WEEK 7So, it’s the end of week seven of my project to swap my bodhrán for a couple of castanets. Not the most productive week of my language learning career, as I was struck low with particularly virulent sinus infection. Not quite manflu, but pretty serious nonetheless. I did manage to do a little Spanish each day despite my enfeebled state and thankfully hospitalisation wasn’t required.
Earlier this week, as I was delighting my teenage daughter with swashbuckling tales of Spanish grammar learning, I had a somewhat unnerving experience. My offspring is naturally following this project with the rapt and avid interest one would expect any fourteen-year-old to have for one of her father’s hobbies, and I was trying to give her an example of something using French rather than Spanish, as that is a language she is learning in school and I thought I used to speak well. But every time I tried to think of a French word, either the Spanish word popped into my head instead, or nothing did at all and I was left blinking vacuously. Yikes. Has Spanish pushed French out of my head? Have I reached the point in life where my brain is full, and every time I learn something new it overwrites something else to make room? If so, I’m going to have to be careful what crap I watch on TV from now on in case any of it pushes out my memory of Ireland beating the All Blacks in Chicago in 2016. Or, you know, my wedding day. This week I read How to Learn a Foreign Language by Paul Pimsleur. I have already done part I of Pimsleur’s Spanish audio course which I think is great and the book didn’t disappoint either. Although it seems to be aimed at people who are taking a language course, the advice is just as valuable for people like me who are ploughing their own furrow. The book is packed full of useful advice, much of which I have seen repeated in more recently written books. Without doubt my favourite line from the book is: “[N]o rule forbids learning a language with a martini in your hand; in fact, it may lower your inhibitions.” I assume that applies equally to Guinness. Coupled with his advice that you should learn a language in short bursts throughout the day, this could prove to a very interesting summer. You can see my review of the book here. I finished creating flashcards in Anki for all the vocabulary I had already covered and have started to use the app to learn new words. The textbook that the Instituto Cervantes recommends for the CEFR level A1 exam, Aula Internacional 1, has a vocabulary of about fifteen hundred words in the index, but I thought it might be confusing learning a list of words in alphabetical order and so took the advice from Paul Pimsleur’s book to use a word frequency list to find vocabulary to learn instead. A word frequency list is a list of words taken from millions of pages of text which are read by a computer program and sorted from most to least common. I had a look at one of these lists several years ago when learning French, but I found that a lot of the words that were listed as being common were ones I suspected I'd rarely if ever use. I think the texts used to make the list were very out of date - probably books written more than 70 years ago and no longer covered by copyright, so you were much more likely to come across the word phonograph than the word iPhone. However, some swift googling has revealed that things have moved on a lot in recent times. Wiktionary now has a list of the ten thousand most common words that have appeared in the subtitles of films and television programmes, made from a total list of over twenty-seven million words. Even better, it gives what it calls the “lemma form” of each word, essentially telling you if the word is a different form of a verb, adjective etc that you’ve already come across. For example, the verb vivir (to live), has eighteen different forms in the ten thousand most common words: vivo (I live), vives (you live), vive (he/she/it lives), vivimos (we live), viven (they live), and so on. Since vivir, is regular, I really only need to learn the infinitive of the verb (the "to live" form), and can figure out the other parts from the grammar I’ve already learnt. If I come across something I haven't learnt yet - like the subjunctive - then I'll just skip it and come back to it later. My plan is to try to learn the five thousand most common of these lemma-form words in one year. In other words, I will try to learn five thousand words, but will count all forms of a verb like vivir as just one word. Pimsleur in his book says a person with a vocabulary of five thousand words is reasonably fluent and can understand about 98% of all written text. Estimates I’ve seen online for how many words you need for each of the CEFR language levels vary, but level B2 seems to be somewhere between four and five thousand words. Of course, that’s not to say that if I know five thousand words I’ll have reached level B2, or that I’ll be reasonably fluent, whatever that even means. There's a big difference between knowing the Spanish for "slice of cake" and being able to convince someone that you didn't just eat their slice of cake and that you don't know what could possibly have happened to it. Having finished both the Pimsleur I and Michel Thomas foundation courses, I decided to try another audio only course while driving and queuing endlessly for the supermarket, so I gave Learning Spanish Like Crazy a go. It has three levels of about fifteen hours each, with each lesson about 30 minutes long. The first lesson began with a fast-paced conversation that no beginner could possibly have understood, and which I found a struggle even after seven weeks of studying Spanish. It involved a man asking a woman if various people spoke Spanish, playing off the ambiguity that "you speak", "he speaks" and "she speaks" use the same word "habla" in Spanish. It was a bit like that part in Airplane: The Movie where one of the pilots is called Roger and the other is called Over. Not a particularly great gag in your native language, but bewilderingly annoying in a language learning course aimed at beginners. The lessons themselves involve a lot of “listen and repeat” drills, going over and over the same vocabulary with the same sentences, or sentences where just one word is changed (“I worked in a pharmacy”, “I worked in a factory”, “I worked in an office”, “where did you work?”, “where did she work?”, “where did he work?”). There isn’t really any mixing of new vocabulary with tests on words already learnt, or blending new grammatical structures with ones covered in previous lessons, so I think both the Michel Thomas and Pimsleur courses are infinitely better. I did a few lessons and then skipped ahead and listened to the conversations at the start of each lesson and parts of the lessons themselves. Most of the conversations were OK, just spoken a bit too quickly by people who are making no effort to pronounce all the words clearly, but there were a few that were confusing and unrealistic to the point of absurdity. It was like to trying to learn Spanish by listening to a badly translated Monty Python sketch. Learning like crazy indeed. This week I watched one Spanish movie: Nueve reinas (Nine Queens) from 2000. I love movies about con men, and this is one of the best. There’s a 2004 Hollywood remake but it just isn’t quite as good. I am beginning to wonder if it is a legal requirement that Ricardo Darín appear in all Argentinian films. I’ve seen four in seven weeks and he has starred in every one of them. Time to freshen things up with something from Spain next week I think. I also continued watching the Spanish TV show La Casa de papel (Money Heist), and am almost finished season one. I like heist stories almost as much as ones about con men, so I’m loving this too. I’m not sure how much Spanish I’m learning, but I do have a few ideas about how to rob the Bank of Ireland wearing a James Joyce mask … Well that’s about it. Week seven of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 917 words in Spanish. I learnt 125 new words this week, which comes to just under 18 per day. One small step in a long flamenco, and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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