Jeremy Guthrie

But it was a grind.

It was hard.

People around me were much better.

The other 12 missionaries in my class, most of them had taken Spanish.

Some of them had taken significant amounts of Spanish.

And so I remember after, I think it was a month and a half, I finally asked, I said, why do we keep taking these verbs like, you know, tener, to have?

Why do we keep taking the verbs and changing the spelling?

And they said, what do you mean?

I said, like, why is it tengo and tienes and tenemos?

And they said, that's conjugating.

I said, what does it mean to conjugate?

They said, what do you mean?

We've been talking about this for six weeks.

To conjugate, it means you have to say, like, I have something, you have something.

In English, it's the same word.

But in Spanish, if I have, it's yo tengo.

If you have it, it's tu tienes.

I'm like, so that's what we're doing.

So anyway, just like they couldn't even comprehend that after six weeks, I didn't know what we were doing.

Every time we walked in and did a chart with six different ways to say a word, I had no idea what we were doing.