"Dude, I think he´s doing the dice thing too much." "That´s all he´s got."

It´s been awhile. I´ll give the footnotes.
The night after I saw Toronto lose to Real Madrid, I went clubbing with Britney, a girl from Canada and Austria, Erica, a girl from the US and Venezuela, and the Madrileños who I had watched the game with. It was good to combine groups.
If I knew how to dance, I might understand the attraction of a nightclub. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to dance, and my usual itinerary in a nightclub can only reasonably be stretched so long. I get a drink and chat a little, if the grating techno isn´t too loud.
Usually, I come into a club with a just slightly unrealistic idea of how incredible my dancing is, so at first I dance seriously. Crip-walk. Michael Jackson spin move this girl once taught me. A casual moonwalk, somewhere in the song. Something dreidel-like with the hands. I think I´m pretty cool, but eventually (a minute into the second song), I don´t know any more moves. I improvise, but I look more like I´m spazzing out than doing anything intentional.
At this point, it´s time to reference the part in "Knocked up" when Seth Rogen repeatedly does a dice-throwing routine to cover up for his lack of dancing ability. (Amazing how closely art imitates real life.) The dice-throwing routine leads to the ever-useful sprinkler routine. If you´re with cool people, they get into the imitations, and this kind of thing can last for a while. The night with Britney, Erica, and the Madrileños saw the lawn-mower, the shopper, the race-car-driver, and countless other classics.
Eventually, I can get into the dancing a little bit, even the non-jokey dancing. But one of the two best parts of a club is the sitting down and chatting...In other words, something that could be done much more easily at a bar.
The club is a similar but less intense version of a semi-formal afterparty. Clubbing is a weekly event, at least, so kids aren´t trying to pack a whole school-year´s worth of partying into one night. There´s more dancing, and less, um, promiscuousness (I´ll leave it at that). The biggest difference, though, is that people don´t know each other. At the nightclub, the friends you come with are usually the friends you stay with. The people on the dance floor might as well be eating lunch with their group at a restaurant -- that´s how little interaction there is between groups. At an afterparty, you´ll say hello to almost everyone you see, and interact with almost everyone you say hello to. Then again, you probably won´t meet anyone new at an afterparty. At a club, you meet tons of people, which is the other really good part of a club.
But to me, bar-hopping is the most enjoyable way to spend a night out. The two best parts of clubbing, chatting and meeting new people, are easier, better, and more fun in a bar. So there, clubbing.

I used to doubt the idea that children learn languages more easily than adults. The evidence often given, that a five year old speaks better Spanish than someone who has taken five years of Spanish classes in school, is a totally unfair comparison. The five-year-old is immersed, a situation clearly better than classes.
After about two month´s worth of teaching, I still have those doubts, but children clearly have some advantages. Pronunciation is the biggest. Hector (five years old) and Dario (three) can, on the first try, repeat a word back to me with nearly 100% correct pronunciation. Oscar, a Madrileño to whom I give private lessons, cannot eliminate his accent when pronouncing words even on the third or fourth try. And he often lapses back into his Castilian-tinted pronunciation if I ask for the word later in the lesson.
But my adult students seem to learn more quickly than the children I teach. They know how to concentrate on memorizing, which is a big part of learning a language. Adults have the same kind of advantage over children that they would if they were studying law, or biology, or history -- they know how to deal with lots of information, prioritize it, and memorize it.
That said, I am sometimes amazed with what Dario and Hector have internalized, such as Dario knowing a word I´ve taught only once or Hector picking up on the difference between "here" and "there." It could just be a matter of expectations -- I expect more of the adults I teach, so I am less blown away when they make these same kinds of leaps. But I feel a difference. The adults memorize words and concepts. The children internalize them. The adults will have to actively transform the memorization into second-nature, possibly in an immersion, as I am doing now. The children already operate as if the second language is second nature. Steffen, a German I know, learned English as a child, and now, after never being immersed in an English-speaking country, speaks perfect English. He learned it and internalized it at the same time. You can see that same-time learning happening in Dario and Hector. They use English words in otherwise Spanish sentences. "Quiero mi red car, por favor." It´s fascinating, and also really cute.

This post will be the last for two weeks, as I am taking a two-week trip to the states! I won a journalism award for an article I wrote last year, and the original reason I´m coming is for the journalism conference and awards ceremony (Harvard-Westlake is being unbelievably generous, helping me to get to Philadelphia, where the journalism conference is being held). As this trip will probably be my only time in the US this year, I decided to extend the time a little bit. The Vasquez´s, the family I´m staying with and teaching the kids in, said two weeks off would be fine. I´ll see friends, my grandparents, and my mom and her boyfriend Bill, who were coincidentally already coming to New York the weekend before the journalism conference. In two weeks, I´ll be back in Madrid, hopefully without missing a beat. But for now, the gap year´s on a two-week hiatus, and so is the blog.