Alioth's Journal: en espanol, por favor...

So in preparation for this year's trip with Scary Internet Friends to Palma de Mallorca, I've decided I probably ought to learn at least a bit of basic Spanish.

"Oh you don't need to, everyone speaks English in Majorca", they say.

Well, except they don't, and anyway, I felt like such an Imperialist last year not knowing any Spanish (short of what I saw when living in Houston, such as 'Piso mojado' when the janitor was in, or 'Se habla espanol!' on every used car lot, and things from the Mexican menu like '$RANDOM_THING con queso'. None of those phrases were of much use.) And it resulted in one very confused conversation last year in Palma with a shop assistant who spoke no English. Somehow we muddled through though...and it only would have taken a fairly rudimentary understanding of the language to make it a non-confused conversation.

The BBC has an interesting 'interactive drama' course for beginners, which I'm going through. Most sentences the first time I hear them are still a baffling stream of sound, but I've not even been doing it for a week, and I can now discern some sentences as a collection of words, and even understand some of them, rather than a stream of random sound - so that's a start. I've got another 6 weeks to try and improve on that!