WEEK 4Hola!
So, it’s the end of week four of my project to inject a little salsa into my otherwise drab existence. This was definitely the week when time management became an issue, if not a significant problem, as I tried to incorporate all the different methods of learning Spanish that I’m now using into my life on a daily basis. I started using the Anki flashcard app which I suspect is now part of the problem but will ultimately, hopefully, also be part of the solution. I’ve been continuing with Duolingo this week, though I think I have been spending too much time on it and not enough on some other areas of language learning, so I think I’ll probably cut back a bit and maybe only do it every second day from now on. I’ve also been continuing with the Pimsleur Spanish course this week which I find is perfect for listening to when driving, as it requires some concentration but leaves just enough to avoid ploughing into one of the multitude of people who now run on the road, apparently believing that breathing the same air as someone else for a fraction of a second as you pass them on a footpath somehow presents a greater threat to their health than running in traffic. Having finished the Michel Thomas foundation course last week, I decided that this week I would try out Learn Spanish with Paul Noble. At first I thought I was going to really enjoy this course, as it seemed to be similar to the Michel Thomas course, except that all of the Spanish words are spoken by native speakers, as in the Pimsleur courses. In this case, each answer is spoken by a speaker of Castillian Spanish and then again by a speaker of Latin American Spanish which I thought would be very useful. It wasn’t. It just meant that every question was answered twice. It didn’t take long to realise that this course has managed to combine the Pimsleur method and the Michel Thomas method and somehow come out with the worst of both. While those courses teach you words and then get you to use them in a variety of different sentences, Paul Noble’s course seems to just get you to say the same sentences, or fragments of sentences, over and over and over and over and … well, you get the picture. There are regular sections where you are asked to simply give the Spanish for a long list of English verbs or nouns, and the whole thing really feels like an old fashioned form of rote learning. I thought maybe I was just being impatient because I already knew all of the grammar and vocabulary covered in the first couple of hours, so I skipped ahead to some of the later sections. I found that much of the material there seemed to be identical to what had been covered earlier. If anything, it seemed to become even more tedious. About six hours in he did a long section involving purchasing a ticket to take a train, and then did the whole section again, exactly as before apart from using a different word for “ticket”. At the very end of the course there is a section where he teaches the numbers from 1 to 121 by saying each one in English, pausing, then having the number said in Spanish, then pausing and having it said in Spanish again. The whole list was then repeated slowly in Spanish only. Twice. This took 29 minutes. The numbers weren’t used in sentences and you weren’t tested on them. You just listened to them being read aloud. For 29 minutes. This didn’t engender the type of boredom that might make your mind wander or have you gently fall asleep. It caused a level of boredom that would make you question your own sanity and possibly confess to a crime you hadn’t committed. Yet. The Guardian newspaper’s review of this course was, surprisingly, quite positive and described Paul Noble’s tone of voice as calm and reassuring, like that of a hypnotist. I found it more patronising than reassuring to be honest. He introduced each new word by saying it in English slowly and then repeating it with an even slower and more pronounced emphasis: “The Spanish for a table, A TABLE is …” This put me in mind of how a carer might address a someone recovering from some sort of traumatic brain injury: “Look, you’ve got a visitor. A VISITOR”. There is a significant emphasis on words in Spanish that are similar in English, leading you to learn to say a number of sentences which seem to be very unlikely to spoken by anyone engaged in a normal conversation, such as, “I would like to reserve a table for dinner, but I would like to know if it’s romantic” or “Your father is exotic”. At one point he says, “I would like to know why you have not prepared the dinner”, slowly emphasising each word in a way that put me in mind of someone whose barely contained rage was about to erupt spectacularly. Whereas the Michel Thomas course appeared to be preparing you to be a short-tempered, demanding tourist who has a great time buying things in shops and then having them delivered immediately to his hotel, Paul Noble seems to envisage a rather different experience for you on your Spanish holiday. First, he teaches you to book a room in a hotel, not by phoning ahead, but by showing up in person without a reservation. You specify a room with a bathroom, and than ask if you can see the room. Apparently, the sight of the lobby has not filled you with confidence. Your suspicion is apparently warranted, as later you learn how to say, “Can I camp here”, a sentence that one suspects is far more likely to be spoken to a farmer in a muddy field than to the receptionist of a clean, well-run campsite. Things deteriorate further, as you go on to learn how to ask to see a doctor telling him that you have a fever and have vomited. Covid 19? Apparently not. Having ruled out the only two medical conditions that are the same in Spanish as they are in English, you are diagnosed as suffering from sunstroke. Strangely, the word for “sun cream” appears not to have been taught. If I’d seen this course through to the bitter end, presumably I would have learnt how to ask “Is it OK if I sleep under this hedge” or to file a police report in relation to my inevitable mugging. Unsurprisingly, this is not a course I would recommend. I would guess that it is about one and half times as long as the Michel Thomas foundation course and teaches about half as much material, and in a manner that I found quite grating. I arranged my second Spanish conversation exchange for Sunday morning, planning to try to speak for about five minutes in Spanish and do the rest of the conversation in English. My language partner Jose was having none of that, and insisted that I had to try to speak for fifteen minutes without using any English. I was very surprised that I was more or less able to manage this, admittedly speaking a very broken, pigin Spanish and with a lot of help from Jose who typed out words in Spanish where I had trouble understanding what he was saying. You can hear our conversation here. As I mentioned above, I started using the Anki flashcard app this week. I’ll give a full rundown on this next week when I have a better sense of how the use the app properly and how it is working for me. This week I watched two Spanish movies: Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) from 1992, and El cuerpo (The Body) from 2012. I saw Como agua para chocolate when it came out and remember liking it at the time. Watching it again I thought it was a bit overly-sentimental, which surprised me as I thought I had gotten more soppy as I aged, not less so. El cuerpo was written and directed by Oriol Paulo who also wrote and directed Contratiempo. I loved both of them so will definitely be checking out the rest of the Paulo oeuvre. Well that’s about it. Week four of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 560 words in Spanish. I learnt 140 new words this week, which comes to 20 per day. One small step towards salsification, and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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