WEEK 1Hola!
The first week of my year-long attempt to, if not vaguely come to resemble, then at least sound like, Antonio Banderas has got off to a decent start. On the morning of my birthday I downloaded the Duolingo app onto my phone, added the Michel Thomas CD 1 to my iTunes and set to work. Well, we’re in Coronavirus lockdown, so the alternative was to run in a circle of 2km radius from my home or queue at the supermarket. With the Michel Thomas audio course, maybe I could do both? I hadn’t used Duolingo before, though my daughter had messed around with it when she was younger, until she lost interest. The cartoonish graphics do make it feel like it was designed for kids, but not in a way that has become grating. Yet. I was a bit surprised that among the first things it taught me to say were “Juan eats apples” and “the woman drinks water”. Are these the sorts of things that Banderas says so often that I need to master them from the outset? Perhaps. I’m sure they can be effective with the right accent and a smouldering look. I wasn’t a big fan of the gamification of language learning on the app: you lose hearts when you make mistakes, you win gems, crowns and experience points when you complete or repeat lessons, you are rewarded for streaks and can compare yourself to others on a leaderboard. There are also all sorts of achievements with names like sage, scholar and sharpshooter that win you more gems. I guess it motivates some people, though to be honest I’d prefer to disable it and just do the lessons, though it isn’t too interruptive. I’d also very much like to disable the ads that keep popping up, but I don’t know that I’m prepared to pay €10 to do so. I’d rather spend the money on something else. Like cervezas (not Corona). I feel like I learnt a fair bit of Spanish from the app this week, and I’ve managed to get to checkpoint 1 completing 8 different lessons (some more than once). The Michel Thomas method involves listening to recording of Michel teaching two students, a man and a woman, and pausing the recording to answer the questions he poses before hearing their answers and his corrections. Michel had a pretty interesting life as a resistance fighter, commando, counter-intelligence officer, escapee from concentration camps and hunter of former SS officers before he ever became a language teacher (see his Wikipedia page here). Judging from the very pronounced German accent Michel has when he’s speaking English though, I strongly suspect that this course will have me sounding much more like Arnold Schwarzenegger than Antonio Banderas, when I unleash my Spanish on the world. The course moves along pretty quickly, with lots of new words being added and lots of questions. To be fair to the two students, they don’t get many of them wrong. Annoyingly fewer than me, in fact. Having said that, Michel puts a lot of emphasis on where the stress falls in a Spanish word. The male student gets this wrong a lot, and when he does the tense silence that follows is at times almost unbearable. You can actually hear Michel staring at him with a mixture of fury and disappointment. One wonders what would happen if the session wasn’t being recorded. A lot of the content that is taught seems to be aimed at preparing me to be a rather short-tempered German tourist. He has not taught me how to say “hello” or “goodbye” or “please” or “thank you”, but within one hour of learning I could confidently say “I want it now” and “Why don’t you have it for me now?” I’m looking forward to future lessons where I’ll presumably learn how to say ““I demand to see the manager”, “The service here is a disgrace” and “Where the fuck is that schnitzel I ordered thirty seconds ago?” I had intended working through this course while in the car or going for what I very inaccurately describe as “a run”, but I found that it moves to quickly and you really need to concentrate, and there are so many questions that you have to stop the recording constantly. It is good to use when standing in the interminable queue for the supermarket, but you can’t say the answers out loud the way you’re supposed to. Or you can, but it makes the other shoppers wonder if you don’t have something worse than Covid 19 that requires standing much more than six feet away to avoid catching. I feel like I learned a lot from this course in a week, though when I checked it was fewer words than on Duolingo. That might be because the course covers more grammer or because it gets to you to use the words you know in constantly different, and increasingly complex sentences. This week I also read Fluent in 3 Months by Irish polyglot Benny Lewis. It was easy to read and enjoyable, partly describing the languages Benny has learnt and how he learnt them, and partly giving advice on how to learn a language yourself. The key points that I took away from the book are first, that beginners should speak the foreign language from day one using a language exchange, looking up words and phrases they think they will need for the conversation and staying in the foreign language for as long as possible, secondly that learning a language like this can get you to conversational fluency quickly and thirdly that this can be hard work, embarrassing at times and can make your brain melt, but will be ultimately worth it. Taking this on board, I’m going to set up my first Skype language exchange next week. I am cringing just writing that sentence, but I guess if you want to learn to speak Spanish you have to, you know, actually practise speaking Spanish? I’ve posted a full review of Benny’s book, which you can read here. This week I also watched two Spanish movies: El laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) from 2006 and Contratiempo (The Invisible Guest) from 2016. I picked two I’d seen before because I reckoned that I would be able to try to listen out for words and phrases I had learnt while following the subtitles and not lose track of the plot. I did recognise some words and figured out a few more from context that were similar to English. That was much harder with Contratiempo though for some reason, though it is a cracking mystery thriller if you haven’t seen it. Well that’s about it. Week one of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 238 words in Spanish – 65 I already knew or sort of knew and 173 new ones, which comes to almost 25 per day. One small step towards Banderasness, and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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