¡Hola de nuevo!
Hoy quería hacer algo un poco diferente.
Desde hace un par de años que estoy haciendo el podcast de Aprende Más Inglés, y mucha gente está escuchando – en casi todos los países del mundo.
Pero me doy cuenta que mucha gente no sabe nada de mi – que si soy británico o americano, de cómo llegué a España.
Así que hoy os cuento la historia de mi vida, en un texto corto, que también será podcast.
A veces, cuando hacemos textos, intento hacer todo en pasado simple o algo así, pero este texto es más avanzado.
Así utiliza muchos tiempos verbales, un vocabulario un poco más amplio y una gramática algo más compleja.
(Y por supuesto, mi acento americano.)
Al final tendrás también enlaces a otros artículos que te pueden ser útiles.
En fin. Aquí el podcast…
The story of my life in 650 words
Hi! I’m Daniel.
I’m originally from the US, but now I live in Spain.
These days I’m living in Barcelona, with my girlfriend. Before moving to Barcelona, I was living in Madrid for many years.
Like I said, though, I grew up in the US, in the state of Arizona.
When I tell people in Spain that I grew up in the middle of the desert, they usually don’t believe me. But trust me. It’s desert. My family lived on a dirt road in the desert, and there was really nothing around but a few other houses, some churches, and an ostrich farm.
I learned some Spanish when I was growing up. First, we learned a little bit of Spanish in school. I didn’t enjoy it much, because I thought I’d never need to speak Spanish in my daily life.
But then, several years later, I got a job in a café, where I had coworkers from Mexico. I started speaking Spanish to them, just for fun, and it was great! I sort of fell in love with the Spanish language after that. I travelled to Mexico a few times, as well as to Spain.
It was actually 2004 when I visited Spain for the first time. Here I met a girl, who incidentally was not Spanish, and sparks flew from the very beginning. Let’s call her Elsa.
I had a fun time with Elsa, but I only stayed in Spain for about a week. Soon I was back in Arizona and thinking about what to do. Eventually I decided to come back to Spain, so I could hang out with Elsa in Madrid.
It seemed like a terrible decision, but it turned out well. Things with Elsa didn’t go well, but life in Madrid did. I rented a room, got a job teaching English, and learned a lot of Spanish.
My method for learning Spanish consisted of basically two activities:
- Reading books or the newspaper when I was on the bus or the metro.
- Talking to girls.
I had a lot of fun, dating Spanish girls and living in the capital. My Spanish actually got really good.
Eventually, though, I was tired of teaching. The pay wasn’t very good, and the schedule was awful. I had classes at 8 in the morning, and I finished at 9:30 at night. I spent most of the day on public transport, going from one place to another to give classes in companies.
Also, Spain was in an economic crisis, and things weren’t looking good for the future. So what did I do? I started teaching online. I started a blog, wrote some books for Kindle, made some videos for YouTube… basically trying to teach English to more people around the world.
After a few years of work, I had published a dozen books and made several online courses, and I had enough income that I could quit teaching. So I did. I spent a few years living in El Romántico Barrio de Tetuán, in the north of Madrid, and I made a lot of videos sitting on my sofa, or walking in the park near Plaza Castilla.
In 2017 I met my girlfriend, and about a year later we moved to Barcelona. These days I spend a lot of time walking around the city, reading, hiking in the mountains, working out, eating Chinese food… and, of course, making new courses and writing new books.
Also, when I can, I travel around Spain or Europe. In 2019 I even went to India and Thailand.
In the future, I’m hoping to learn some French, write more books, and do some epic hiking or cycling adventures around Europe. I’d also like to visit Latin America. I haven’t been there since my first trips to Mexico, and that was a long time ago.
Anyway, that’s all for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this text and listening. From the beautiful city of Barcelona…
See you soon!
Enlaces de interés para aprender más inglés
Como dije, el podcast se puede escuchar en muchos sitios – en Spotify, en Apple Podcasts y en muchas aplicaciones más como Google Podcasts y Stitcher.
En la otra web, que también se llama Aprende Más Inglés, tienes artículos sobre pronunciación, idioms, textos y más.
Y aquí tienes tiempos verbales, phrasal verbs y mucho más.
También me puedes seguir en Instagram.
Buen aprendizaje,
Daniel.
P.D. Tengo una versión más larga de la historia de mi vida en otro blog que tengo en inglés – sí, tengo muchos blogs. Echa un vistazo al primer artículo de la serie: Days and nights of love, wine and cholesterol. Have fun!
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