WEEK 11So, it’s the end of week eleven of my project to swap a rainy St. Patrick’s day for a sunny Fiesta Nacional. A pretty busy week as I sat took the DELE A1 Spanish exam and also tried out some new approaches to learning Spanish while continuing with the ones I feel have worked well so far.
First, the DELE A1 Spanish exam. Since we are still in partial lockdown and the Instituto Cervantes doesn’t have any exams scheduled, I didn’t sit an official exam. If you’re a conspiracy theorist who believes that almost everything they read or hear is a lie, then don’t read the next bit. I could have made it all up and not sat the exam at all. I may not even speak a word of Spanish. The government are probably in on it. And the CIA. And they’re watching you reading this, laughing at your gullibility … I downloaded the sample paper from the Instituto Cervantes’s website and then signed up with iTalki and found an accredited Instituto Cervantes DELE examiner who gives Spanish lessons online – and who happens to live in Cork, about two and a half hours drive from where I live. I sat the exam paper under exam conditions (ie strictly timed, with each section done one after another) and then got my examiner to correct my work and give me the spoken exam. I’ve posted the questions and my answers and a recording of the spoken exam and the examiner’s correction of it here. My examiner said that I had easily passed and am not far away from reaching level A2, and suggested that I try it in a few weeks. That would be much faster progress than I had expected when I started this somewhat eccentric project, and should mean that I’ll be well on course to reach level B1 within the year, or even get beyond it. But the exam wasn’t just useful as a way of nourishing a macerated ego. It was also great for figuring out what areas of Spanish I need to focus more attention on. I found the reading comprehension the easiest part of the exam, so struggling through La Noche de la Usina for the past few weeks has certainly paid off. The listening comprehension was fine, though there were words here and there I didn’t know, and I wasn’t used to listening to Spanish spoken at full speed. I definitely need to work on that. The spoken exam went OK, but I made a lot of mistakes, and that was my first time writing in Spanish. To work on my listening comprehension, I’ve been going through the past exams for the Irish Junior Certificate exam, which is somewhere between level A1 and A2. There are past papers going back to 2005 available here. I’ve also been trying the past exams for the UK’s GCSE, which is around level A2. There are papers going back to 2010 available here. I feel like I am improving, but am still a long, long way off being able to understand a news broadcast or watch a TV show or movie without subtitles. I have also started watching the TV show Gran Hotel without English subtitles. The programme seems to be Downton Abbey-like show about the goings on in an upmarket hotel in Spain in the early 1900s. I’ve watched the first few minutes of the show a couple of times with no subtitles, trying to see how much I can figure out. Really only the bare gist of it to be honest. I’ve then watched the same part a couple of times with the subtitles in Spanish. I can understand pretty much everything with the Spanish subtitles, but even then can’t hear every Spanish word as it is just too fast. Hopefully if I stick with it a couple of episodes in it will start to make sense. I have been continuing with part II of the Pimsleur Spanish course when driving, but have been alternating it with the Junior Cert and GCSE past papers. A couple of books I’ve read have recommended dictation exercises as a way of training your ear to pick out the individual words in foreign language when it is spoken at speed. For some reason it conjures up an image of pupils slavishly transcribing while a teacher reads something, so I suspect I must have endured something like that earlier in my language learning career. I decided to suppress the memory and give it a go, hoping it wouldn’t give me nightmares. I settled on using News in Slow Spanish, which has news stories spoken slowly along with a full transcript. The website has a very limited amount of free content and costs $22.90 per month for full access, which seems like a lot, especially since I plan to move from slowly spoken Spanish to full speed Spanish as soon as my Irish ears are capable. However, the Linguistica app gives two free stories of about five minutes in length each week, which is perfect. The advice I’d read on dictation was a bit short on detail as to exactly what to do, so I made up the following approach for myself:
I have to confess that I did not robe myself in glory my first time trying this. There were a lot of errors, the most frustrating of which were from focusing so much on the words I heard that I lost all sense of the meaning and failed to get some words I should have been able to figure out from context. It was fairly time-consuming and not the most pleasurable way of learning a language I’ve tried so far, but I will give it another go. This week I read How to Really Learn a Language by Jeff Martin. It’s a pretty short book that is a mix of anecdote and language learning advice. Jeff’s story is inspiring, he managed to learn to speak Spanish from chatting to people in the factory where he worked and worked his way up to becoming a Master Certified Court Interpreter in Spanish who is fluent in several languages. He points out that the of all the people who study a foreign language, the vast majority never become bilingual or even very proficient. This he ascribes to taking the wrong approach. He advocates abandoning classes in favour of learning as a child does, first with mimicking and repeating, then speaking simple sentences and only later with reading. The second key error is not learning from native speaker, whether through listening to them, speaking to them, watching TV shows or movies or reading books written in the language. He suggests talking to native speakers from the outset, and that every time you learn even a couple of phrases you should find someone to try them out on. I’m not sure exactly how that would work, though. What do you do when you say the phrase and don’t understand the native speaker’s reply? Smile and nod and walk away? Before they do, presumably? He says that most language courses do not work, but says he has come across some audio only ones that are useful. Frustratingly, though, he doesn’t say which are the courses that are worth trying and which should be avoided, and this is true of most other language-learning resources too, which essentially leaves the reader to make the same mistakes he did on his language learning journey. All in all, I thought the book was interesting and useful, but as a comprehensive “how to” book, there are better ones available. This week I decided to start reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal again. I began the book in week three, but then abandoned it in favour of the more complex La Noche de la Usina. I’m still reading that book, using the dictionary, and I’ve got about 11% of the way through it so far. I decided to see if I could manage to read the Harry Potter book without the dictionary, and so far I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve been able to understand. I couldn’t translate every sentence word-for-word correctly, and there are sentences I don’t really understand, but I already know the story so I’m just letting myself become immersed and keep reading. It’s a pretty enjoyable way to learn a language, assuming it is actually working. I’ve also got the audio book and am have started listening to it and reading along with some of the pages I’ve already read. My film this week was La isla mínima (Marshland) from 2014. It’s a great mystery thriller. Slow and moody and beautifully shot. Definitely worth a look. Well that’s about it. Week eleven of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 1720 words in Spanish. I learnt 210 new words this week, which comes to 30 per day. One small step towards watching the Patrulla Águila over Madrid, and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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