I am the dorkiest dork who ever dorked.

(As always: THANK YOU for reading my blog about my experiences preparing for a year volunteering in Costa Rica! If you are interested in contributing to my fundraising effort, please see my donation page for instructions. THANK YOU!!)

So yeah, I happen to be a huge, huge language dork. There's nothing in the world that makes me happy quite like communicating with someone who I wouldn't be able to speak with if I only spoke English. Fun words and accents and dialects give me a rush, and part of the reason why I'm so excited to be going to Costa Rica is because I'll finally get an immersion environment and be able to improve my Spanish.

I've invested years and years into language learning. I studied German and Linguistics at William and Mary, took several classes in Dutch while studying abroad in Germany, learned the Vorarlbergerisch Dialekt of German while teaching in Austria, and have been teaching myself Spanish for the last three years. Languages are my hobby, my passion, and my career thus far, and Spanish fluency is my current linguistic goal.

The first time I remember wishing I could speak Spanish was when I was in middle school and one of my art class comrades wrote the following in my yearbook:

Rachel:
Eres loca! :)

Now, I'm far enough along in my studies to understand just how right he was.

Instead of practicing Spanish by reading old yearbook entries, though, I thought I'd try another approach: watching TV shows in Spanish. For a month or two I'd been watching The Big Bang Theory with Spanish subtitles, but being able to talk about particulos subatomicos probably isn't going to help me much in Costa Rica. So, I switched to Friends (or Colegas), dubbed into español.

For example:



... finally, an excuse to watch hours and hours of TV :) Plus, I'm learning to say important things like:

-ewww, no voy a probarlo! es la leche materna! (eww, I'm not going to try it! it's breast milk!)
-NOS ESTABAMOS TOCANDO UN DESCANSO (WE WERE ON A BREAK!)
-estaba de compras. no hay suficientes tiendas en Nueva York. (I was shopping. there aren't enough stores in New York.)

See? Now that I know how to say all this, I must be ready to go to Central America! Right? Right?

Bueller?