I should be relaxing, drafting, in this couple hours free, but it is an outlet to have a captive audience and to talk about how things are here, so here I am.

I have two Pacos as new students. The Paco I met last night is an accountant, a young man probably younger than me, in his 30s, I'd say. He was very interesting to talk to and that's mostly what we did, or rather, he did. His level of English is probably similar to my level of Spanish. He is fluent and can talk a lot and likes to do that. A very smart fellow. I learned some things about the economic activity in various parts of Andalucia.

The second Paco, I've just met this morning, a man in his 50s, a "technical architect" who has a project this month doing some design for Burger King. We will start lessons later this month.

The one thing I am truly confident of being able to help my students with is their pronunciation. Simply helping them say and hear the difference between a short i and a long e sound is really helpful to them; it is something they are not expecting and seems to almost surprise them - they see how essential it is right away. After all, it really won't do to confuse fit and feet, ship and sheep, and so on. All of them of course are looking for conversational ability. The fact is that if you grow up never hearing or using certain sounds, you hear and say the sound closest to it, in your native language. And then your ear cannot recognise the difference between them without some concerted effort. Speech is so subconscious that your mouth cannot form those new sounds without concerted effort. For some people, they manage to make them and others it really costs them effort (sorry, Spanish word usage...)

It really has been necessary to speak Spanish fluently to communicate initially with them. I do the classes only in English, but really must be able to organise and communicate with them over the phone in Spanish. It would be difficult and uncomfortable for some of them if they had to deal with me in English only.