Advanced Plática Spanish Meeting Highlights

Tuesdays are for OKC Spanish meetings!

It's my group, so just trust me!

Once again, I sat in my new-to-me spot.

In my new-to-me chair.

Looking at the new-to-me view.

Taking pics of our new-to-us space (finally).

Reading my book (Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian, borrowed from a friend), waiting the obligatory 15 minutes before going home on a zero-RSVP night.

And lo - two people appeared!

This is why I show up when there are no RSVP's 💪

"Never tell me the odds!" - Han Solo

The bookstore advertises our group on their calendar and give us our meeting space for free, so I make it a point to show up every single Tuesday that I am physically able to. People often find out about us through the bookstore calendar and don't know to RSVP - so it is important that I show up every single week, even when there's nobody but me on the list. Then there are the people who don't know if they will get out of work in time to attend. And then there are the new people who are anxious about committing to their first meeting. There are a million and one reasons people have for not RSVP'ing.

I don't want an empty RSVP list to be the reason that someone didn't get to practice Spanish or learn about our group. This is why I show up even when there are no RSVP's 💪

¿De qué hablamos?

Being a Plática meeting, the conversation was predictably unpredictable. This week, it was myself, one of my VIP's (from the opossum and frog meetings), and a frequent face. The discussion included current events in our personal lives, details about work, vacations, and airplanes. We chatted all the way up to 8:30!

I dished about my ex-husband's upcoming wedding and my VIP talked about unexpected chaos regarding her grandma, dinner, and a family trip. The Frequent Face gave an admirable explanation of a difficult topic without using any English at all - she shared some aviation science, specifically mentioning "thick air," and revealing to us that the plane/s (?) she pilots have a little oven on board for heating up lunch during flight exercises!

¿Qué aprendimos?

Good grief, I have a bit of a list of vocab and grammar that I made note of during the meeting; you can see some of my notes below. Some are actual questions we discussed, others are things I wrote down as the conversation continued.

• Grass: pasto, hierba, césped, and patio were all words we came up with. Some of those words have nuance and might not be used in every case where English would use "grass," but between my Nicaraguan and Spain Spanish, my VIP's español de Ecuador, and our Frequent Face's conversational experiences, we were satisfied with our vocab list.

  • Pasto is also slang for marijuana in Latin America. There are other terms for it, but we're talking about regular grass right now.

  • Pasto is also the word for "pasture," which is different from el prado, which is "the meadow." We did discuss the differences between prado y pasto 😄

  • Mala hierba is used for unwanted, invasive plants like the poor little Dandelion. I thought it was also used as a euphemism for marijuana, but I was mistaken - I was thinking of mota.

• 500: quinientos, not cinco cientos.

• Congelar felt weird for all of us to conjugate, with no discernable reason why.

• "Thick air" - we agreed that air cannot be grueso, and that aire denso sounds better.

• Bachelorette party = Despedida de soltera

  
  

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Al fin y al cabo

The Advanced group was our strongest and most active group for a long time - which is why we have always had two Advanced meetings. But since 2025, our average attendance for both styles of Advanced meetings has gone down to 2.9 participants. Of course, we've had meetings with of 4-8 people over the last two years, but not often enough to raise the average.

Life happens, people get busy, and sometimes we have to prioritize our time and energy. I absolutely get it. You guys have always given me tons of grace when I've gone through a rough patch or busy season. This isn't a problem to solve; it is a shift that we need to adapt to.

So, I've got two options:

• Figure out how to bring in enough advanced participants so that two meetings per month still makes sense, or
  

• Keep the Advanced Plática meetings on the 2nd Tuesday of each month, and convert the 4th Tuesday to a Foundation level meeting.  

The beginners and intermediates have been filling out fairly well, and "absolute beginner" or "absolute zero" Spanish is my most common meeting request - it's the only level we haven't historically supported, accommodating the historically high Advanced-level attendance.

What would encourage you to attend an Advanced Spanish conversation meeting? Leave a comment or message me directly (members can use Whatsapp, others can use the contact form on the website or Facebook messenger). I plan on announcing my decision at our anniversary party.

Touch some hierba, then throw me an RSVP!

I'm just a person who spends my free time building a community of Spanish-speaking anglophones 😁

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