WEEK 9Hola,
So, it’s the end of week nine of my project to swap a frosty jig for a fiery tango. If feel like I’m starting to get a handle on the Spanish language and think I might be closing in on A1 level, so I’m planning to get my hands on a past paper, find someone to correct it and sit it in the next two weeks. Not the same as sitting the official exam and getting a bit of parchment as a reward, but good enough to see how much progress I’ve made in two and half months, and how far I might be able to get by next April. This week I started working through the textbook that the Instituto Cervantes recommends for the A1 exam, Aula Internacional 1. I had originally intended to use this from the outset of my Spanish learning, but when I looked through it I could see that it is really designed to be a class workbook and not a self-contained course for intrepid solo learner like me. The book has an index with about 1,500 words which I’m guessing are the ones prescribed for the A1 exam, so I’m working my way through the ones I haven’t already learnt. Some of them seem like words I’m very unlikely to use in any Spanish conversation any time soon though, such as ox, procession, ecovillage, shepherd and repopulate, though having reread them, it is probably possible to make at least one interesting sentence out that particular list. Strangely, the exercises in the book and accompanying .mp3 recordings use quite a lot of words that aren’t in the index at all, so I’m not sure that this is the most carefully put together book in history. The exercises themselves vary from useful ones that test vocabulary and grammar in realistic pieces of text and recordings, to time wasting nonsense that appears to just be busy work, like the one that suggested I make a poster using information about a classmate, adding that if I want I can include drawings and photos. Great. Maybe I’ll knit a sweater with their face on it too, and see if that teaches me Spanish. This week I’ve been continuing with part II of the Pimsleur Spanish course. It’s much as the first part was, with lots of questions requiring you to use the vocabulary and grammar you’ve learnt and lots of practice pronouncing the words and hearing them pronounced correctly. Repetitive, but easy to do in the car and effective I think. I also started the Michel Thomas Spanish Advanced course. I loved the foundation course, but find this course is quite different. There is much less practice of grammar and vocabulary using new and ever more complex sentence structures, and instead just a lot of teaching of verbs and verb tenses, so it’s not so much a continuation as an add-on. Michel’s explanations are good though, and there are some questions to get you to practice the material, but I’m not sure it is all sinking in as easily as the material in the first course did. It is useful though, so I think I’ll see it through the end over the next couple of weeks. This week I read How to Speak Any Language Fluently by Alex Rawlings. I struggle to find much that is positive to say about this book, to be honest. The author is obviously gifted at learning languages: in 2012, aged just 21, he was named Britain’s most multilingual student after being tested for fluency in 11 different languages. Sadly, his prodigious talents do not appear to extend to teaching. As I suspect the case with many prodigies, he may not have much insight into how he does what he does, and hence has few valuable tips for us mortals. The book begins with an entire chapter devoted to selling you on why you should learn a foreign language, which I found puzzling. Why are you reading a book about the best way to learn a foreign language if you aren’t sure if want to learn a language in the first place? It would be like buying a book on how to build your own computer if you weren’t sure you liked building things and thought that it was probably better to just buy a finished, working laptop instead. Although there is some useful material in the book – the chapter on reading as method of learning a language is quite good – much of it is buried among reams of coruscatingly self-evident information. For example, he outlines various types of language courses available (group, individual etc) and where they might be found (university, private school, language institute etc) and then tells you about each. He tells you that private teachers work for themselves, that the costs of private teachers vary, that it’s important to have a good relationship with your language teacher and a host of other points all of which you could have figured out for yourself in about as long as it took you to read them. What he does not do, unfortunately, is tell you whether private teachers are better than group courses, or in what circumstances, or give you tips on how to make one-to-one tuition work well or outline the pitfalls that you should avoid, or really provide much in the way of advice at all. The book doesn’t tell you how, it just tells you what. It isn’t a recipe book, it’s a menu. This week I watched one Spanish movie: La cara oculta (The Hidden face) from 2011 and continued with the second season of Spanish TV show La Casa de papel (Money Heist). The film had a remarkably unlikely premise. A man goes to a bar, sits alone and gets drunk while crying. He then goes outside and picks a fight. When the barmaid comes outside and asks him where he lives so she can get him a taxi, he says he doesn’t know. So she brings him home with her because, you know, he’s a total catch. The next morning he leaves without a word of thanks, but returns to the bar and takes her to the concert hall where works as is a conductor. He says he has no wife or girlfriend, so naturally she immediately goes home with him to his remote house in the country for sexy time. In the morning, cops arrive who are investigating the disappearance of the guy’s girlfriend – she went missing two weeks ago. He is clearly a suspect. Cut to that evening, and not only has the barmaid with a heart of gold returned, she is upstairs waiting for him as he sits in the living room broodingly playing the piano. The only thing that seems to unsettle her are some strange noises coming from the plumbing. Thick as a manure milkshake, this girl. Living proof that beauty times brains equals a constant. From that point on, I was solidly rooting for her to end up locked in the basement with the last gullible idiot. I’ll leave you the pleasure of discovering the rest. Well that’s about it. Week nine of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 1300 words in Spanish. I learnt 203 new words this week, which comes to 29 per day. One small step towards, if not dancing with a rose in my teeth, at least admiring those who do, and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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