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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| SarahQ Tetraglot Newbie Uruguay Joined 3868 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Speaks: Tagalog, English*, Bikol languages, Afrikaans Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 19 25 April 2014 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hey all!
I'm an 18yo Australian that has been living in Uruguay since January. My Spanish is in between B1 and B2 (for reading/writing), and I honestly don't think I've improved at all since being here. I feel really self-conscious when speaking Spanish, so I think I'm a bit hesitant to try conversing. My boyfriend is Uruguayan, but speaks English, and I feel really embarrassed to talk to him in Spanish, too! I also work as an English teacher, so I speak English at work all day... Honestly, I've been picking up on more Spanish when I study by myself with books and doing grammar exercises than by conversing with people, is that normal? Also, what are some strategies that you guys have used to learn your target language in its native country? And how do you get over the feeling of being self-conscious? Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 19 25 April 2014 at 11:35pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I suspect you can already see the pattern here. :-) Even though your life is in Paraguay, you still do pretty much everything in English. You have an English-speaking job, and an English-speaking boyfriend. This is what Kato Lomb called a "linguistic microclimate" (quoted in this article by the language blogger Khatzumoto):
Khatzumoto goes on to write:
So let's look for some places where you can bring a lot more Spanish into your life. Some changes may be difficult or impossible: - Work probably needs to stay in English for now, unless you're up for a career change. - As for your boyfriend, it's not easy to switch the language that you use with your significant other. Your brain will probably fight you for a month or two, and even after that, you'll still be operating a linguistic disadvantage for quite a while. It is possible to switch the language of a romantic relationship—my wife and I spoke English for over a decade, we switched to French, and we've been speaking it for over two years—but you may find this pretty hard. You would both need to be prepared for you to sound like a toddler for a month or two! But other changes are easier: - At your level, you probably can switch your TV viewing entirely into Spanish. In particular, if you can find a Spanish series that you really like (dubbed series are great, too), and you can understand at least 40% of what's going on, you can make great gains just by watching TV. - While you're at it, you probably want to start looking for books, comics, magazines, etc., in Spanish. Find awesome stuff that you love to read, and dive in. - You might want to pick up a copy of Fluent in 3 Months. Benny has lots of good advice on how to start speaking, even if there are giant holes in your knowledge of a language. - Can your boyfriend take you to Spanish-speaking events with family? Friends? If you already have B1 passive skills, all you really need to do is jump in and start conversing. It will melt your brain at first, but it gets better quickly!
Smile a lot and try to have a good time. :-) As Benny Lewis points in his book, if you look like you're suffering, people won't want to speak with you. But if you have fun and laugh at your mistakes, you'll find that most people are quite helpful. Making a fool out of yourself is inevitable, but if you can laugh at yourself, it's totally survivable. 14 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3989 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 3 of 19 26 April 2014 at 12:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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emk gave you some very good advice. I have 2 questions:
1. Do you like Spanish? Would you be eager to learn it even if you lived in Australia and had an Australian boyfriend? 2. Do you like Uruguay? Are you interested in local culture, history, people, food, music, soccer, whatever? Be honest to yourself. If the answer to both questions is YES then you will come out of your shell. However, if the answer is NO, then I am afraid you can spend the rest of your life in Uruguay, it won't make any difference. Edited by Hungringo on 26 April 2014 at 12:14am 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5101 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 4 of 19 26 April 2014 at 12:34am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I haven't had the opportunity to move to France but I take every opportunity to speak it here at home. And I do mean every. single. one. If someone speaks French, I speak it with them. It is really that simple.
Do I make mistakes? Sure, but who cares? I make mistakes in English too and I've even left my cellphone at home by accident before. That's life. I suggest that you do what Benny Lewis likes to say:speak, or stop pretending you want to. Just remember that "those who mind (your mistakes in Spanish) don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss (maybe) 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 19 26 April 2014 at 12:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'm very shy myself, and when I stayed in Spain as au pair it took me roughly three months to actually have conversations with people other than the four year old daughter of the family (who just chatted away, happy there was somebody trying to listen), because I felt so self-conscious - and I was surrounded by the language almost all the time, with many people trying to talk to me.
And I did feel very self-conscious about being so ... inadequate. But in the long term, it doesn't matter. Some people start talking the minute they leave the plane, but others need more time. And if you look back in five years, what matters is that you kept on learning Spanish, not that you reached a certain level faster by a month or so. Also, learning from conversation is a skill that might come easily to some people, but takes practice for others. Even if you feel you don't learn much new from conversation, what you will certainly learn is to be more efficient so that everyday conversations become easier and feel more natural. What I would do is to try to find people to be around who speak Spanish to each other, and where you are accepted whether you speak or don't speak. It really helps! And if you surround yourself with enough of the language sooner or later phrases will pop into your mind. If you're self-conscious you probably suppress the impulse to use them, but you could instead try to make a game out of it, like "hey I just thought 'sentence' - does it mean 'translation/paraphrasing' what I wanted to say?" or maybe mention words that you just learnt/heard, and ask about how they are used. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4445 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 6 of 19 26 April 2014 at 3:17am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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There was 1 summer I joined an exchange program to Taiwan. The locals prefer to speak the Minan
dialect which is similar to Fujian in China but everybody also speaks Mandarin. I attended an advanced language class and made friend with an American who studied Mandarin before but our level of conversation was a bit weak so we spoke to each other in English. But a few times a year we would exchange letters (now E-mails) in Chinese. During the trip we would take turns asking for directions to shopping places, art galleries, places to eat, bus numbers. Once we ended up in the food court in a shopping area with another person in the study group. His Mandarin was in the intermediate level. We decided to eat at a noodle place. He had to ask what was on the menu because he had trouble reading the menu. Ordering food in Mandarin wasn't about showing off our language skills although the many places we've been it was obvious that we were not locals. At some point I suggested to them although Taiwan has a lot of Japanese tourists but we are supposed to act like we are locals and don't want to been seen pointing cameras around. While my newly acquainted American friends were happy to be asked that they came from the US, I prefer to hang out in local arcades and play video games with locals around and pretended I lived down the street. And when I would dine out, I always had a local newspaper and would read the headlines like a local. Traveling abroad while attending an advanced level class I was often asked by other people in the group to translate when we went out to local markets. We would talk in English among ourselves all the time but I was using Chinese a lot more than they did out of necessity. The last 8 months I made an effort to improve my Chinese by listening to radio discussions and watching whatever TV programs are available online from Taiwan, Mainland China & Singapore by cutting down on my English TV programs to just the news. I'm not living over there but I don't have to when it comes to learning the language. In the beginning I didn't pick up half the dialog so I would write words & phrases down phonetically and look it up on an online dictionary later. In many TV programs I am able to pick up at least 90% of a conversation without relying on reading subtitles. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| SarahQ Tetraglot Newbie Uruguay Joined 3868 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Speaks: Tagalog, English*, Bikol languages, Afrikaans Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 19 26 April 2014 at 3:36am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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@emk: Thanks for all the advice! I'll definitely check out Fluent in 3 Months, too. Also, you're right, I'm sure I've had
a horrible processing face and looked pained at times! In regards to the TV shows, I do watch the dubbed shows and can understand pretty much all of it. I also went to the cinemas here to watch Frozen when it came out in Spanish and could understand it, too. But I can't understand the people here on the streets, and my boyfriend pointed out that dubs speak reallyyy slowly compared to Uruguayan or Argentinian Spanish, and he's right. So right now I'm trying to source out some Argentinian shows instead to get used to the accent rather than just any Spanish. @Hungringo: Yeah, I do love Spanish and really love living in Latin America. I prefer the culture, history, music, people over Australia, and am a football maniac. In regards to food, though, I'm vegetarian and prefer Indian/Asian cuisine because of that, haha. I desperately want to be part of the Uruguayan culture, and do try really hard. When I talk to people, too, they think I have a native accent... but a Colombian one (not a bad thing, but I want to sound like everyone from here). It's just really frustrating to not be at the level you want to be at, it just makes you feel dumb. So don't think that I don't love the culture, because I really do and am always hesitant to return to Australia each time! @Darklight: I understand what you mean about trying to take every chance. Last year, I spent Semana Santa in Buenos Aires and since it was my first time in a Spanish country, I was really excited to just absorb the language. But since I wasn't so great at Spanish back then, I sometimes found it difficult to communicate at shops and things (really stressful when you have a mother depending on you, too). There was probably one or two times when the young girls that worked at the shops would get annoyed at me for not understanding, and get visibly angry and such, and I think that probably made me realise that there are people that do mind your mistakes. But you're absolutely right with that quote, and now that I think about it, for every angry/annoyed person there is, there's probably 3 people that laugh it off. @Bao: Thanks for knowing where I'm coming from! I'm also shy and have a hard enough time chatting in my own language, haha. You made a really interesting point about finding situations where you can just listen, and I think that'd be a good start, so I'll definitely try it out. Also, the game thing does sound fun, I do a similar thing with idioms since I know that native speakers have a good time trying to explain their meanings. So thanks for the suggestion! @shk00design: That's really interesting! I guess I see a lot of similarities, too, since all of my friends here (except my boyfriend) are foreigners. I do live like a local, shop at the markets, and yes, go to the videogame arcade (but it's in english), too! But I liked your strategy with the newspaper and local media. I think engaging with the local news is important, so that's worth a shot, too. Might try reading them at the plazas and seeing if anyone engages too, haha. Thanks! Thanks guys, you've definitely helped a lot and have made me reflect on and realise why I'm so self-conscious. You've all offered a lot of useful strategies, as well as some more points to think about and address. Cheers :) Edited by SarahQ on 26 April 2014 at 3:43am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3893 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 8 of 19 26 April 2014 at 7:21am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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SarahQ, I also tend to shy away from speaking when ever possible. When I was studying abroad (with lots of other nice foreign people) I made my friends among them at first. Those people were there anyway, we spent time together in class, so it was just easier that way.
And then I met a local girl at a party whom I liked and we decoded to go shopping for clothes the next day. I was also at B1 or so at the time, but she did not care. She chatted extra fast and extra non stop, but we had fun together and kept on meeting for coffee, chats, more shopping, sightseeing and what not, and very soon I got very comfortable being spoken to and answering (and enjoying) conversations with her, her friends and other people. It's about making chatty friends, I'd say :) Come on, your boyfriend must have some female friends, cousins, colleagues even, who would like to go shopping for clothes with you and talk about men and dieting. That really did help me! It is quite difficult to switch the language you use with your boyfriend and existing friends, colleagues. But once you make a NEW friend, stick with Spanish from the start. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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