Post #3528488

Esta noche fui a mi primera clase de salsa. En realidad, mi primera clase de baile de cualquier tipo. También, como me di cuenta cuando empezamos, era la primera vez bailando con un hombre, y sin ser el que guía. Fue una experiencia. Pero una buenísima. Éramos diez o doce personas, con una mujer más que hombres. Solamente tres gringos. El maestro nos hacía cambiar de pareja frecuentemente, aunque pasaba más tiempo conmigo, porque tenía la menor experiencia. Ninguno de los hombres tenía problemas conmigo, y al fin de la clase uno me preguntó por mi nombre. Y estaba bailando mejor al final que al principio, y devirtiéndose mucho. A brief note on how I write my Spanish, because this particular post has a lot of phrasings that I did not know no offhand. I had most of the vocabulary and the tenses, but there were a lot of cases where it turned out that there were more natural or correct ways to say what I was trying to say. I write in Kagi Translate. I have modified it, through the field it provides for additional context, to provide a bunch of instructions (which I'm happy to share, it's just a paragraph of text) that tell it to report grammar and spelling issues. It's rather remarkable. Because it will tell me things like "No, in Mexico, this is usually phrased some other way." In fact, in this case, it even mentioned that while one word I used was in fact used in salsa dancing, there was a better term. It's also rather flaky. It has a habit of reporting different errors each time I make a change. Sometimes I deliberately introduce errors just to see if it finds any additional ones. But it's still very useful. Anyway, it's a very iterative process. And it probably took me about an hour to write this post. My first draft would've been understandable, just not correct. But it seems like a much better way to learn the language then just plugging stuff into translate. It's about as close as I can get to handing homework to a teacher, and getting feedback.