WEEK 13So, it’s the end of week thirteen of my project to swap a furious game of hurling for a mellow game of jai alai. This week gyms finally reopened in Ireland, and so I’ve been able to the abandon wheezy lurching thing I call running for the more pleasant experience of using a rowing machine or cross trainer sheltered from what now seems to be interminable rain. As a result, I’ve spent a lot more time listening to spoken Spanish this week, as all of my workouts have been done to the background noise of podcasts or listening comprehension exams.
This week I read How to Learn Any Language in a Few Months While Enjoying Yourself: 45 Proven Tips for Language Learners by Nate Nicholson. The book is quite short and is really a list of various pieces of language learning advice, much of which I have already read about elsewhere. It reminded me a lot of Benny Lewis’s Fluent in 3 Months, with its focus on speaking the language with natives from day one and as regards some of the advice given (eg learning a language through couchsurfing). What the book lacked I felt was more on the author’s experience of using the methods he recommends, pitfalls to avoid, things that work well etc. For example, what he says about using couchsurfing to learn a language you could easily learn from just googling the word “couchsurfing”. The book does have some interesting advice that I haven’t seen elsewhere, such as checking phrases you write in Google books to see if they are regularly used by writers in your target language (and so likely to be correct), targeting the vocabulary you learn to what you plan to use the language for (so you don’t bother learning how to ask directions if you’re not planning to travel to the country where the language is spoken as a tourist), and living your life through your target language (eg making shopping lists in the target language). Some of the advice seemed pretty impractical for beginners though, such as listening to podcasts aimed and native speakers and watching TV and films without subtitles. I find this a real challenge having almost reached level A2. All in all I think the book was pretty decent and I would recommend it. I think the main thing I took from it was the importance of listening to native speakers speaking the language naturally and as close to normal speed as possible. That’s something I have been working on this week. I’ve been alternating listening to three podcasts: Notes in Spanish intermediate, Vino para principiantes and a new one called Hoy hablamos. The latter is a podcast aimed at Spanish language students that has run five times a week since February 2007, so there are now almost 900 episodes available. There is a theme for each week, and each day has a different focus: discussing Spanish and international news, Spanish culture, famous Spanish people etc. The presenter speaks slowly and distinctly and the content is interesting. He says in the early episodes that the podcast is 100% free and that transcripts are available on the website, though that policy seems to have changed since 2007 as they now cost $10 per month. In addition to the podcasts, I’ve also been listening to past Junior Certificate and GCSE listening comprehension exams. Listening to Spanish as it is normally spoken is something that has been absent from approach so far, as it isn’t really a part of any of the audio courses or apps that I have tried. I suspect this is a really important part of learning a language, as you need to tune your ear into the speed that people normally speak and the way that they run words together. It is a little harder to concentrate on doing this properly when out of breath and pedalling a stationary bike like an idiot, but being able to combine the two, while not exactly enjoyable, does make me feel like I’m getting a double benefit. This week I continued reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal and La Noche de la Usina. I also decided to add using Audible to my reading. I have gone back over some of the chapters of the Harry Potter book that I have already read, and reread them while listening to them being read aloud. Even though the narrator is not speaking that quickly, I am finding it hard to keep up and don’t think I’d manage doing this with something I hadn’t already read. Hopefully this will come with practice. I continued using the Busuu app this week and having finished all of the lessons in the A2 section decided to do the A2 exam. I passed it and so have been awarded an official McGraw-Hill Education certificate, but I think I’ll hold off claiming I have reached this point just yet, as the exam was much shorter than the Instituto Cervantes exams and obviously does not include an oral exam. Still, I do like the app, so I’ll continue with it for now and move on to the B1-level material. I also downloaded and tried the Babbel app this week. It is touted as the best-selling language learning app in the world, and perhaps it is, but I found availing of the money-back guarantee pretty quickly. The app contains a variety of courses (Sightseeing in Latin America, Business Spanish, Discover the Culture etc) all of which appear to be aimed at beginners. There is also a Spanish (Spain) course divided into different levels. The app offered a placement test, which consisted of twelve sentences with a word missing where you had to choose which was the missing word from four options. I thought I had gotten them all correct, but was placed into Beginner II, course 2. The lessons on this course involved reading a few sentences to check pronunciation and then a very long series of questions with sentences written in English where you had to choose the correct translation from one of three options, followed by the same sentences in Spanish where you had to type in a missing word or words. I didn’t think much of the placement test, as I already knew all of the vocabulary and grammar covered, but it was the material and method of delivery that I really didn’t like. The lesson was long and tedious and involved typing on the iPhone which I find fiddly and prone to errors. The sentences that were taught, and repeated, and tested, seem to have been designed solely to illustrate some grammatical point. This was a typical exchange:
How many times have you had exactly this conversation? If you’re like me, it’s hundreds. Maybe thousands. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t tell someone that I swim very quickly, though usually I also challenge them to a race, especially when they tell me that they tire quickly. Of all the apps I’ve tried so far, this was definitely the one I liked the least. I’m sure if you stuck with it you would learn to speak Spanish, though possibly a very stilted form that would make you sound like a 1980s grammar book. There are better and more enjoyable approaches, so this app is getting deleted. A number of the books I have read on language learning have recommended self-conversation as a way of practising Spanish. Since I am holding off on doing any more conversation exchanges until my level of Spanish is a little better, I thought I would give this a try. Essentially, I’ve been picking a topic (eg going to the gym, cooking, driving to work) and imagining that I am discussing it with someone in Spanish. It’s hard to concentrate on having an imaginary conversation an another language without your mind wandering, but I have certainly found it a good way to identify vocabulary that I don’t have (eg rowing machine, cross trainer, weights). It’s hard to know whether I’m just talking to myself in ungrammatical sentences and solidifying my mistakes without someone to correct them, but then I suspect that is the same with talking to a Spanish speaker unless it is a teacher. I’ll stick with it for now and see if I feel I am making progress. My film this week was Grupo 7 (Unit 7) from 2012. This was written and directed by Alberto Rodríguez, who was the man behind La isla minima which I loved and El hombre de las mil caras which was only OK. If you like hard-drinking cops beating up suspects in dramas that are coarser than a gravel enema, then maybe this is the flick for you. I didn’t really engage me, so I think I’ll be moving on from the Rodríguez oeuvre next week. Well that’s about it. Week thirteen of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 2,140 words in Spanish. I learnt 210 new words this week, which comes to 30 per day. One small step towards swinging a cesta like a native and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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