Putting the Real in Realtor—Lara

Let’s step behind the lockboxes and “For Sale” signs for a moment. This is the second week in our agent spotlight series, where we reveal the fun and totally unexpected sides of your favorite Realtors.

Up next is Lara!

Estoy disfrutando de aprender un nuevo idioma. (I'm enjoying learning a new language). A little green owl named Duolingo is my teacher and I’ve gone 1,487 days in a row without missing a lesson.

My daughter Chelsea suggested the app when I mentioned wanting to learn Spanish. Her husband Rich was practicing Russian on Duolingo at the time. He likes that the Russian alphabet is completely different, which is just masochistic. I chose easy, ha. I think Spanish is a beautiful language. It has a similar alphabet to English and shares many of the same words and it’s useful to know considering our southern neighbor. It also seemed a better way to spend downtime than mindlessly scrolling.

I think about language differently now. When I’m watching a movie with subtitles, I listen for individual words and what they mean, whereas before I listened to the sounds of the language as a melodic backdrop and just read the subtitles.

I've been practicing for 15-30 minutes a day for over four years and am surprised how much I know and how much I still have much to learn. I can read Spanish better than I can speak it. People talk so fast! I may sign up for a speaking class, or I could just keep torturing my friends Olga and Maria with my rudimentary Spanish.