WEEK 3Hola!
So, it’s the end of week three of my project to turn a pasty Charles into a passable version of a swarthy Carlos. It was a busy week at work and a busier one in the Spanish-learning arena as I tried to incorporate more methods of language acquisition into my repertoire. I going to have to figure out a more detailed plan for how much time I spend on each one of these each day if I’m to avoid this thing completely taking over my life. I’ve been continuing with Duolingo and this week reached 60 crowns, which unless you have used the app is an essentially meaningless metric. I think it means that I have covered about 7.5% of the whole course, which isn’t bad in three weeks. Even if my pace drops a little, I should be able to finish it well within a year. The cartoon owl is starting to grate a bit though, and I find typing the answers on my phone fiddly, especially with predictive text making additional mistakes on my behalf, so I’m already wondering if I’ll make it all the way to the end or abandon the app for something more fun. I finished the Michel Thomas method foundation course this week, and will take a break before moving on to the advanced course so I can try something else, I think. There was a significant acceleration in the pace of what was taught towards the end, with a number of new tenses being covered but without being really being practised properly, and with lots of new words added. At the very end Michel congratulated the listener, by which he meant himself, for accomplishing so much in such a short space of time. However he didn’t have any advice about what happens next. Presumably, he spends the €95 I forked out for the course on hair pomade and artisan bratwurst, but what I am supposed to do exactly? Almost certainly, immediately start forgetting most of what was covered in the last couple of hours, unless can I find some other way to lodge the material in my noggin. I had arranged my second Spanish conversation exchange for Sunday afternoon, and sat patiently in front of my laptop waiting for the Skype call. Then I did the same thing an hour later, assuming I had misunderstood the message I’d received and that the call was actually arranged for Irish time and not Madrid time. Silence. I was stood up on a date once – yes, once – many years ago, but somehow this felt worse. Admittedly, the last time I had to deal with the pitying glances of the barman every time I nervously checked my watch, but at least there was a barman. And the solace of decent pint. This week I started to read my first novel in Spanish, putting into practice the key recommendation of Kato Lómb’s book How I Learn Languages, which I read last week (see my review of the book here). I had planned on reading a Roald Dahl book, but I had trouble finding any I had read before that were available on Kindle in Spanish, so instead I got Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal which I suspect is a bit more complex and challenging to read. I wasn’t exactly clear what Lómb’s approach was to reading a book in a foreign language when armed with a vocabulary of only a few hundred words and very basic grammar, though she was clear that the dictionary should be used sparingly. I liked the idea of that, as looking up every word sounds like a real chore. I decided to treat reading the book as both an immersive experience in the language and as a puzzle to be solved, and came up with the following plan:
So, did this work? Amazingly, yes it did. I was very surprised how much I could figure out and how little I had to look up in the dictionary. Granted, I know the story already, having read the book to my daughter when she was younger and having seen the movie, and context is very helpful in figuring things out. Also, some words in Spanish are similar in English and knowing the root of a verb you’ve seen used in the present tense gives you a good shot at knowing what it means in another tense. I bet even if you don’t have a word of Spanish, you know what the title of the book I’m reading is, for example? Some of the words I figured out have stuck in my memory as I have seen them again a page or two later, and one so far has stuck because my guess of what it means was so wide of the mark. I assumed that the words “un bigote inmenso” used in reference to Mr Dursley were saying that he was an enormous bigot. Actually, it means “enormous moustache”, although one coincidentally on the face of an enormous bigot, like the thing on Geraldo Rivera’s face.* * If you don’t know who particular shitbag is, Google “news is a flirty business”. I was also surprised how much I enjoyed reading the Harry Potter book this way. It sounds like a ghastly amount of work, but I much preferred it to using the Duolingo app or listening to the Michel Thomas or Pimsleur courses. I guess I’m just a puzzle geek at heart. I’ve read four pages of the book so far, though I’m hoping my pace will pick up as my Spanish improves and maybe I’ll get to see Gryffindor win the House Cup before year’s end. This week I also watched two Spanish movies: El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in their Eyes) from 2009 and El infierno (El Narco) from 2010. I’d seen the US remake of El secreto de sus ojos before but the original is infinitely better, well worth a watch. I didn’t really enjoy El infierno which I felt didn’t quite manage to be any of things it was trying to be (drama, thriller, black comedy), though I did understand a lot more words and phrases from it than the other movies I’ve watched so far. Maybe this is because the story didn’t really draw me in, so I was just listening the dialogue. I hope that doesn’t turn out to be a feature of language learning: I’d much rather learn Spanish from great films than dull ones. Well that’s about it. Week three of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 420 words in Spanish. I learnt 86 new words this week, which comes to just over 12 per day. One small step towards Carlosification, and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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