I have a preposition for you

A Polish instructor once told me that for him, the hardest part of learning a language was mastering prepositions. He wasn't kidding. If you think about it, there are no real rules governing use of prepositions in English. What's the difference between "burn up" and "burn down?" What about going "out the door" or "out of the door." Speaking of doors, there's "the door fell off" and "the door fell down." To those of us who are native English speakers, the difference is pretty obvious, but can we really explain it? Or do we just know what's right after many years of speaking, reading, and writing English?

Well, the same is true in Spanish. You can go por Cuba, or you can go a Cuba. One (por) means towards the destination, the other (a) means.... um.... about the same. How is one to figure out which is which? As my dear friend Neil Bernardo Herrero said, "The same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, kid, practice." 

One thing I'll say for Fluencia is that you get as much practice as possible, given the format constraints. But to tell the truth practice is only a part of gaining mastery in a language. You need to hear the language more than anything. It's all well and good to have a vocabulary of 1000 words, but if you can't understand them in the high speed at which Spanish is often spoken, they do you no good. With that in mind, I've started watching the news in Spanish from Univision (which I like better than Telemundo). That, of course, makes sense. But then there's my other new habit. I watch telenovelas.

To the uninitiated (or those who know better,) telenovelas are Latin-American soap operas. The "best" of them seem to come from Mexico, but almost every Latin-American country makes its own. They differ from US soaps mostly because many of them are pretty violent, sexual, and discuss mature topics like teen pregnancy, abortions, and so on. The plots are very convoluted, the actors change frequently, and it takes several days to figure out just what happened on the first day. What's worse is that in the first one I watched, practically everyone was crying because one of the male characters was mysteriously killed. Have you ever tried to understand what someone is saying while they sob their eyes out? Now just imagine that in a language you haven't quite mastered. 

But telenovelas can be addictive. I am searching for the next episode of the one I first watched, the one with the mysteriously dead dude. I want to know how he died. And what will happen to his widow, his pregnant mistress (they always have one,) his kids and his Swiss bank accounts which actually belong to Rico the drug kingpin. I think I better go and find the next episode of whatever telenovela I was watching. Not that I care...