WEEK 8Hola,
So, it’s the end of week eight of my project to swap a cool Guinness for a warm rioja. This was a pretty busy week at work, both because of trying to catch up on things I didn’t get done last week due to my temporary infirmity and because I need to finish and submit an academic article I’m writing about taxation theory. Heady stuff. I did still muddle along with some Spanish learning though. This was definitely the week when I started to lose enthusiasm for Duolingo and it's irritatingly chirpy cartoon owl. There are 159 separate lessons in the Spanish course, each of which involves about 16 questions, and each of which apparently needs to be done five times. The first couple of times you do a lesson, it mostly involves forming sentences using words from the selection given, so you just need to click on the correct words in the correct order. This is easy to do on an iPhone and a relatively painless way to learn. The problem comes as you move on to doing the lesson for the fourth of fifth time, because at that point you are mainly translating sentences by typing them into the app with no hints or prompts. I have now done the first twenty-one lessons the full five times and another thirteen lessons three times, and the problem that I've found is that typing the sentences is much more time consuming and user-unfriendly than clicking on words. I find typing on the iPhone is a bit fiddly, so I often have to retype my answer fix typos or autocorrect errors. I also find that on the fifth time doing a lesson I make stupid, frustrating mistakes unless I really concentrate, and this means that it takes even more time to get through. The app is gamified, so when you make a mistake you lose a life (a heart on the app), and if you lose five you are shut out or have to "buy" more using treasure won from completing tasks. This doesn't make me want to concentrate any harder to avoid mistakes, nor does it make me want to pay for the premium account with unlimited lives. It makes me want to delete the stupid thing and see if Netflix and alcohol works for learning Spanish. I know that writing in Spanish is an important skill that I'll need to acquire for the exams I take at the end of this project, but I think I'd rather acquire that ability through writing something longer and more practical than the random, unconnected and often useless sentences Duolingo comes up with, like “The football players speak English”. Do they? Because I’ve heard a few of them interviewed, and even some of the British ones seem to be communicating in a language with an unstable and surprising grammatical structure that only broadly approximates English. I haven’t quite given up on the app just yet, as it is good for teaching grammatical rules, but it's days may be numbered. I’ll trying doing each lesson twice from now on and see how that goes. I’ve been working a bit on my Spanish pronunciation this week, as Pimsleur in his book advises addressing this as early as possible when learning a language, as do a couple of other books I’ve read. The first ten lessons of Coffee Break Spanish have some good tips. I liked the one about how to pronounce the Spanish r: Say the words “an otter” in an American accent (ie, not pronouncing the t strongly). Now change it to “a otter”, and say it a few times. Now change the o from an “aw” sound to an “oh” sound. You have now said the Spanish word “ahora”. Tips like this are all very well, but I wonder how realistic is it using them in practice. If I keep saying “a otter” to myself will I eventually crack how to say the Spanish r a be able to say it in any word, or will I months from now find myself in a bar trying to buy beer saying: “Say otter, say otter, say otter … say -tter, say -tter, say -tter … say -tter vesa ... cervesa por favor”, like the man with the weirdest stutter in history? I also tried Idahosa Ness’s Mimic Method which is strongly recommended in Benny Lewis’s book, Fluent in 3 Months. I downloaded the free guide which takes you through the 39 elemental sounds in Spanish. There’s a good chart showing where your tongue goes to make the Spanish vowels and how the sounds compare with English vowels, and there are recordings of each of the 39 sounds and several Spanish words in which they appear. Thinking about what your mouth does when it makes a sound helps a bit, as does repeating the various words along with the recording, and I have gone through these a couple of times. It didn’t make me want to spend $197 on the full course though, as I think speaking aloud using the Pimsleur course and focusing on trying to make the right sound should get me to a level where I can be understood. I figure I’m always going to sound like a gringo, and saying full sentences that I might use on a real Spanish person some day seems like a better use of my time than walking around making exaggerated vowel sounds like someone who's lost what slender grip they had on reality. One tool I have found to be great is SpanishDict It's a website containing a dictionary with example sentences for each word, and a video file of the word being pronounced (with with either a Spanish Castillian accent or a Latin American one). It also has a section with the conjugation of every Spanish verb in every tense, vocabulary lists sorted by topic, and huge grammar section with examples, practice quizzes, and links to to the appropriate grammar page and quiz for each chapter of a large number of textbooks. Of all the completely free resources I’ve come across so far, this definitely ranks number one. I’ve been reading La noche de la Usina by Eduardo Sacheri for the last couple of weeks and I’ve now managed to get through the first three chapters (about 7% of the book according to Kindle). I definitely feel that I am using the dictionary less and less and am starting to be able to read and get the gist of a few sentences at a time, without being able to translate every word 100% accurately. The book is pretty enjoyable even though the story is still only getting started. I am learning a bit about rural Argentina in the 1980s and 1990s, which will come in handy if I ever invent a time machine and it malfunctions and takes me somewhere I don’t want to go. This week I attempted to watch the first episode of Game of Thrones (Juego de Tronas) dubbed in Spanish with no subtitles. A few things I've read had suggested doing this, even at an early stage of learning a language, but to be honest I didn't find it useful at all. I’ve seen this episode twice before (yes, I'm one of those guys), and if I hadn't I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have had a clue what was going on. I managed to pick up a few stray words here and there, but no more than that. I'll have a go at episode two in a couple of months and see if I do any better. This week I watched one Spanish movie: Celda 211 (Cell 211) from 2009. If you like your prison dramas grittier than a gravel sandwich full of shivs, then this is definitely the flick for you. I also finished the first season of Spanish TV show La Casa de papel (Money Heist), and started straight into the second. Terrific stuff. Well that’s about it. Week eight of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 1,097 words in Spanish. I learnt 180 new words this week, which comes to just under 26 per day. One small step towards sipping vino fluently in the sun, and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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