Ellos están ahí porque el narco Pablo Escobar los llevó en los ochentas como mascotas para su zoológico personal. Cuando el murió, los hipos escaparon a los ríos cercanos. Al principio había solo 4 hipos. Ahora hay más de 200. Ellos no tienen depredadores naturales entonces ellos reproducen y crecen la población muy rápido. Aprendí esto a traves un podcast llamado “the interSpanish podcast”.

I will never get over the look of surprise and/or shock I get from both Hispanics and Americans when they hear me speak Spanish for the 1st time. I was telling someone the other day, it does not matter how hard or simple the phrase is, it's always the same look... the mouth drop in ahhh... the stare... and it's almost like time freezes for them as their brain catches up to what I'm actually saying. My favorite example of this is one time, I was walking past a Hispanic person in a touristy area in Colombia and I said, "Oye como estas." The other person just stared at me in shock, like they were trying to figure the English phrase I had just said.... so I wanted to mess around with the situation a little more... so I stopped, and turned directly to them and said, "Saludo... como va." At that point, everything started to register that we were speaking the same language. In my earlier Spanish speaking days, I thought I was mispronouncing certain words until it started happening even with simple phrases like, "hola." Anybody else ever experience anything like that?

con flor de jamaica, jengibre, clavo, romero, agave, y canela es bananos. La flor de jamaica es buena para mi hipertensión. Romero, para mi mente. Jengibre para digestión, inflamación y mi sistema inmunitario. Y canela para azucar en sangre. Quizás otras cosas también. Dime si sabes más..

poder entender mucho español cuando lo oigo o lo veo, pero no poder piensar de las palabras cuando necesito las hablar. Pero a el misma vez, lo muestrame que estoy haciendo progreso. Como nuestros gran maestra dice, "Sigue. Sigue. No pare."

So I was having a discussion with someone about someone else who says that they are fluent in Spanish. He was in disagreement that the person was fluent in Spanish. He couldn't explain why, so I looked it up. It's so weird I had to share it. So everyone here knows that there are tests that you can take, like the DELE and other state tests, that gauge and certify your level of Spanish. That's fine, except most Native Spanish speakers would not pass those tests without studying and practicing for them, which to me is not a true gauge of if you are fluent in a language or not. If you can communicate without a translator with native speakers, in my opinion you are fluent. Just like if you forget a word or what something is called, you look it up online or describe it, the same thing goes in the other language. What do you all think?