maybe barnes and noble will be better

so, i've got this friend at work, adrian. and every shift we work together we both ask each other at least a few major grammar/vocabulary/pronunciation questions regarding each other's native languages (spanish is his)...(english is mine). we seem to both be teaching each other a little bit at a time which is nice because not only is it helping us both to learn, it has become a point of trust on which a friendship is being built. what i mean is, i seem to be unafraid to pronounce things badly in front of him and vice versa, because we both know that we're not going to laugh at each other. i know that if i say something badly he will correct me, with not even a hint of a smirk at my silly-sounding attempt at a word or two. and i have always tried to not crack a smile at the sweetness of when a sentence of his comes out about the same as my 3-year-old niece's sentences come out. that seems like maybe a strange basis for a friendship, but let me tell you there is nothing more comforting than a person that you can trust with your words. especially if those words are brand new to you and you're just figuring out how to put them together. i have found that since i started asking him spanish questions and he started asking me english questions, we've also begun to ask other questions about more important matters, which is really really cool.

anyway...the point is, from what i understand, he's got a spanish-english dictionary at home and that's about it. so i thought it would be nice to buy him some kind of book that will help him with understanding verb conjugation or pronunciation or grammatical rules or whatever...you know, since we've been helping each other learn for a few months now.

now i am not making this up. i did not learn spanish in a class. i learned spanish almost entirely by reading and doing the exercises in this book. it was my primary resource during the first months of my language-learning and alongside a travel-sized spanish-english dictionary given to me by Jason Parks (thanks man!), freetranslation.com, and helpful spanish-speakers in my proximity, that book is why i can conjugate verbs and make sentences in spanish and not sound like a dummy.

i went to borders tonight to try to find something similar written for a spanish-speaker intending to learn english. there was nothing. i was there for about an hour and a half, and i flipped through about twenty different books looking for something as straightforward, clear and well-organized as Vivienne Bey's Spanish Verb Drills. and there was nothing. all the information in every book i picked up was jumbled together in a big mess, or there was not a good pronunciation guide, or, get this, some of the books that included "for non-english speakers" in their titles, were actually written entirely in english. one such book also claimed to make learning our language "easy." yeah. all english. for non-english speakers. that's super easy.

i'm a little discouraged. i hope my problem is that i went to a bookstore that doesn't have the best selection. i'm going to try some other places this week. but i really hope there's something better out there. because i really think adrian would appreciate maybe having a good resource or two at home since he has a desire to learn english.