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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 57 of 154 08 April 2013 at 3:28am | IP Logged |
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Once again, you have posted a very enjoyable summary of your Spanish endeavors.
About once or twice a year I travel for work to conferences. Occasionally there are conferences in or near Latin American countries. The next time an opportunity comes up I am going to go on the trip to the conference and then simply stay there for a week of vacation and do an immersion course. Maybe you could do the same thing the next time you have to go to Mexico for work? You could undoubtedly find a cheap school with a homestay. The schools and homestays I did in the Dominican and Ecuador were dirt cheap and extremely enjoyable. Also, do you pay for news in slow Spanish or are you just using the free material? I have heard many great things about it, but never used it. Edited by James29 on 08 April 2013 at 3:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| HermonMunster Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4636 days ago 119 posts - 211 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 58 of 154 22 April 2013 at 11:41pm | IP Logged |
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Hey James,
I've thought of trying to double dip on a trip to Mexico, but my job is fairly demanding. Things tend to get out of control when I'm gone for more than a week. Fortunately all my trips to Mexico are immersion classes. There's always someone at the front desk in the hotel I can talk with and I've made friends with some of the bar tenders and cleaning staff. I take what I can get when it comes to lessons. As for news in slow Spanish, I think it's the most bang for your buck out of all the language tools I've used so far. Most people won't have the patience to do what I did, but if you are diligent, you can download the whole site in a month for about $16. There are 214 lessons on the site now so that works out to about 7 cents for an hour of Audio and the transcripts, vocab lists, and grammar lessons. Can't beat that. I really look forward to my daily commute so I can listen to more news stories. They have great discussions/examples of when to use por/para and other topics that cause problems for non native speakers. I still have about 30 lessons to go before I get so the lessons that have the news at slow and full speed. When I finish the lessons (I have about 6months to go) I will sign up for another month and download all the new content. One of the cool things is that you can hear that the speakers really enjoy what they are doing and each other’s company. Almost every episode they say something that makes me laugh. I've also been stopping by Mexican restaurants to pick up the free Spanish language newspapers. I know I could just view them on the web, but there's something special about having the paper in your hand and being able to write on it. No to mention the fact that I'm sure my eyes could use more time away from a computer screen. The newspapers and news in slow Spanish are forcing my vocab to grow at a steady rate. I'm running into so many new words and phrases that I have to decide on whether I will learn a word or not. It's about 50/50 right now but I'm getting more confident in my reading/listening so I can rely on the context of the sentence/paragraph to give me the meaning. I have a little more than 2500 words in my Anki. I’ve noticed something kind of different on Spanish radio, there are a lot of advertisements for psychics. Does anyone know if fortune tellers are popular in Mexico culture? LOL@ assuming. The other day I was in the airport coming home from a business trip. I stopped in a Mexican restaurant and I heard two ladies speaking what I thought was Spanish. I ordered my dinner in Spanish and the lady was just staring at me. For a second I was heartbroken, thinking, "Shoot,I know I haven't spoken in about a week but I didn't think it was that bad." I figured I would ask her something simple that I couldn't possibly mess up. "How do you say refried beans in Spanish?" She looked at me with a puzzled face and I repeated it in English. "Ohh I don't speak Spanish." I asked her where she was from... Ethiopia. Ha! This last business trip was a big deal for me. I had to give a presentation in place of a guy who couldn't make it over from Germany. I did a pretty good job on it, adding my own style, while being respectful of the Phd's original content. I got to spend a lot of time with colleagues from Germany, France, and Portugal. The German guys were cracking me up with their English sayings and asking me soooo many questions about why Americans love guns so much. "Well in Germany if someone is going to rob you the worst thing that can happen is that you have a punch down and maybe you lose a couple of teeth." Yes! Their English word for a fight was "punch down." I couldn't stop laughing at that. I'm a pretty respectable mimic so I kept saying "yah, let's have a punch down." hahahha. They were asking me questions about hip hop culture that were hilarious, "So you know flavor flav, why did he wear a giant clock around his neck? (think of a heavy German accent) Yah, I am from the hood. I am rough and tough american gangster, homie." My face hurt from laughing so hard. At a dinner with all the group my supervisor made an announcement that I wanted to do some travel abroad on the production side of things. The guy from Portugal asked if I wanted to go to Mexico and without skipping a beat I switched to Spanish and said, "I have been discussing that with my wife and have been studying for about 13 months so I could be ready if the opportunity arose." Everyone at the table was like, "Whoa!!!" None of the people at the table had ever heard me speak Spanish. That felt really good. As the night went on I told them the reason why I started learning. They couldn't believe the story of my car accident. After dinner I was telling the guy from Portugal about how I mess up alot by doing direct translations. Told him about how I wanted to say, "I did that to save my ass," but I really said, "I did that to drown my ass." He explained to me that phrase really doesn't make sense in Spanish. If you say save (ahorrar) then "my ass" it really means something like you were going to give your ass away today but decided to save it for later. I was like, "Nooohoooooooo that's not what I was trying to say." We had a good laugh about that. Trying to learn Spanish has made me much more compassionate to people who are trying to learn English. I was killing some time in the airport when a middle aged woman asked if she could sit next to me. I detected an accent so I asked where she was from. Brazil. She apologized for her bad English, but I assured her that it was great (that was a half truth but I wanted to lift her spirits and give her some confidence) We sat and chatted about her home town, why she was here, and what she thought about the Olympics coming for about 10 minutes. It was a really fun conversation it felt good to be giving back to the language universe. I'm getting quicker with my Spanish wit. My program manager asked me if we were going to do some work for free. before I thought about it, I had written, "hell no, doesn't your wife need some presents?" He got a kick out of that. It's nice that I'm finally at the stage where my real personality can start coming out in Spanish. I'm still listening to audio lessons for about 1hr/day, listening to 2-4 hrs of Spanish radio at my desk, writing majority of my emails in Spanish, reading transcripts of newsinslow Spanish during lunch, talking to everyone who I think can speak Spanish, but most importantly I'm still having fun. 1067.5 hrs of studying according to my tracker. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| HermonMunster Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4636 days ago 119 posts - 211 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 59 of 154 24 April 2013 at 3:38am | IP Logged |
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quick update. just finished listening to a lesson in newsinslowspanish. It was really cool because it deals with past events. I just got to the lesson on the earthquake that smashed haiti. There's a section on exploring Latin America and the guy was asking for donations to the red cross. I could understand about 85% percent of what he was saying. Old news stories have a way of drawing you back in time to where you were when the event happened. I remember giving some money to help out. You never know when today will be your last or something will happen to totally change your life. I got back in contact with a colleague and he told me that a tree fell on his wife and daughter. The girl just had some cuts but the wife broke her back and she hasn't been the same since. :-(
On a more positive note. I had another glimmer of the real me in Spanish. An engineer in Mexico was asking me for a deviation because the line workers can't fit their fingers in a machine. I know it's a problem because I saw it with my own eyes last time I was in the plant. Without missing a beat I told him, in Spanish, that all they need to do is hire a bunch of kids because they have little fingers that can fit in the machine. They would also be a cost savings because they could just pay them in toys. He was cracking up :-) Weeeeee 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| HermonMunster Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4636 days ago 119 posts - 211 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 60 of 154 29 May 2013 at 5:09am | IP Logged |
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Hello,
It's been a while since my last post. This post has been sitting here for about a week. I've been adding a little bit here and there so bare with me if the timelines don't match up. I'm still alive working on my Spanish every day. I'm on lesson 83 of newsinslowspanish podcasts, but only on lesson 17 of the transcripts. I'm reading some newspapers as I find them and am almost exclusively listening to Spanish on the radio. I was kind of proud because I could pick out a few words from a commercial. You know how they need to say the disclaimer at the end of the commercial?? "warning diet and exercise will increase your testosterone more than this pill. May cause blindness, death, bleeding of the eyes, spontaneous combustion, etc." I was really happy like, "hey, i actually caught some of that." Operation Skype will began a few weekends ago. The guy a mentioned a few pages back ( the one who was feeling bad about his English skills) and I have started having regular skype sessions. The inspiration for this was when I needed to talk to him about a drawing (thought it would be easier than instant message) and it was difficult. He is not very confident in his abilities and it slows him down so much that it's hard to communicate. I told him about skype and he was really excited to start practicing. I need to tell him to kind of keep it a secret because I don't want people getting mad, "Herm, I thought we were friends, you asked Guillermo to be your Skype buddy and not me.. What's up with that." It should be very rewarding for both of us and a good way for me to push myself. I know more Spanish than he does English so when he doesn't know a word or phrase he'll ask me in Spanish. Good practice of my vocab words. Our first session went really well. We talked for 2hours. It was about an hour and a half in English. He really has some work to do. It was fun because we were just getting to know each other. You know, do you have any brothers/sisters, a dog,stuff like that. It was kinda funny because his mom and dad were visiting and they kept walking past the room he was in and looking at the screen. Since he didn't know about Skype until I told him, I'm sure his parent's brains exploded, "My boy is talking English through the computer and I can see the guy on the other side, and he's drinking beer!!!" This audio was pretty good so I could hear the birds chirping in the background and everything. When we switched to Spanish I was flowing pretty well. I got caught up on a few tenses, forgot a few words, and he taught me a few, but overall it was good. This past week he told me that he's leaving the company to work in Arizona. I'm really happy for him because this will be his big break to learn English. I just hope he can get over the shyness and speak to Americans. It would be very easy for him to live his life in Spanish. He regrets not taking language learning seriously when he was a kid. His parents told him everyday that knowing English was the key to a better life. I told him not to get so down on himself because I'm sure everyone has some regrets with their studies. I wish I would have caught fire for Spanish while I was in college. Some years I would have 2 or 3 weeks to do nothing before my internship started. Having plenty of time is no fun when you don't have plenty of money. Something funny happened today. I kinda offended my buddy Guillermo. He's leaving the company and a lady is taking his place. I asked if her English is better or worse than his and he replied, "Hey! I'm not the worst! My English is ok." The Spanish word peor can be both worse and worst and I guess he took it as worst. After clearing that up he told me that her English is worst than his. I was like, "Yesssss!" which confused him. I explained how it will be a great opportunity for me to work on my Spanish. I sent her an email introducing myself and explaining my plan for learning Spanish from her and teach some English. (You have to make your own way when learning a language. No one else in my company is doing what I'm doing) I had a meet up today that was super fun. Lots of new people and some of the old ones. Spanish was just flowing out of me. One guy lived in Mexico city for a few years. A lady has to go Mexico and Brazil multiple times a year for work. Another lady is a mom who has been too busy to keep up with it. There were several others that I couldn't talk with this time. I was surprised at how many older people are joining the group. I think it's great. It's never too late to acquire a new skill. Over the holiday weekend I ate at a Mexican restaurant and spoke with the waiter. He said that it's good I'm learning Spanish. I'm happy about my progress. This has really been a fun experience. I spoke to my wife a few weeks ago about an article I read about Americans going to Costa Rica to retire. It was very interesting and definitely something for us to consider. While I plan to be rich through an invention or acquiring other skills, I need to be realistic about the future and think of ways to make future earnings stretch as much as possible. I guess I'll put more though into that in 20 years, but in the mean time I can at least do myself a huge favor by improving my Spanish. We may go to Mexico for Christmas with another couple (We would be going to the wife's hometown). That would be a really cool experience. Cya Edited by HermonMunster on 29 May 2013 at 2:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| HermonMunster Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4636 days ago 119 posts - 211 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 61 of 154 04 June 2013 at 10:40pm | IP Logged |
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This will be a quick post. Something funny happened yesterday. I was talking to a co-worker about her weekend. She went camping and I asked did you catch any fish in Spanish (or at least I thought I did). I used the verb coger which can mean to catch, but also take/get. But in Mexican Spanish, the familiar preterit of coger (cogiste) is slang for F*$&-. Of course she just cracks up laughing and tells me to ask one of the guys what it means. His reply had me cracking up.
"in the perverted minds: cogiste is F*$%, bad word. don't say it to the Mexicans." His wording was really funny to me because he is Mexican hahaha. Ohh yea I went to a bon-fire with a bunch of people and my Columbian buddies were there. They were really impressed with my improvement. The wife has only been here 2 years and her English is getting much better. We want to invite them over for game night, but so many games use words and phrases that only an American would know. A while ago a group was playing the game catchphrase. A lady from Mexico got the word comet. She started by saying, "Umm it's like a missile," so her team was yelling out "bomb, explosion, fire cracker," and things like that. Then she said, "No, it's more like a kite." We all burst out laughing, thinking, "how is a comet like a missile and a kite." But after a while it sunk in and I was really impressed. She used the language that she had at the time to give a pretty good description. A comet flies through the air/space like a missile and it has a tail following it like a kite. You have to work with what you have. Looks like the company has some ambitious expansion plans. I'm going to float the idea of being an engineering consultant for plants that will be opening in Southern Mexico and South America. I don't want to move there but a week or 2 at a time would be interesting and a great chance to work on the language. I'm on lesson 95 audio of newsinslowspanish but only lesson 19 of the reading. It's really exploding my vocab and I look forward to listening to it during my commute. Still listening to Spanish radio for hours per day. I'm at 1240hrs of studying. I'm feeling pretty confident in my abilities and I get happy when I think about how good I'll be in a year or two. I'll never stop learning Spanish. As I mentioned before, in another couple of years I may take up another language. Ohh yea, I ran into my buddy from the Spanish meet up whose family is from the Dominican republic. I asked his wife if she had been to any more yard sells and she said enthusiastically EVERY SATURDAY!!! I guess when you think about it, they are pretty amazing things. Edited by HermonMunster on 04 June 2013 at 10:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 62 of 154 06 June 2013 at 3:55am | IP Logged |
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Hey Hermon... have you been to other Latin American countries/cities? What do you think of Hermosillo in terms of safety for Americans? How does it compare to other places?
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| HermonMunster Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4636 days ago 119 posts - 211 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 63 of 154 07 June 2013 at 11:23pm | IP Logged |
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Hey James,
Mexico is the only Spanish speaking country I've been to in the last few years. I was in Barcelona about 10years ago but I can barely remember that trip. In Mexico I've been to Hermosillo, Empalme/Guaymas, San Carlos, Durango, Monterrey/Escobedo. In Hermosillo I've always felt safe. When I'm down there I try to go for an hour walk right after work. I've been walking all over by myself and no one bothers me. Some people may stare b/c there aren't too many people that look like me there. I've never felt uncomfortable and I was almost in a bar fight once. Nothing was out of control, just some drunk guys that wanted to fight and get me to join. The same can happen anywhere. Empalme/Guaymas is a nice area near the Sea of Cortez. I was kind of nervous there but not because of crime. The way people drive there is insane. I was holding on to the ohh-shoot bar the whole time. I think I remember closing my eyes at one point so that the crash would be a surprise. A coworker once told me that it's an insult to say, "you drive like you're from Guaymas. San Carlos is a resort city on the Sea of Cortez. Very beautiful the people are very friendly and vendors are reasonable. My wife and I paid for a scuba excursion, but the water was so cloudy from a Typhoon that we couldn't see more than a foot. That made my wife really nervous and we had to stop just about as soon as we got in the water. The guide was cool and only charged us half of the original prices (he did give us lessons in the pool) I know this is off topic but he said something really profound. He was speaking about how he used to be a spear fisher and catch everything under the sea for sport but then he stopped. I asked was he poaching and if it was against the law, he replied, "No, it was against myself." Durango is kind of a different story. There you're kinda getting into the area where bad things can happen. A week before I was there the federales found a mass grave. I asked my coworkers if the violence is really bad and they said that it's pretty much just confined to the drug guys. I asked about a driveby shootings or someone shooting up the beautiful constitution ave and they said noooo way. I went into a Walmart that had a bank in it and there were two security guards, one with a shotgun (finger on the trigger and shells across his chest) and the other with 2 pistols in his hands (also with fingers on the trigger) I remember thinking, "what kind of greeters are these." lol Again I went for walks by myself and no one paid me any attention other than tilting their head and probably thinking, "I wonder who this guy is and where is he going." Monterrey/Ecobedo is a sad story. I believe it's the artistic capital of Mexico. It's beautiful with a river running through it like San Antonio. I did have coworkers say, "You really shouldn't go far, it's not safe." Of course I went out alittle bit but not too far away from the busy areas. One guy that worked at a assembly plant there was kidnapped leaving work. The bad guys found out that they had taken, for lack of a better work, a nobody, and they just kicked him out of the car and he had to walk back to town. Monterrey is also the city where the drug guys burned down the casino and many people died. That seems pretty crazy to me. If you know the guys you want to kill are in there, why not wait till they come out and get them. Not burn the whole place down with grandma and grandpa in there. A lot of people don't know it but the Mexican judicial system is complete different from the US. There is no trial by jury. If you were ever arrested for something you could probably pay a bribe and get out of it, but if you went before a judge he would read some papers and then decide if you were guilty and that would be it.(unless you got the embassy involved). If you're in a car accident and no one is hurt so bad that your absence would cause death, it's probably better to leave the scene and figure out a way to straighten things out without police involvement. I wish they would just legalize drugs. It's not like them being illegal is stopping them from being consumed. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 64 of 154 09 June 2013 at 3:09pm | IP Logged |
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Cool. Thanks for the info. I'd like to take a trip to Mexico sometime as I feel I have neglected Mexico in my Spanish studies. I seem to be mostly drawn to Spain and the Caribbean. The safety factor is of top priority for me and cost is basically equal. The easiest place in Mexico for me would be to fly to Cancun and then take a bus to Tulum or Merida or some other place. Getting over to Hermosillo would be tough/expensive, but I have heard people around here talking about it as there is a company here with offices in Hermosillo.
I can totally relate to the driving experience. I don't understand it at all. It really is insane and I simply cannot believe it. I find it definitely detracts from my experiences in the countries as it is a deterrent from travelling. In Ecuador I took a few bus and long cab rides and there were at least 100 times I could have been in a fatal accident. In the Dominican I had the "closing my eyes" experience... and will never forget seeing two motorcycles on the highway in the middle of the night... one was broken down and was getting pushed by the other guy at breakneck speed. Edit: oh yeah, on drugs... it is not like everyone would immediately do drugs if they became legal. Sometimes I feel like people think everyone would immediately become a heroin addict as soon as drugs became legal. Not much would change, except drug users would have a lot more money to buy other things because the prices would come down so much. Edited by James29 on 09 June 2013 at 3:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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