day one

I started today (one of my New Year's Resolutions was to learn 8 words a day of Spanish. I'm going to track it here). the idea is that if I learn 1000 words I'll be able to understand about 90% of the spoken language. I'm heading to Argentina next in June so that gives me some time. Today I learned "a" (to), "y" (and), "en" (in), "el/la" (the), "por" (for), "ser" (to be), "un" (a), "que" (what). And my wife helped me conjugate "ser" but its hard for me to remember.

yo soy - learned something interesting here. Since every very conjugates for "I" then you never actually have to use "yo" - its basically clear from usage when you are using "yo".

tu eres

el/ella es

nosotros somos

(i can't remember the plural "you" or but Claudia says doesn't matter so much)

ellos son

In the course of learning the above I learned other basics like "casa" and "esperar". for some reason i have a good memory with just about everything else but not with languages so i hope i can pull this off.

I also learned that the following is ok: its going to be always clear that I'm a "gringo" so the main thing i want to do is to be understood and to have basic understanding, not to be perfectly fluent as if I were Spanish.

Claudia played for me two songs to help me learn:

I kept confusing Nosotros with Nostromos for some reason.

And then "Cuando Caliente El Sol" - so now I know "caliente" and "el sol" and "cuando"