Para Practicar

I’ve always been pretty good at finding “free time” to do things I enjoy, but here, I actually have a lot of free time.  Outside of being in class for a minimum of 20 hours a week, there isn’t a lot I have to do for school.  The only consistent homework I have is Grammar and Italian which combined takes no more than 30 minutes. Every once in a while, I’ll have to write a one page paper about my personality or something easy like that, or I’ll have to read something for my Literature class.  Other than that, I have a lot of free time to decide what to do with, so I’ve been trying to find things that I’ll enjoy but can also help me improve my Spanish.  I’ve been reading Twilight in Spanish and I just finished that. Now don’t be too impressed.  I’ve already read Twilight in English so I already knew the story pretty well.  And also, it’s Twilight. It’s not exactly the hardest Spanish to understand.  It was interesting reading an English book translated into Spanish because I actually found a few mistakes in the translation.  There are quite a few phrases in both English and Spanish that, if translated directly, make absolutely no sense.  Like “I’m sick of it” if translate to Spanish is “Estoy enferma de esto” and if you say that to a Spaniard they will literally think you are sick with something.  The way you say “I’m sick of it” in Spanish is “Estoy hasta la nariz” which translated to English is “I’m up to the nose”.  There were quite a few little mistakes like this in the Twilight.

Now that I’m done with Twilight, I’m reading this book called La Celestina.  I read a little bit of it for my Literature class and I really liked it so I thought it would be cool to read the whole thing.  I’ve only gotten through the prologue so far.  It’s going to be a little hard to understand then Twilight was.  I have to keep my Spanish dictionary out while I’m reading because I pretty much have to look up every other word.