I never paid that much attention to body language and tone and facial expression, but when people speak to me in Spanish and I can't understand the actual words, I've been noticing a lot more about the way people talk. And it's been a lot harder to get to know people in Spanish, but I end up getting to know them differently, based a lot less on what they actually say, and much more on the tone of the conversation and mannerisms. It's kind of cool actually. Except when it's weird (since I tend to kind of just stare at people while they talk to get more visual cues).

And I've been getting together with three middle-aged Colombian women twice a week during the lunch break to teach them English. And teaching English is so much harder than I ever would have thought!! Or maybe I'm just a really bad teacher, but I hope it's more just that we don't have a common point of understanding from which to start. My Spanish is a lot better than their English, so most of the explanations take place in Spanish, but it's impossible to explain verb tenses that don't really exist in Spanish, given that I don't even really understand them all in English. I thought I was pretty decent at English grammar, given that my mom is an English teacher and way too fond of grammar, and I can write without making a lot of grammatical errors. But there are all these tenses that I didn't even realize we use all the time that are weird. Seeing how Spanish-speakers try to understand English actually helps me understand Spanish though, because I'm getting a better sense of all the different ways that they think about language.