Your Inflation Experience: At The Zoo

[ajoknoblauch]

As an aside, my sister-in-law has three of her five courses this semester in English...she's panicking a little, although she has solid intermediate-level skills. She and I now pretty much speak English all the time between the two of us so she can practice, but she's a little short on the written side as a result of depending primarily on conversation. About a third of the students in her class are English-speaking students from places like Germany, the US and Holland. She's a bit intimidated.

Writing is the most difficult part of learning a language. I write Spanish well, but more slowly than English and not always idiomatically. Much of my vocabulary consists of cognates and tends to sound more academic than I would prefer. Whenever I'm writing something significant in Spanish, with the possibility of misinterpretation, I run it by my wife first; I do the same for her when she's writing in English.