Angel H   

New to Strømmen 6 yrs teaching experience

Conversational Spanish for working adults: from "I understand but I can't speak" to speaking with confidence.

What is your favorite word in your language and why?

Vaina. It is the most useful word in Colombian Spanish and the least translatable. It can mean thing, problem, situation, object, or the whole mess you are currently in, and the meaning comes entirely from your tone and the context. "Pásame esa vaina" is pass me that thing. "Qué vaina" is what a shame. "Se complicó la vaina" is this got complicated. I love it as a teacher because it is the first word that makes a student sound Colombian instead of sounding like a textbook. And it teaches something bigger: in real Spanish, a lot of the meaning is not in the word, it is in how you say it.

What is your favorite dish from your hometown? If you no longer live there is there a good local restaurant that serves it?

SANCOCHO DE GALLINA VALLUNO, cooked outdoors over a wood fire, which is how it is done properly here in Valle del Cauca. It takes hours and it is the reason Sunday exists in my city. I still live in Cali, so I do not have to miss it. The best ones are not in restaurants, they are in the roadside places where the pot has been going since early morning. If a student ever visits, the other thing I send them for is el ABORRAJADO, which is from here too and travels badly, so it has to be eaten in Cali.

Besides the languages you teach, do you speak or study any other languages?

English at B2 level, which I use every day with my students and which gives me something useful in the classroom: I have gone through the same process my students are going through, in the same direction, so I know exactly what the hard part feels like.

What are your interests outside of teaching at Strommen?

Cycling, mostly. I ride around Cali and into the hills west of the city, and being Colombian means I have opinions about the Tour de France that nobody asked for. If you follow cycling at all, we will not run out of things to say in Spanish. Chess, which I play badly but persistently. Running and hiking too, which is easy here because the mountains start where the city ends. And football, of course. Away from sport I read constantly: research papers, history, anthropology, philosophy, and anything on artificial intelligence. I am deep into military history, which spills over into strategy games, the Total War series in particular. I also like wine, which is mostly an excuse to keep learning geography. A lot of this turns out to be useful in class. My background is in public policy and international cooperation, so when a student works in government, development or tech, we already share a vocabulary. The conversation stops being an exercise and becomes an actual conversation.

What do you consider your hometown? Why do you love it?

Cali, Colombia. People here call it la Sucursal del Cielo, the branch office of heaven, which tells you something about how seriously the city takes its own good mood. It is the salsa capital of the world, and that is not a marketing line: it is a city where people dance on a Tuesday. It sits in a valley between the Andes and the Pacific, the weather is warm all year and nobody has ever needed a coat, and the food is the best argument I have for visiting. What I like most about teaching from here is that Caleño Spanish is clear and easy to follow, without the speed people expect from the Caribbean coast. My students understand me from the first class, and that matters more than it sounds when someone is convinced they cannot understand spoken Spanish.