will see how things go tomorrow ...

Day 19/20: Ugh ... I hate my sleep disorder

These two days were essentially washes; Saturday was almost a complete no-spanish day because I was traveling, which really through me through a loop and set my sleep disorder into a tiff and well, you can guess how Sunday went.

It wasn't a complete wash, I did have a conversation in Spanish with the cab driver for awhile as we went to Santo Domingo airport, and I did talk for half-an-hour with a langex partner on Skype, which helped, combined with the fact that I forced myself to finish my memrise basic spanish deck. I'll water it for a day or two, then add a new Spanish deck in addition.

Day 18: Conversing with confidence

Sometimes you just need a day of nothing to get through. While unfortunately this day comes wedged between another day which will be "nothing", I had several conversatins with more ease. I'm still lacking in the vocab front, but I had an interesting conversation with Audri on some historical events (though I did need some help from Spanish Wikipedia to get through some of the finer points of the conversation).

I also had brief conversations on the street with locals. I will say, with the fact that I'm heading back to New York tomorrow, I will miss this place and the people in it. I look forward to returning with a mastery of the Spanish language.