I moved to Spain, or Catalunya, originally for a month, armed with no Catalan and very little Spanish besides the extremely useful “un cafĂ© con leche, por favor.” I stayed almost a year, and returned for another summer later, and in the course of that learned considerably more Spanish, and some Catalan. Nonetheless, [...]
I went to Cuba with an absolutely shocking level of Spanish that could best be described as non-existant. I’d taken a year of it in high school, possibly seven or eight years before, and couldn’t remember a word, other than “paella,” and possibly “gracias,” thought gracias was probably stretching it. My father had [...]