¿Dice que?

The first day of school is always so interesting. Who's in your class? What's your teacher like? Can you understand what she says? This morning was our first intensive Spanish class and intense it was! We have class for 3 hours a day, Monday through Thursday, with outings to practice our Spanish on Friday. I was placed in the higher level Spanish class, which is both very exciting and incredibly intimidating. This was the level I was hoping to be in because I want to work really hard to try to become fluent in Spanish, but it also entails a lot of work. Our professor is rather difficult to understand (for me at least), because she speaks very, very fast and although she tells us to ask questions to clarify if we're confused her answers are often not very illuminating.

Communication in general is a somewhat difficult topic. Chilean Spanish involves a lot of shortening of words and everyone speaks super rapid! Plus there are lots of "Chilenismos" (Chilean-isms) to learn. My host family is really good about explaining things and trying to speak slowly for me, but when I have to ask them to repeat things more than once I feel like I'm being a nuisance. It can be really frustrating because I have intelligent things that I want to say, it's just that in Spanish I have the vocabulary of probably a middle schooler instead of a college student. I'm confident that in a week or two it will be easier to comprehend what people are saying just because we'll be more used to listening to Spanish, but for now my most commonly used word by a lot is... "Que?"