WEEK 15So, it’s the end of week fifteen of my project to bring a little sunshine to my rainy corner of Dublin. It’s been a busy week with work and Spanish learning, and while I’ve been continuing with all of my usual approaches (Pimsleur, AnkiApp, Busuu, podcasts, exam papers), I did manage to squeeze in trying a couple of new things too.
I finished doing the Notes in Spanish podcast intermediate lessons and have moved on to the advanced ones. These are definitely harder to follow both in terms of vocabulary and the speed at which they speak. It also seems to have been the first podcasts recorded by Ben and Marina – the intention having originally been to record 31 in 31 days to raise money for charity – and as a result they were a bit more rushed and less well thought out than the later ones. A few I just skipped past – such as the one where he was walking through Madrid, taking the metro etc, and most involved listening to the noises of cars and other people. I also tried listening to some Spanish news podcasts and radio stations this week. First I tried Últimas noticias de CNN en Español, which is available as a podcast on Spotify. There are five short bulletins of about two minutes each posted each day. They are still feel lightning fast to me, but as they are about news bulletins it’s not too hard to follow the basics of what they’re about. I also tried tuning into RTVE Radio 5, an all-news radio station which can be accessed from the radio section of the music player on the iPhone. This is a bit more challenging as in addition to news bulletins there are interviews and magazine-style pieces on a variety of topics. A bit beyond my level, but I’ll stick with it and see if it gets any easier. The book I read this week was Effortless Conversations: A Method to Understand Native Speakers and Have Fluent Sentences Roll Off the Tongue in any Language by Lukas Van Vyve. I really enjoyed this book which was based primarily on the key piece of advice that you should learn a language not by learning vocabulary and grammar, but by learning chunks – several words that are used together as phrases that come up again and again in the language. Like the phrase “come up again and again”, for example. In applying this principle, the author makes two key suggestions. First, you should be getting ‘input’ from material made by and for native speakers as soon as you are able to. This should be predominantly spoken, though it can also be from reading. Secondly, you should go back over the material trying to spot useful chunks or phrases that you should then memorise and use when you speak the language. He points out that people often make mistakes speaking a foreign language because they think of how to say what they want to say in English and then translate it word for word to the other language. He gives a very useful piece of advice, which I haven’t seen in the other books that I’ve read, that whenever you come across a phrase in the foreign language that is different from how you would say it if you translated directly from English, you should memorise that phrase and use it when you speak. The author has a website with a worked example of a conversation with the chunks he would choose to learn. With enough of these chunks, he says, you can speak fluently and easily and sound like a native, even if you do not understand the grammar behind the phrases. The idea that we speak our native languages using chunks or set phrases rather than thinking out each sentence a word at a time makes a lot of sense to me, and it also seems logical to learn Spanish the same way. I’ve previously read the advice not to learn individual words but to learn them in sentences (which is a slightly different point), but haven’t really done it. I am now making a deliberate effort to spot and memorise chunks. I wish I had read this book sooner and had been doing this from day one. This week I also tried the Rosetta Stone website and iPhone app. The company behind these has been around since 1992 and is pretty well known in the United States for its (rather expense) language learning CD-ROMs. I started with the website, which irritatingly does not allow you to choose your own password and instead gives you one that is impossible to guess. Or remember. I chose the intermediate level (from the three options beginner, intermediate and proficient) and was then asked to choose my goal from travel, family, work or basics and beyond. I chose basics and beyond and for some obscure reason was put into Unit 3 Work and School, Lesson 3, People and Countries. I decided to go back to choose a different option (travel, family or work), but the site does not make it easy to figure out where to go to do this. When I finally did manage it, it just put me back in the same place as before – Unit 3 Lesson 3 – though a slightly different lesson when I chose travel for some reason. The lessons themselves consisted or reading and hearing, or just hearing, a short sentence and trying to figure out which of four pictures the sentence went with. The sentences themselves were very basic and certainly not at intermediate level, and the challenge was not in understanding them but in figuring out the appropriate picture. For instance, for the sentence “Can you write in Spanish” it was not clear whether to choose the photo of a teacher talking to a pupil, or the one of two pupils. Both seem correct. And pointless. For some of the photos there was a tiny flag, so even if you had no Spanish at all but could recognise the word español and the Spanish flag, you could guess correctly. The whole thing felt like using flashcards made by someone else, and didn’t really feel like it was teaching anything other than matching photos to words. Apart from the core lesson I was started on, there seem to be sections for pronunciation, grammar, speaking, reading etc., but I seem to have been locked out of them. I guess you have to finish the core lesson first, but after 73 questions I had only done 48% of it and was profoundly bored. I couldn’t see a way to skip ahead, so I decided to try the app. It was essentially the same, except that it was possible to see that there were 20 units in all, with 37-39 parts to each. It was possible to choose any unit, and although you appeared to be forced to do the core lesson, once the lesson started if you held the iPhone sideways, for some reason, it was possible to skip to the other sections (eg grammar, vocabulary, reading etc). In essence all the units and all the sections were broadly the same thing – matching what you read and/or heard to photos – though there were some where you had to repeat short sentences to test your pronunciation. I couldn’t see how to change from intermediate to proficient on the app, so I went back to the website and chose work from the available options and was placed into Lesson 1 – Family and Relationships. I didn’t bother finding out if choosing travel, family or basics and beyond would have been any different. The material again was very basic: pick the picture that has a man and a dog, or a girl and a horse, or a policeman and a horse. I went back to the app, which had changed me to the proficient level and now had me on Unit 6 Lesson 1 – Past and Future. Again, this was a series of photos with some basic sentences, though now requiring to know the difference between the present and past tense. I found the app and website user-unfriendly and confusing to use. I also have my doubts about the effectiveness of the method. None of reading Spanish, listening to it spoken, speaking it or writing it involve matching pictures to short sentences. It is hard to tell whether this would be useful for a total beginner, though I think there are better places to start. For someone who has reached level A2 or so, I couldn’t see the benefit even of the proficient level lessons. I am a fan of flashcards and use AnkiApp all the time. I don’t see how this app is any improvement on it and I found it annoying to use. Not recommended. My film this week was El hoyo (The Platform) from 2019. This is apparently one of the ten most watched films on Netflix at the moment, which is a bit surprising given that it is a curious sort of sci-fi horror movie. It reminded me a bit of the 1997 film Cube. Despite a fairly preposterous premise, it did have some interesting ideas, though I thought it was very badly let down by its ending. Worth a look if you like the genre, but I wouldn’t have it in my top 10. Well that’s about it. Week fifteen of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 2,560 words in Spanish. I learnt 210 new words this week, which comes to 30 per day. One small step towards a sunnier, Mediterranean disposition and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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