Frustrations of Spanish 102

Last semester, I took Spanish 101. I had to take it for my major, which was English at the time. Actually, I was supposed to take Spanish 202, but to get there, I had to climb the Spanish ladder. That doesn't make sense to me. If I'm majoring in English, I feel like I should have to take English classes, not Spanish classes. About a week in to last semester, though, I changed my major. That meant I had to change all of my classes. I decided to keep Spanish, though. I thought it would be fun, and it was. Since I enjoyed 101 so much, I decided to take 102. When I told my adviser that, she assumed I wanted to minor in Spanish. I don't think so, lady.

Spanish 102 started out with review from 101. I did very well and I thought, "Hey, 102 is gonna be a breeze." Then we started in 102 stuff. The first chapter was a little hard, but nothing I couldn't handle. As the semester has progressed, however, I find myself struggling more and more. The frustrating thing, though, is that the whole class is conducted in Spanish. So when I have a question, the professor answers in Spanish. Predictably, I can't understand the answer, so I still have the same question, compounded by more questions created by the answer given. Because the class is in Spanish, I have a lot of questions, too. It's just a vicious circle of confusion, except I'm the only one in the circle that gets confused. The professor also makes important announcements in Spanish. He'll say, "¡Clase! ¡Muy importante!" followed by a lot of Spanish words that I don't understand.

Other people seem to understand Spanish just fine. That's also frustrating. I'm definitely not used to being the worst in a class. I'm not the worst in Spanish, but I certainly would not put myself in the upper echelon of students. I know you may be thinking, "Joe, you were pretty bad at calculus. Are you sure you're not used to being the worst?" Hey, back off, guy (or lady). I wasn't the worst in calculus, either. I was pretty close, but not the worst.

I think I recently found out why I do so poorly in Spanish, though. It's not because I don't know the rules of Spanish (the rules we have covered, anyway), it's because I don't know the vocabulary. There are two words that mean "it" in Spanish - Ser and Estar. We did an exercise in class in which there was a paragraph, and we had to fill in the blanks with the correct forms of ser and estar. I didn't do very well. I know the situations in which I am supposed to use each word, but I couldn't tell what the situations were because I didn't know what the rest of the words meant. It was frustrating.

Less frustrating is that yesterday and today, I've been totally dominating Spanish. By "totally dominating" I mean "slightly able to understand." Yesterday we had an oral exam and I could actually formulate sentences. Big whoop, yeah? Well, that's way better than I had anticipated. Today, I understood words. Total domination of the language, right? Well, not so much, but it's a start.