Learning Spanish

Just back from my evening Spanish class. I've been taking an intermediate conversation class twice a week at Cornell since the first week of February. The instructor is a lively man who is fond of literature and music and has been using both extensively in the class. It's challenging. I'll have a bad class, but it's usually followed by a good one. A bad class is one when I can't understand the question the instructor is asking me in Spanish. Or I don't understand the story we have read well enough to answer coherently.

But it's good for me to take on the work. It will pay off on the next trip to Chile. Hopefully this coming northern hemisphere winter/southern hemisphere summer. Every once in a while I will understand a whole sentence. Triumph. More often it's a game of approximation. How much can I understand? My progress is slow but, still, progress. I expect to keep learning Spanish, off and on, indefinitely. I want to be fluent.