As I´ve been living in Benidorm with Boyfriend-W for a few weeks now I thought I´d show you some basic Spanish phases I´ve picked up so far. The english will be in bold, how it´s written in Spanish will be in blue and how it´s said phonetically will be in italics. So here goes:
Hello, Hola, Ola Goodbye, Adios, Adios
Good Morning, Buenas Dias, Buenas Dias Godd Afternoon, Buenas Tardes, Buenas Tardes Good Evening, Buenas Noches, Buenas Noches
What´s your name?, ¿Cómo te llamas?, Como tay yammo? My name is Antony, Me llamo Antony, Me yammo Antony Pleased to meet you, Mucho gusto, Mucho gusto
The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett is a story of Sabine who we meet when she looses her gay husband Parsifal suddenly. She knew he had HIV but expected it to be a few more years before his death.
Parsifal was a great magician and Sabine his loyal assistant. Parsifal had been in love with Phan who died from AIDS recently. Parsifal knowing that he was HIV positive and had no family decided to marry his life long friend Sabine. This was so that she would be entitled to his inheritance and because on a deep level he truly loved her.
After Parsifal’s death the lawyer explains to Sabine that Parsifal has family in Alliance, Nebraska. This is a great shock for Sabine who thought Parsifal had no family. Why didn´t she know about them? Why did he never talk about them and deny all knowledge of having a family?
You join Sabine on an emotional journey as she meets this family and discovers more about Parsifal´s childhood. During the days Sabine learns more about Parsifal and in the nights she dreams meeting first Phan and eventually Parsifal. Along the way Sabine learns more about herself and realises that Parsifal has given her a most precious gift, more precious than money and security she thought he´d left her.
This book becomes an absolute page-turner as the reader connects with Sabine and needs to know what will happen next. The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett is available to purchase on Amazon.
A few months ago I was rushing an assignment for my university module entitled Promoting and Influencing Health so that I could spend a week with Boyfriend-W with out worrying about the upcoming deadline.
Boyfriend-W phoned and I explained about the assignment I was working on and stated “I just want to do enough to pass.” “What do you mean? I thought you had more aspiration than that?” “You don´t understand. I´m regurgitating the same stuff I did at college, when I went to Uni the first time, in my VRQ in youth work I did and that I wrote in my NVQ in substance misuse I just did.” I answered. “Well I´m dissapointed.” He replied.
Perhaps I care what he thinks because I worked harder and it´s paid off. I got a massive 81%. This means at degree level (level 3) it´s a First 1st, see below for the grading system:
I never thought I could be grade A student, but with the support and love of Boyfriend-W I managed to achieve top grading. So pehaps I can achieve more with him than I can on my own?
If I get the next three modules at this grade I´d get a First 1st Degree, so that´s my aim when I start back at uni in September.
It´s nearly been a week since I arrived to start a new chapter in my life with Boyfriend-W in Benidorm. It´s been a time of learning, a new language, a new job, a new life style (sleeping some of the day to stay up later in the evening and most importantly living with someone).
With the language I´ve started watching YouTube videos such as:
As for my new job table waiting I´ve been shaddowing my colleagues watching and more importantly getting my hands dirty and pitching in. My first night I was quite fustrated with myself – feeling like I wasn´t picking things up quick enough. I´ve never done this sort of work before and learned that I´m actually quite hard on myself. I had to remind myself of the stages of competence:
The Four Stages
Unconscious Incompetence
The individual neither understands nor knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit, nor has a desire to address it.
Conscious Incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.
Conscious Competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.
Unconscious Competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes “second nature” and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she may or may not be able teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.
Natural language is an example of unconscious competence. Not every native speaker who can understand and be understood in a language is competent to teach it. Distinguishing between unconscious competence for performance-only, versus unconscious competence with the ability to teach, the term “kinesthetic competence” is sometimes used for the ability to perform but not to teach, while “theoretic competence” refers to the ability to do both.
Certain brain personality types favor certain skills (see the Benziger theory), and each individual possesses different natural strengths and preferences. Therefore, advancing from, say, stage 3 to 4 in one skill might be easier for one person than for another. Certain individuals will even resist progression to stage 2, because they refuse to acknowledge or accept the relevance and benefit of a particular skill or ability. Individuals develop competence only after they recognize the relevance of their own incompetence in the skill concerned.
Possible Fifth Stage
Many attempts have been made to add to this competence model. This addition would be a fifth stage, and there have been many different suggestions for what this fifth stage would be called. One suggestion is that it be called “Conscious competence of unconscious competence”. This would describe a person’s ability to recognize and develop unconscious competence in others.
Another suggestion by consultant David Baume:
As a fifth level, I like what I call ‘reflective competence’. As a teacher, I thought “If unconscious competence is the top level, then how on earth can I teach things I’m unconsciously competent at?” I didn’t want to regress to conscious competence – and I’m not sure if I could even I wanted to! So, reflective competence – a step beyond unconscious competence. Conscious of my own unconscious competence, yes, as you suggest. But additionally looking at my unconscious competence from the outside, digging to find and understand the theories and models and beliefs that clearly, based on looking at what I do, now inform what I do and how I do it. These won’t be the exact same theories and models and beliefs that I learned consciously and then became unconscious of. They’ll include new ones, the ones that comprise my particular expertise. And when I’ve surfaced them, I can talk about them and test them. Nonaka is good on this
—Nonaka, I. (1994). “A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation.” Organization Science 5: 14-37. (David Baume, May 2004)
(From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence, Last Accessed: 29 May 2010)
I´m currently conscious incompetent but getting better all the time.
As for my new life style, I´m loving it. Loving being with Boyfriend-W, going to bed with him and waking up with him. I´m adjusting my body clock to the evenings and most importantly looking forward to learning more.
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. I´m also currently reading: 
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. So expect more book reviews soon.