¿Aprendo espanol es facil?

This lovely video put together by Matt Stone and Trek Parker (not a phrase you hear often!) nicely explains what I´m doing with my life. It´s amazing to discover that you don´t need to be rich or clever to travel the world and have amazing experiences. You just need to do it!

I discovered the video on the blog fluent in 3 months which is a blog written by an Irish guy who has spent the last 8 years travelling and learning language, and has some great tips on faster language learning - mainly, speak it! There´s some great life lessons here too.

Few people seem to speak English here anyway, so this shouldn´t be a problem, however to put a bit more pressure on making language learning a clear goal, I hereby publicly set myself a target of achieving a level of B1 on the Commmon European Framework benchmarks for language fluency  over the next three months - that is,

Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her field of specialisation. Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party. Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.

Wish me luck!

Currently my main resource for learning is my Kindle, loaded up with Collins English-Spanish and Spanish-English dictionaries, Learn Spanish the Novel Way, Spanish made Simple and Practice makes Perfect: Spanish Verbs, plus trying to get out and talk to people as much as possible. Any other recommendations or lovely PDFs people could send me would be incredibly welcome!

In the meantime, I´ll also be having as much fun as possible. Next post will give a few pictures of the fun so far.