Hola, me llamo Tarheel.

He tomando cuatro años de Español. A mi me gusta el idioma.

Just kidding, I'm not actually going to write this blog in Spanish. Translation: I have taken four years of Spanish. I really like the language.

I started taking Spanish my freshman year of high school. My first year I took Spanish I (surprise surprise), and had a really easy teacher. If you begged enough you could pretty much get her to answer every question on a test and effectively have her take it for you. Everyone got an automatic 100 on homework. It was great. That's not to say I didn't learn anything though.

Spanish II was sophmore year. My teacher was more difficult, and thought she was much funnier than she actually was. She always tried to bond with us, but treating 15 and 16 year olds like 10 year olds doesn't generally help you achieve that goal. Still, I progressed in my Spanish skillz.

Spanish III (see the pattern?) was junior year. I got a really good, but relaxed teacher. He made a joke about looking at porn during his lunch break. Yes. By now I was a pretty decent speaker of the language.

AP Spanish (C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!) was senior year. I skipped Spanish IV cause I wanted another AP to help boost my GPA and college credits. Because we only have 3 Spanish teachers, I ended up with the same one as last year. As essentially all of the students had had him twice as a teacher now, and we were all seniors, it was a very relaxed class, and hilarious as well. Unfortunately, it was as hard as a shirtless guy's nipples on a freezing January morning. Seriously, the class was killer, especially for someone who skipped the class before it. As an example, part of my homework would be filling in the blanks in a paragraph. Forget about being given a type of speech or anything of the sort. You had to figure out the exact word to put in there out of the entire Spanish language. It might sound easy if you've never taken a foreign language, but anyone who has is cringing in pain at the thought. Aside from stuff like that, my homework also consisted of English-class-length essays and impossible amounts of vocab. Not on different nights, either. All of that was one night. I checked for one unit, and it was expected that we learn 50 new words a day. 50.

I still have no idea how I got a 5 on the AP. Nonetheless, something came of all that work. ¡Puedo hablar Español! (I can speak Spanish!)

Now, onto what I'd like to learn. I'd really like to learn Japanese, partly because of all the anime I watch and partly because I think it'd be a cool, useful language to know, especially in the auto industry. I'm probably going to be taking German, though. I have the opportunity of possibly working for BMW in Germany during a Co-op, so I'll need to know how to speak it pretty well. Germany is somewhere I'd love to go anyways, so it's an opportunity I really don't want to miss out on.

Finally, most beautiful language. That definitely has to be either Spanish or French. Romantic languages in general are so… romantic. (Which isn't obvious! Seriously, the two meanings are completely unrelated.)

Just check out these two songs. You don't have to understand it to appreciate the beauty of the language.

Of course, any language can sound beautiful in the hands of a master–there's countless examples of gorgeous prose in English–but those two languages just seem to be naturally beautiful.