a new hobby: learning spanish

When I get hooked on something, I'm literally hooked. Manu alone has been witness to many a new venture of mine including becoming a Zumba instructor, obsessing over food photography, working on my Italian, wanting to write a cookbook, delving into a new career of English teaching - I'll stop there, but trust me, there's more.

My new love is espanol, and for the past two months I've been committed to learning as much as I can on my own. I'm going to go out on a nerdy limb here and tell you that....IT'S SO FUN. On my lunch breaks I curl up with my various resources and write vocab words, study sentence structure, learn new verbs, you know, serious-like. And since I teach grammar for a living and have Italian and French under my language belt, I like to think I have a leg up. It seems crazy to me to be American, already know a Romance language and not know Spanish. But when I started out two months ago, I had literally no base to work off of. Nada.

(My nightstand as of late) These have been my favorite resources so far: two textbooks in the photo above that my mom had in our overflowing bookcase in the basement, an award-winning podcast called "Coffee Break Spanish", and this telenovela made for students of Spanish called Destinos that I'm sure you've heard of if you took high school Spanish! It's so 90's (created in 1992) and the fashion is just way too great not to share:

White tights! Scrunchies! Matching pantsuits! Another great way to learn is with music (duh) and here's a super in-depth description of a Shakira song that you know I blast when I have the casa to myself. Ay, Ay, Ayyyyy!
Ok, on to you: Do you speak Spanish? Have you ever learned a language on your own?