My First Year Spanish Speaking Exam

/ Blog / By Hayden Perno / October 26, 2017

Did you know that more than 470 million people speak Spanish as their native tongue? That ranks it second behind Mandarin Chinese. To top that off, more than half a billion speak it and by 2050, they predict that the United States could have more Spanish speakers than anywhere in the world.

So yeah, it’s pretty prevalent.

I have been learning it for roughly a year now (with some randomly dispersed weeks scattered over the past two years), but this year was the first year I undertook it in a structured setting. I.e. In the classroom.

Note: Clicking the above will redirect you to YouTube.

I have found this is a much better approach to learning it as opposed to just playing games like Duolingo, as it has taught me to understand the foundation alongside the structure of a language. In fact, it has actually helped me learn and understand English better.

To prove that, how many of you know what preterite means? What about a double object pronoun? What about just giving me a simple definition of a gerund?

These words are simple English words, but it’s amazing how we are never taught them and how they work when we communicate or write.

I mean, you never really think about it all, of course, but for some reason we all know (most of the time) when we say something that sounds odd. For example, tell me which one of the following sentences is wrong:

a) Yesterday, I ride my bike to school.

b) Yesterday, I rode my bike to school.

If you have at least one year of English under your belt, I’m sure you would have said a). But whilst most of us can see and hear the errors in our grammatical constructions, we probably can’t really define the use of the words we use.

Which is a whole other blog post I’m sure, but for those playing at home, the use of “rode” in that above sentence is an example of a preterite. Or, a branch of the past tense.

Anyway, last week, for one of my final assessments for first year Spanish, we were given the task of coming up with a script between two people. The only guidelines were:

Use vocabulary that we had learned during the year
It has to involve us running into an old friend in the hospital
Must discuss some sort of get together
And obviously, make it flow

I thought it would be funny to film it so we can look back on it in a year or so and see our progress plus for other beginning language learners to check out too. I also thought it would be funny to put a spin on it and make it seem like a serious thing.

So, the following video is the result of 6 months of structured learning, plus a little bit of creativity.

If you’re interested, this scene is a follow up to the first semesters scripts that myself and three other guys put together. Here’s how the first semesters speaking exam played out:

Josh and Mark were on a spaceship heading for the moon. They talked about their life back on earth and what they liked about it. On the way their shuttle ran into some problems and crash landed on the moon.

Jake and myself were already on the moon and followed a similar conversation (talked about life on earth, what we liked, etc.) plus talked about how good it will be when Josh and Mark arrived. Jake came down with a sickness and our script ended with us hearing an incoming distress signal from Josh and Mark.

This semester’s script picks up where we left off. So if you want to see the ability of what you could achieve in a year of learning a language, plus listen to some terrible accents, check out the video below.

Espero lo disfrutas.

Note: Clicking the above will redirect you to YouTube.

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