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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 33 of 124 12 March 2013 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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CANTONESE
I just finished Unit 9 of Elementary Cantonese this morning, and have just started reviewing the dialogues in Unit 10. This lesson deals with positive/negative questions, which I’m already pretty comfortable with, but I figure it’ll be good practice nonetheless with drills and character recognition. At this rate, I should be done with the first volume of the set by the end of the week! There was a big sale at the Commercial Press bookstore at Causeway Bay, so I stopped by and picked up three more Greenwood Press books at a nice discount: Living Cantonese for Intermediate Learners, Fun with Cantonese: Basic Patterns, and Wedding Bells. I think next week, I’ll do a quick skim through the Basic Patterns book, spending maybe just a day or two, so that I can beef up my vocabulary for the purposes of improving my listening comprehension. While I appreciate the clarity and thoroughness of Sidney Lau's books, they take a very FSI-like approach of focusing on grammar and speaking fundamentals, but without much vocabulary at all. I know that grammar is absolutely necessary, but I will also need to greatly improve my passive vocabulary if I want to be able to understand the news and television shows better. Especially since I've been watching a lot of Cantonese television every day, it’s a good idea to quickly cram a lot of new vocabulary now, and then continue to move through the Sidney Lau drills at a more comfortable pace to burn the patterns in. The past two days have been pretty rough for me speaking-wise. Although I am usually pretty decent with tones and don’t have much trouble pronouncing them in isolation or in simple constructions, my pronunciation tells to fall apart when I’m tired or trying to push my language beyond my comfort zone. Lately, I've been using a lot of expressions that I've heard zillions of times before, but have never actually had occasion to use myself. So even though the proper pronunciation is right at the tip of my tongue, my mouth simply refuses to pronounce the words correct. I think this is just going to be something I have to push past, but it is certainly frustrating! My Cantonese deck for Anki is now up to 334 words. Hopefully, I can get to at least 500 total new vocabulary words by the end of the month, when we leave for our trip to Paris. FRENCH I’m now up to Lesson 64 of NFWE, and should be on track to finish my review before our trip. I’m still noting a few words or grammatical constructions here and there that I missed the first time, such as “beaux-parents” for parents-in-law or "du vendredi au dimanche” for “from Friday until Sunday.” I've also been diligently listening to RFI journal en francais facile. It’s funny how sometimes, an episode seems super fast, but then I listen to it again and it seems slow and super clear. The only complaint I have with the easy French news is that it tends to revolve around the same topics – lately, the passing of Hugo Chavez and the Kenyan elections. That means that it tends to cover the same vocabulary and subject areas over and over again, which is great for reinforcement but not so much for vocabulary expansion. In an effort to broaden my French listening, I downloaded and listened to a few episodes of “Comment vont les affaires,” RFI’s program for intermediate business French. It is AWFUL. The program revolves around a young English-speaking woman, Danielle, who takes an internship in Paris to learn French and French business ways. Not only is her French absolutely abominable both in grammar and accent, but more than half of each lesson consists of her explaining what is going on - in English! The actual French dialogs (some of which are interspersed with Danielle’s terrible French or her annoyingly patronizing commentaries or musings about French business etiquette) only last a minute or less. I am considering editing down the MP3s with Audacity to make the lessons more usable, but I am more inclined to just delete them from my computer. Sadly, I cannot recommend this program at all. OTHER LANGUAGES Yesterday, I read two articles from La Jornada online, and today, I read an article from El País. I’ve been trying to spread out the topics to increase my vocabulary exposure, so this included an article on the Vatican’s upcoming conclave and two articles about various assassinations in Mexico. I've added three new words to Anki. I also listened to two episodes of Café Brasil and two Schlaflos podcasts. The Café Brasil podcasts clock in at about half an hour each, which is pretty time-consuming, but I've been using them mostly as background music during my morning routine. The Schlaflos podcasts are much shorter, and I've been listening to them mostly at the gym. Edited by mike245 on 14 March 2013 at 8:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 34 of 124 14 March 2013 at 8:54am | IP Logged | ||
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CANTONESE
I’m halfway through the Lesson 10 drills in Elementary Cantonese, and should be able to finish the chapter today or tomorrow. Part of me is impatiently looking forward to quickly learning as many new sentence patterns as I can, while the other part of me just wants to pound through Elementary/Intermediate Cantonese so that I can get a good thorough overview of the grammar and basic structure of the language. Aside from a few Pimsleur courses and Assimil NFWE, I've not seen many language courses through to “completion” so I think there will be a sense of accomplishment when I get through these four hefty volumes. Of course, there are actually six volumes of the Sidney Lau course, but my understanding is that the last two are basically vocabulary-intensive readers that aren't that useful at my current stage of learning. I've been reading up a lot on language learning, and have seen a lot written about two opposing language learning approaches: the all-X language-all the time/”listen to as much as you can before you speak” method versus the comprehensible input method. I must say that at least in my experience, the second approach is so much more efficient and useful. My relationship with Cantonese bears this out. I've listened to Cantonese for a substantial chunk of my life. Growing up, I watched thousands of hours of Hong Kong television shows and movies. I sometimes heard my parents speak Cantonese with relatives or outside the house. In college, I had roommates and friends from Hong Kong and Singapore, and would often hear them speaking on the phone, listening to music or otherwise using Cantonese. For the past 8 years, I’ve heard my partner and members of his family speak Cantonese for hours on end. Many of my friends are originally from Hong Kong, and on many occasions, I've been the only person in a group of bilingual speakers who effortlessly code-switch between Cantonese and English. And of course now, I'm living in Hong Kong. According to the most extreme iteration of the “listen before you speak” method, I should at some point have magically absorbed the language and at this point, should be able to listen with perfect comprehension. After all, I imagine I must have at least 10,000 hours of passive listening exposure, mostly on familiar topics and all at real- life conversational speed. But the sad truth is that my Cantonese language skills – including my listening comprehension – are pretty poor. Sure, I know a lot of words but mostly for commonplace nouns, such as food items, where it's pretty easy to guess what a word refers to. And I know a number of basic conjunctions/adjectives/etc., but these are mostly words that I learned in taking a year of conversational Cantonese classes in college. When I listen to real-life conversations or watch television, some of it is comprehensible but most of it is unintelligible because I simply don’t know the words. And I don’t think any additional listening without active study is going to change that. For instance, phrases such as “all the time,” “since you’re doing that anyway,” or “be that as it may” are never going to be comprehensible unless I actually look up what those words in Chinese mean, or ask for an explanation -- the concepts are otherwise too abstract to connect the dots, and Chinese is different enough from any of the other languages I've studied for me to guess. I don’t think it’s because I’m an inept language learner, either. I've studied enough languages and made enough progress with languages that I have confidence that I can learn a language to a reasonable degree of proficiency and communicative ease (I fear to use the word “fluent”!). But input needs to be comprehensible before I can make the most of it. I think that’s why I like Assimil so much. You spend a lot of time listening to interesting, dense dialogues chock-full of vocabulary, idiomatic expressions and challenging grammar, but there are translations to help make sure you understand what you’re listening to. You may not have to glance at the English more than once or twice before immersing yourself in the recordings, but at least, it’s enough for you to get started. Now, too bad there isn't an Assimil course for Cantonese. During the past two weeks of studying Cantonese, I notice that pushing myself to study vocabulary and ask for meanings of words is starting to pay off. Even with just 300+ new words in my vocabulary arsenal, I’m starting to understand television better. I still have a long way to go, but it's real progress. And it’s nice to know that just because I didn't magically and effortlessly pick up Cantonese through years of passive exposure, that doesn't mean the language is a lost cause for me. Rather, I just need to change my approach! FRENCH I’m now up to Assimil NFWE lesson 75. The lessons are definitely picking up, and it’s not so easy anymore for me to jump in cold and back-translate from English to French, although though I can still easily understand the French recordings, i.e., my passive comprehension is still okay. I think I might have to slow down the pace, so that I can really focus on bringing my active skills to speed. I am continuing to listen to RFI’s journal en francais facile. OTHER LANGUAGES I listened to one lengthy Schlaflos episodes (about 1.5 hours), in which Annik interviewed various immigrants to Germany and emigrants originally from Germany, about their jobs, their life stories, and their languages. I am also continuing to add new vocabulary from Basic German Vocabulary into Anki, and am now up to page 320 of 395. I’ve added 1098 words to Anki, which is a mix of words I just didn't know and words that I already knew but was shaky on with regards to gender/conjugation/etc. By the end of exercise, I hope to be able to say with confidence that my German vocabulary is 4,000+ words! At some point, I plan to do the same vocabulary building exercise with Spanish and French using the Barron’s Mastering X Vocabulary series, each which contains about 5,000-6,000 words. I'd also like to repeat it with Cantonese using Susanna Ng’s Interesting Cantonese 1 & 2 volumes, which together contain about 4,500 words. I think my Spanish vocabulary is already pretty good, but I have a LOT of holes in my French and Cantonese vocabularies, so I think this will be a pretty painful process. I’ve also read two more news articles in Spanish and listened to two more episodes of La crónica cultural. Its fun and I definitely want to improve my Spanish and study it more. But in the meanwhile, I need to remember not to let wanderlust get the better of me. I need to take advantage of living in Hong Kong to immerse myself in Chinese! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6431 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 35 of 124 14 March 2013 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Very few people would claim that you can pick up a language though just passive listening, and I've never seen anyone make that claim here. There are some people who claim you can get some benefits from listening even if you don't understand, but I don't think anyone would claim it's enough. Personally, I don't think it helps much at all. I agree that you need comprehensible input.
Oh, and "all-X language-all the time" is certainly NOT a listen-only method, at least if you're referring to the popular blog "All Japanese All the Time". It's very much about vocabulary study, though it's focussed on comprehension and not production. Keep pushing with Cantonese1 It's such a wonderful language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 36 of 124 14 March 2013 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the reply. My comments in the last post were borne largely out of
frustration and the feeling that the last two weeks here in Hong Kong, which have been a combination of semi-immersion and intense active study, have been as effective as literally thousands of hours of listening. Of course, that's not actually true. I recognize that I've made a lot of progress in the past two weeks, but that a large part of it is probably because I have so much listening practice. For instance, I don't have trouble following native-speed conversations where I know all the words, which I don't think would be the case if I started studying Cantonese from scratch. But I sometimes wonder how much more farther I'd be in my language goals if I had just been a bit more active in my efforts! With respect to the language methods, I was thinking a bit about the All Japanese All the Time website, but more particularly, one related blog where a guy claimed that after listening to hundreds and hundreds of hours of French over the course of 8+ months and pretty much nothing else, he found himself with amazing listening comprehension, including being able to watch Lost and other television shows in French with pretty much complete comprehension. A pretty extreme example, but his approach definitely made it sound like it was certainly doable. Maybe for other people, in different (and rare) circumstances, but that certainly didn't work for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5808 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 37 of 124 14 March 2013 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||
Khatz does have production in his approach though in the beginning it's weighted extremely heavily on input. Edited by Snowflake on 14 March 2013 at 5:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 38 of 124 15 March 2013 at 11:14am | IP Logged | ||
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CANTONESE
I’m happy to announce that I finally finished the first volume of Elementary Cantonese, all 418 pages of it! It was at times very dry and boring, and getting through it took me several months of off-and-on studying, but I finally made it through all the vocabulary, extensive drills, reading exercises and detailed grammar explanations. Now, I have three more dense volumes to get through. I think, however, that the pace will pick up in Intermediate Cantonese, especially as I get into new grammatical territory and more complex sentence patterns, so it won’t feel so tedious. All in all, however, the Sidney Lau series has been extremely thorough and very helpful. I feel like I've gotten a very good understanding of the basics that I've covered so far, and that if I make it through all six volumes, I should have a great grasp of the language. Notwithstanding the complaints in my prior posts, the past two days have been great speaking-wise. Just a few days ago, I felt like I was tripping over every word, and even the simple sentences were coming out of my mouth with mangled pronunciation or incorrect tones. But these past two days, I've felt fairly fluid in my speech, aside from the occasional lack of vocabulary. I think I’m slowly converting more words from my passive vocabulary to my active vocabulary, and also getting better at talking around words that I don’t know. I've been chatting with my partner’s mother about everything from restaurant reservations and watch repair to the school system here in Hong Kong and the recent incident of the 6,000+ dead pigs in Shanghai. It’s still tough, but these moments of fluidity make me feel like fluency may someday be within reach! One tough point for me, though, is that I am currently suffering a bit of a “Leetha” frustration. That is, I can hear that my accent isn't that great, but I can’t seem to improve it. Overall, I don’t think my accent is that bad, but it definitely sounds at best like an ABC (American born Chinese). Even when the basic sounds and tones are correct, there is still something about the subtleties of pronunciation, pitch and rhythm that just don't sound local or native. There are enough overseas Chinese people here in Hong Kong who have imperfect Chinese (including several TVB celebrities) that my accent doesn't keep the locals from speaking to me in Cantonese, but I am still frustrated by it. I’d love to think that as I become better at speaking, this problem will resolve itself, but I’m not so sure about that. After all, I know plenty of people who speak fluent, grammatically flawless English but whose accents are still noticeable very foreign. I wonder, is accent something that fossilizes early on or can I shelve this for now and come back to it later? Or should I just figure that good enough is good enough? OTHER LANGUAGES Not much to report, other than that I've been keeping up with French studying and listening to podcasts in Spanish and German (Portuguese is on the backburner at the moment). I am now up to Lesson 85 of Assimil NFWE. With just two weeks before our trip, I definitely plan to intensify my studying. We have two friends in Paris who only speak French and Cantonese (no English). So usually, my partner speaks to them in Cantonese and I speak to them in French. It’s a fun exercise, but it’s a lot more demanding than the superficial conversations in French that I usually have with waiters and shopkeepers. Last time, for instance, I explained to our friends the structure of American law firms and their profitability, which definitely pushed my vocabulary and gave me a bit of a headache. I still feel like it's a tremendous struggle to speak and follow real life French. Maybe after my Cantonese gets better and/or I return to the US, I'll make another push to improve my French! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 39 of 124 18 March 2013 at 2:05am | IP Logged | ||
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CANTONESE
I've been making good progress with the Elementary Cantonese set, and am now up to Lesson 13. The past few lessons have started to cover in depth final sentence particles, which are one of the most difficult points for me and probably most foreign learners of Cantonese. It’s impossible to speak natural sounding, conversational Cantonese without particles, since they are essential to adding shades of mood and meaning to sentences and compensate for the language’s rigid tone structure. But native speakers don’t pay any attention to what particle comes at the end of a sentence, except to subconsciously understand its meaning. So drilling particles is both necessary and unwieldy – I need to develop an intuitive sense of when to use the particle, but at the same time, the particle has to flow smoothly; it can’t just be tacked on stiffly at the end. Years of listening to Cantonese has given me some sense of which particles are used when, but the actual rules and reasons are really challenging. In the meanwhile, I think I’m going to memorize sentence patterns with fixed particles to begin internalizing them. My Anki is now up to 390 Cantonese words and patterns. This number is a little inflated since it includes some words that I know quite well, but wasn't complete sure as to finer shades of meaning or exact tone. I would guess that about 250 are actually new words, and about 140-150 are words that I've included to track and practice. I've actually created two decks: one deck contains all the Cantonese words that I come across in general studying: in the Sidney Lau volumes, while watching television or speaking with people, or words that I think might be useful. The other deck is based on “Interesting Cantonese” by Susanna Ng, which contains 3,000 common words and phrases, arranged by topic. I plan to review about 5-10 pages of that book every day and add any words or patterns I don’t know to my Anki deck. Most of it so far has been review, but I think it’ll step up as I get to subjects and topics that I am less familiar with. I think it’ll take me about 3-4 months to get through the book, and then several more months to actually internalize and learn the words. Between that and my other vocabulary study, that means I should have enough words for daily conversation within a few months. At my current pace, I should be able to get through Elementary Cantonese by next week, when we leave on our trip. I am not too concerned with “overlearning” or memorizing everything in each lesson at this point. Rather, I’m planning to take an Assimil-like approach of going through it once and then repeating it several times again and again in the future. The risk, otherwise, is that I get mired in the details, get overwhelmed, and just quit. I did quickly review lessons 1-5 yesterday, and saw some good grammar points that I had started to forget, so I think this layered approach is helping. FRENCH I’m now up to lesson 93 of Assimil NFWE. It’s definitely gotten harder, and I essentially need to do a passive wave in the morning in order to be able to actively back-translate a lesson in the afternoon. The grammatical constructions and vocabulary have gotten more complex, so I am also less motivated to work through it. I think this is the same point that I faced years ago when I used Assimil for the first time. At some point, you reach a level of fairly good survival skills, probably somewhere in the A2 range. You can talk about most colloquial topics with some ease, you can muddle through the most common situations that you’ll find yourself in when traveling, and you can talk with patient natives about general topics. Assuming you don’t have any external motivation to study French or pressing need to speak the language, you end up asking yourself, is this level good enough for my purposes? Some people take the view or would like to learn each language to a high level of mastery, and that’s an awesome goal. For all the amazing polyglots on this forum who have reached those goals – I have tremendous admiration for all of their accomplishments. I’d love to one day reach that level in a few foreign languages. It takes so much to push through that apathy and resistance of saying whether good enough is good enough. OTHER LANGUAGES In other languages, I finally finished going through Basic German Vocabulary and inputting all of the unknown/shaky/passive words into Anki. The total count is 1432 words. That means that my German active vocabulary is at least 2568 words, although it is probably larger since it includes a few hundred other words that don’t appear in the Basic Vocabulary. To cull words, I went through the Langenscheidt book and, looking at the English definition, tried to recall the German word and gender, as well as the past tense form and plural forms. If I recalled them accurately, I gave that word a pass. If anything was shaky, such as if I didn’t remember the gender or couldn’t recall the past tense form, then I added it to Anki. This exercise has been a good test to see what remains of my vocabulary after largely ignoring German for 11 years. The exercise has been eye-opening in a few ways: (1) it has shown me that 4,000 words is a LOT of words. Even when I lived in Germany and could get by day to day, I probably at most only knew 3,500 words, based on my assessment of the Basic Vocabulary results. While there were a lot of words I didn't know, I felt that I knew enough to be an independent learner and add words through context rather than through formal study. I think 4,000 words is definitely enough to get by in a language, and on a good day, even to feel fairly advanced! (2) At the same time, the exercise has shown me that 4,000 words really isn't a lot. At 4,000 words, there are still SO MANY words you DON’T know, such as “superficial,” “periodical,” “teddy bear,” “soy milk,” etc. Those words could take a lifetime to learn, but it’s probably best to learn the words that are particularly applicable to your interests and needs. (3) It reminds me that vocabulary study is an enormous undertaking. It was humbling to go through some of the pages of the book and feel like I didn't know a single word, especially words for incredibly basic concepts and objects. (4) It also reminded me that another reason I was able to function well in Germany was because of the enormous transparency between English and German vocabulary for difficult words, an advantage that I won’t have when I am studying Cantonese vocabulary. (5) But it also gives me hope that if I could function with a relatively small but useful vocabulary in Germany, I may be able to do the same in Cantonese one day (and hopefully once I get through the “Interesting Cantonese” set, I should have a good basis). I've set my Anki deck to test me with 15 German vocabulary words per day from this Basic German deck. Some of this studying should go extremely fast because it is just learning a gender or plural form, but some will be actual new words. At this rate, I should get through all new cards within about 3-4 months, and then it’ll just be studying for the next several months, and then review and maintenance after that. I don’t intend to do any more formal vocabulary study of German other than this deck, which I think will be enough to keep me busy for a long time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 40 of 124 21 March 2013 at 8:05am | IP Logged | ||
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CANTONESE
I just completed Lesson 14 of Elementary Cantonese, and man is it a killer. The chapter covers temporal phrases, including “before …”, “after,” and “while, “ such as “After I got to the office, I made a call to my mother” or “Before I arrived in Hong Kong, I already had studied two months of Cantonese.” The rules themselves are not too hard to understand, but Cantonese requires that these temporal clauses go at the beginning of a sentence, but that the actual temporal phrase shows up at the end of the clause. Putting together one of these sentences is painfully slow, and I don’t think I’m fast enough yet to use these in real conversation. In the absence of comprehensive drills, what I’ll need to do is spend a LOT of time over the next few weeks thinking of temporal phrases I might use and translating them into Cantonese, until they get easier. I don’t recall having this much of a problem when I was learning German word order years ago, but maybe I did have a lot of trouble and I just don’t remember anymore? In the spirit of not burning out, I've finished the Lesson 14 exercises and moved on to Lesson 15 for now, which covers “who” and “which” words, which are much easier. It’s nice that some of these grammar points feel refreshingly like review, since that makes it easier to slog through the tough lessons that feel completely new and frustrating. Given my previous frenetic pace of a few days ago, I was hoping to finish Elementary Cantonese Volume II before leaving on my trip next week, but now I’m not so sure. I still have another 275+ pages to go in the book, and finishing it will depend on how hard to remaining six lessons are. Even though I am not concerned with over-learning at this point, I don’t want to breeze through them too quickly. There are still a lot of drills to work on, vocabulary to study and grammar to learn. My Cantonese Anki deck is now up to 551 words, spread out between my general study deck (445 words) and my Interesting Cantonese deck (106 words). I just noticed that Interesting Cantonese is set up with the most common topics first, which is probably why I’m getting through it pretty quickly. I think that at the book advances to harder subjects, it’ll be a greater challenge. FRENCH With the Paris trip just around the corner, I need to step up my French review. I am now on Lesson 99 of Assimil NFWE, right about where it starts to get harder as it dives into business interviews, letter writing, etc. I never really mastered these lessons the first time around, so I think they’ll be pretty hard this time as well. Luckily, I won’t need to write any letters or interview for a job anytime soon, but there are some good vocabulary words to learn in the lessons. Yesterday, I also played through 10 lessons of Using French as a review. It doesn't really feel much more advanced than NFWE, especially since the voice actors still speak very slowly and enunciate very clearly, but it’s great for me to hear and mimic their pronunciations. The first half of UF is also great for learning more everyday vocabulary and grammatical constructions, even though the second half starts to get into less useful (for me) topics like the simple past, excerpts from Victor Hugo novels, etc. One day in the far future, I’d love to take an official language certificate exam in French. At that point, I’ll worry about learning more French, including beefing up my grammar knowledge, expanding vocabulary, etc. But in the meanwhile, I’m focusing on it purely for enjoyment, and I’m only covering topics and resources that are fun. OTHER LANGUAGES I've continued to plod along listening to podcasts in German and Spanish. In addition to the Schlaflos and Crónica podcasts, I am now also going through old episodes of Notes in Spanish Advanced. I don’t know if they are still putting out new episodes, but several years ago, I downloaded some 90+ free advanced episodes from the iTunes store, and am only now rediscovering them. Each one is short – between 5-10 minutes – and they consist of two or more speakers discussing various issues ranging from cell phone usage to working in an office to current events. One of the speakers is a foreigner who speaks well enough but makes some mistakes, whereas the other is a native Spaniard with crystal clear pronunciation. The podcasts are more intermediate than advanced, but still very enjoyable to listen to, and I have been noting a few useful words and phrases here and there that I can add to my internal lexicon. The great thing is that I don’t have to strain to understand the lessons – each one is comfortably at a level where I can listen at the gym and get pretty much 100% of each episode. By contrast, the Crónica episodes are sometimes hit or miss – a few are very easy but some of them are very difficult, and require several listens before I get the point. I've also started reading the Spanish version of “Do You Speak English,” free from the iBooks store, which HTLAL Luke recommended in another thread. I have mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, it’s very interesting and goes into the author’s thoughts and opinions regarding studying various languages, lots of which is very interesting. On the other hand, the author seems rather arrogant, which doesn't make him particularly likable. For instance, I didn't find at all funny his descriptions of how he taunted a rather self-absorbed British girl in his Spanish class in Barcelona – if anything, it just came across as petty and cruel. Interestingly, his descriptions of his time in Germany and Italian resonated with me. Contrary to common stereotypes about cold German personalities and warm Italians, I (like the author) experienced the contrary in my travels: lots of extremely friendly, warm and sociable Germans and plenty of loud, mean, insensitive and unscrupulous Italians. I haven’t completely out the possibility of making another trip to Italy or learning Italian in the future, but I have to say that the several days I spent in Italy haven’t given me the best of impressions. From a leaner's perspective, I also have mixed feelings about the eBook. It's the first book I've read in Spanish in years, but it's clearly a translation of an English book, including some Anglicisms that have been literally translated as well as a fair number of grammar mistakes, including incorrect genders, weird and grammatically incorrect constructions, etc. I'm appreciating learning some new vocabulary, but I'd warn an intermediate Spanish learner to approach the book with caution, since there are enough errors to throw a person off. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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