in the previous months i failed to find the spanish classes i was looking for – somewhere in town, as part of some nice project or organization. and the experience of the summer classes organized by the city was awful enough not to try city language courses again. so now i’m checking out what might have been the obvious: the language program on campus.
“high impact” as they put it, with three classes a week. and in principle for students only, but staff can negotiate to get in. after having settled that with the language center, a question remained: to get in which class. (ay, this is where i get all nervous and sweaty when thinking back of the city course and sitting through a full hour of learning the spanish alphabet…) the point is, i’ll be pretty unhappy if i have to start with a total beginners class. but it’s perfectly true that i have as good a no spanish grammar, and when i try to speak italian comes out. i explain the situation in full details to the language center people but they don’t really take the time to consider the story. instead, they give me an access code to the on-line placement test. i take a deep breath (ay, if i had known i could have minimally prepared myself…) and take a chance: i go for the intermediate level test, not the beginners one. the weird structure of my basic knowledge of spanish becomes visible: no mistakes at all in reading and listening comprehension, but one mistake after the other in the grammar part.
the test takes me automatically back to level one. oh shit. then it seems that for some reason (well… the grammar questions about verbs concerned the present tense, while in the second level test they were about various past tenses. hereby confirmed that inventing grammar is more easy in the present than in the past) i pass the test without problems. declared fit to start classes in level two, this friday, three days a week, during lunch break, on campus, for free. me siento muy afortunada.