My Newest Passion

I am learning about being a police officer and blogging about my progress, if you want to know more about my blog look at my About This Blog page.
My mentor is a police constable who is in her 7^th year with the Winnipeg Police Service, and is currently assigned to a position in Recruiting for Human Resources. She will try to give me insight on the topics that I am researching. I have been emailing with her and we are going to be meeting next week so we can talk in person.
My goals and plans for my passion project are posted on My Plans/Goals page.

End of project

We are now done the passion project for school, I have presented my Spanish project and what I learned for my class and I think it went pretty well. My goal in the beginning was to learn enough Spanish so that I could roughly have a conversation. I have practiced a lot but I don't think I can really have a conversation yet, but I can put a few Spanish words into my English conversations. I can also say the alphabet and count to twenty. I learned that to learn a second language you have to make a lot of time to practice, which I didn't always do, but I still practiced quite a bit.
There is a lot of ways of connecting your faith to learning a second language because by learning a second language you can connect better with other people and build community and it gives you more opportunity to share your faith.
Learning Spanish is connected to creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. God created language for peace so that people could communicate together. Fall is when people used language to work together, building the Tower of Babel and doing other acts of rebellion. God put a stop to this by creating language barriers to separate people. Redemption is that it is God's ultimate plan to restore peace. Overcoming language barriers is a way to restore peace.
I hope to learn more Spanish before I go to Mexico in march and I will try to blog about using the Spanish I have learned in Mexico.

Spanish quizzes

Here are some quizzes that made for me to do after I learned the words/phrases. I got %100!

Learning with my mentor

I got together with my mentor Makayla who is also learning Spanish but is way farther along than I am. She has some books for homeschooling yourself to learn Spanish that are very helpful. She photocopied some of the pages from her books and made me do some written tests on the stuff that I learned. We went over welcome and farewell words/phrases and had a few conversations using those. She also corrected some of my pronunciations of lots of my words and how I pronounced the alphabet. She also gave me a cd that came with the books to help learn to pronounce Spanish the words right (you can see a picture of the cd on my pictures/videos page).

Studying Spanish

Learning Spanish takes a lot of practicing to remember all of the different words and to know when you are supposed to say them in a sentence. I am doing well learning Spanish, and I can put together a very rough conversation using both English and Spanish. My dad is also trying to learn some Spanish with me because he is also coming to Mexico with my class in march! It is helpful having someone to quiz and to have quiz you. There isn't much else to tell about because most of my project is studying Spanish.

beginner español toolkit

I found a video on youtube that teaches what to say in a restaurant or a cab. It only teaches basic español, so you will be able to communicate what you want or where you want to go. I embeded the video to my videos & photos page if you would like to learn what to say in these situations also.

Update on my learning

Yesterday, my friend gave me a book called Mexican Spanish(which you can see on my sources page). I have started looking through this book and it shows a lot of helpful stuff, but it is also quite confusing and I need a lot of practice because I pretty much only know the alphabet, how to count, and a few random words and phrases. I hope to learn a few more phrases by the end of this week.