More than I can adsorb, but still too slow

I have completed my first week of my Spanish studies and sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed, yet it still seems to be going too slow. I wish I was further along. My teacher is effectively pedantic. She makes me repeat everything orally that we are learning, and she is a real stickler for pronunciation. I had been told in the past that my pronunciation in Spanish was very good, but my teacher now has me convinced otherwise. She can make me repeat the same sentence four times until I get it correct to her satisfaction. On Wednesday, she asked me if I ever learned French, and I responded, "Oui je parle un peu francaise, pourquoi?" Apparently my limited familiarity of French has affected my pronunciation of some of my Spanish, especially the word 'en', which is a word one uses most frequently in Spanish. In French this word 'en' would sound like 'on', but in Spanish it sounds closer to 'ane', where the 'e' sounds more like a long 'a'. If I am not concentrating or I am bit tired, every time I see, read and say that word, I say 'on' and my instructor immediately stops me and makes me start over. You would think I would learn.

The school itself, the Christian Spanish Academy, is very good. I think there are probably at least two dozen students and most are from the United States. And a number are from Korea, some from Japan, a few from Europe and probably one from China somewhere. Today a student from Korea came to live at the host house where I am living at, so now we have set up a schedule to use the shower in the morning. I thought I was making a big commitment to study for a month, but I am finding many students are here for three month programs, including the Korean that just started living with the de Navas, my host family. He is going by the name Esteban, and he is six weeks into his three month program. I have been a bit frustrated with the speed of my progress, but I am going light speed compared to poor Esteban. Spanish is a foreign language to me, but it is totally foreign to the Koreans, Japanese and Chinese. Many times I can just add an 'a', or 'Ito' or 'oso' to an English word and I have changed it to a Spanish word. The poor Asian students, if they did not attend an English language school, need to learn a new alphabet in addition to new words.

I told my teacher that since I would not being going to school on Saturday and Sunday, that she needed to give me more homework. She took me very serious and now I have seventeen pages of homework to complete before Monday morning. Early tomorrow morning, I plan on going to Finca Filadelfia, a local coffee plantation, and have breakfast with a view of the three local volcanoes and get a start on that homework.