I study Spanish to keep my brain young

I’ve been studying Spanish for two hours a day for the last ten days. I heard that it’s important to exercise your brain as you age, so I figured I should either do math or learn Spanish, and Spanish seemed the more practical.

Spanish has a lot of charming words like la falda (skirt) and funny words like el excusado (toilet), and it seems logically constructed compared to English, which is more like a house that was added onto by each of its twenty owners, none of whom had any talent for carpentry or design. This isn’t to say that I don’t love English. I adore English, but that’s because it’s my language and the language of my cultural forbearers. On the other hand, if I were a Spanish speaker who was trying to learn English, I would be pulling my hair out. The only thing that bothers me much about Spanish is that every noun in the whole language is either a boy noun or a girl noun. Who thought that up? The wall (la pared) is feminine, but the floor (el piso) and the ceiling (el cielo raso) are masculine. Go figure.

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