WEEK 6So, it’s the end of week six of my project to transform myself from obvious gringo to passable muchacho. This week I finished part I of the Pimsleur Spanish course, so I decided to try out a few different Spanish language learning podcasts. Part of my goal is to try every method and approach available, and widening the scope of resources I am using is a good thing and I definitely found some useful stuff. The problem is that while all the courses aimed at beginners have something different to offer, they are all essentially covering the same material, just in a different order or with a different emphasis. If I do them all, I’ll end up spending a lot of time becoming very good at A1-level Spanish, but won’t really progress beyond that. A bit like trying to learn to swim by wading ankle deep for hours along the seashore every day. But skipping through the courses creates a weird anxiety that I’m missing out on useful vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation tips etc, even if they appear only sporadically in lessons that cover material that I already know. Maybe this is just me subconsciously trying to take the easy route and I need to force myself to push forwards.
First up this week, I tried Coffee Break Spanish. This is a free podcast series with four levels (absolute beginner, intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced), with a total of 160 episodes of about 20 minutes each. There is also a paid version of the course for the curiously non-round sum of £98.40 per level, which includes video instead of audio lessons, transcripts of the lessons and some bonus material. Having had a look at the preview though, the video seems to be the free audio podcast with some of the key vocabulary appearing on the screen, so I’m not sure how much you really get by subscribing. The course involves a bilingual teacher teaching a pupil who is just beginning Spanish. I liked the pronunciation tips in the early lessons, especially as you can hear the difference between the teacher’s pronunciation and the student’s. I’m going to work on my pronunciation next week, so I think I’ll do the first ten or so lessons then, even though I’ve already covered all the vocabulary, grammatical points etc. The lessons themselves involve quite a bit of repetition, and I think I prefer the Pimsleur method which gets you to use the vocabulary and grammar to say a range of different sentences. A couple of the lessons also included the teacher’s young son. I’m not sure what the purpose of this was, as children are much harder to understand when speaking a foreign language than adults, and other people’s kids are, well, generally pretty annoying. Presumably the tyke asked if could be part of the podcast and his Dad said OK, a bit like if I let my five year old neese tipe de rest uf dis sedense fer no reesun at allllllllllllllll. Next I checked out Notes in Spanish. This podcast has 214 episodes of about 15 minutes each across three different levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced), though the majority of the episodes are at the advanced level. The podcast is not a course in Spanish as such, but really a useful accompaniment to whatever method of learning the language that you might already be using. You will need to have learnt some Spanish already even for the beginner’s series, though I am managing fine with six weeks under my belt. Each episode begins in English giving some of the vocabulary that will be used and then has a conversation between Ben, an Englishman living in Madrid, and his Spanish girlfriend Marina. What I love about podcast is that you are listening to real conversations and learning some useful idiomatic Spanish while also learning a bit about life in Madrid. The intermediate and advanced seasons have no English and seem to be just Spanish conversations. In the beginner’s podcasts they regularly mention the website where you can get transcripts of the conversations, worksheets, exercises etc. These cost €55 though, or €220 for the material for all the seasons, and since I think I can get everything I need from the free version, I’ll give subscribing a skip for now. This week I also read How to Learn a New Language with a Used Brain by Lynn McBride. This is a short book by a woman who retired and moved to France from the US and who writes a blog about learning French. It’s not a book I enjoyed reading to be honest, as there is no scheme or structure to it, and there is no guide for a language learner as to where they should start, or what resources work better than others, or which should be tried sooner or later. Instead there is an (almost) random collection of pieces of language learning advice. I’m a fan of the “try everything” approach, but this is really a list of all possible approaches undifferentiated, unsorted and disordered, including everything from singing songs in French, to getting a French girlfriend to cooking using French recipes. I’ve checked, and my adoring wife has given a firm no to all three of these. Chapter four is a good example of what frustrated me about this book. It is described by the author as a “goldmine”, which I suppose is accurate in the sense that you have to do a lot of serious digging if you want to find anything of even the smallest value. It consists of a series of random anecdotes about language learning from people who had read the author’s blog, many containing advice that is unlikely to be implementable for the vast majority of people, such as the suggestion that you go to live with a family where one member speaks English and the rest do not, or that you be uninhibited when speaking a foreign language, which is fine if you are a naturally uninhibited person, but otherwise is about as useful as telling a claustrophobe not be scared as you suddenly shove them into a closet. Not a book I’d recommend I’m afraid. You can see my full review here. I’ve also been continuing with Duolingo this week. The statistics tell me that I have learnt 750 words using the app, but by my reckoning the total number of Spanish words that I know is just under 800, and that is from all sources (Duolingo, Michel Thomas, Pimsleur, conversation exchanges, podcasts, reading etc). I suspect the app is counting all the different forms of each word separately. For example, instead of including the verb to live, vivir, as just one word on the list, it includes vivo (I live), vives (you live), vive (he/she/it lives), vivimos (we live), viven (they live) and tells you that you have learnt six words. This feels like a bit of a cheat, sort of like claiming you can say 10,000 sentences in perfect Spanish because you can say vivo en Dublin, vivo en Galway, vivo en Cork … and so on with 9,997 other cities. I arranged my third Spanish conversation exchange for Sunday morning, and managed about fifteen minutes completely in Spanish, though I did run into trouble trying to say a few things and had to change the subject. Having asked for permission to record the conversation at the start, for some reason I didn’t remember to actually start the recording until about ten minutes in. You can hear the last part of my faltering butchery of the noble Iberian tongue here. This week I watched one Spanish movie: El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride) from 2001. Not my favourite flick so far. I got bored with the story and characters fairly early on and just concentrated on listening to the dialogue. I feel like I can understand more each time I watch a movie, though it’s very hard to tell, as I also feel as if I am somehow getting taller, and that probably isn’t the case. I also continued watching the Spanish TV show La Casa de papel (Money Heist). The professor seems to be exciting some interest from various female characters in the show, so I have begun to model myself on him. Hell, I’ve already started growing the beard, so why not? I’m going to start searching for plans to Fort Knox online as soon as finish this post. Well that’s about it. Week six of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 792 words in Spanish. I learnt 120 new words this week, which comes to 17 per day. One small step towards moustachioed muchacho, and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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