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Study Abroad in Mexico | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| SirIvalis Newbie United States Joined 4545 days ago 11 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 12 21 August 2012 at 2:12am | IP Logged |
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I arrived in Mexico yesterday and when through my first 6 hours of Spanish language class.
I made an "Advice Center" post about this trip so you can refer to that post here: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=33288&PN=1 I'm currently enrolled in an intensive group class. It's 6 hours a day. I wanted to do the one-on-one but in my email correspondence with them (while I was still in the States) they said that they didn't have enough teachers to dedicate one to a single student... Well, today's classes have served as a pretty powerful reminder of why group classes are a bad idea. I was placed in class level 5 (there's only 6) which, according to the school, is a low B2. Now, since I would have said I was at B1, which I still think is accurate, I was a little intimidated. After about 5 minutes in the class, I knew I shouldn't have been. Out of the 4 other people that were in the class, only two were somewhat on my level of Spanish. Two of the other people were abysmal - poor conjugation, absurd American accent, etc. I was pretty surprised. I gathered that 3 of the students are basically there because their parents moved there to retire and it sort of seems like they don't care whether or not they really learn Spanish or not. The other is a retiree and possibly doing it more as a hobby. I, on the other hand, am on a quest to fluency and need no nonsense. Unfortunately, it got worse as only mornings are level restricted. The rest of the classes are more like workshops, so they're mixed level and so my classmate situation deteriorated further. People were mixing Spanish with English and unable to properly conjugate even present tense verbs etc. Needless to say, I was very frustrated at the end of the day. I spoke with one of the ladies in the office afterward about my desire to change over into privates and she said try another class and then speak with your teacher afterward, which I don't mind doing. However, if I can't do one-on-ones there, then I'll have to change schools. The single positive note is, the main focus of the level is the subjunctive, which I really look forward to getting down pat. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5190 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 2 of 12 21 August 2012 at 9:43am | IP Logged |
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What a bummer that your classes aren't panning out so far. I remember reading the other thread that you had started, and it raised a bit of a red flag for me when someone from the school told you that small-group learning is better than one-on-one. For them, sure! It's less work, recycling the same curriculum for the 100th time, regardless of who the students are. Anyways, hopefully the school will be able to structure a plan more suitable for you. If they don't, then what I would do is attend those portions of the school day that are useful to you and then leave and do your own thing for the rest of the day - interacting with locals, visiting cultural sites and doing activities, etc. You could also maybe hire a tutor from outside of the school. Or perhaps find someone local who is interested in English and do a language conversation exchange. Don't squander your valuable immersion opportunity being stuck in a class that is held up by weak students, bad pronunciation, and too much English. In fact, I believe spending too much time in such classes is counter-productive.
Just out of curiosity, how do the reviews at http://www.123teachme.com/search.php?utf8=%E2%9C%93&relCount ryID=12 stack up with your impressions of the school? In my earlier phases of learning Spanish I did contemplate going to a language school in Mexico but never got around to it. Now my level in Spanish is to a point where I doubt that classes will be of much use. So I've replaced the Spanish school idea with a different pie in the sky dream: to spend an extended period of time in Spanish-speaking country to really live the language 24/7. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Dagane Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4510 days ago 259 posts - 324 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishB2, Galician Studies: German Studies: Czech | Message 3 of 12 21 August 2012 at 11:50am | IP Logged |
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I'm going to pinpoint a different insight. I think that a class where you can interact with a few people is a very good idea. Conversely to what you think, there're some pretty good factors which hardly appear when you study on your own. Perhaps the main of them is the competition. If you are learning among people who share your goals and development of skills, you'll probably wish to go over them, and that's good for everybody. Thus, the problem is your current class rather than studying with classmates, as I see it.
EDIT: I don't really understand the hatred which many people here shows against classes. My experience is that classes are incredibly valuable. Actually I didn't began to learn English until 10 months ago. Then, I decided to get an English title and I signed for a class in order to study it. Of course, my self-motivation played the main role, but the class was very useful sometimes. So to speak, I did learn tons of new words by my own, but I used to mixed them all in a somehow weird form, since I didn't now the differences between formal and informal speech. So I used to beg the teachers if they could teach me when to use a pair of words with similar meanings. This is only an example, but I could offer you more. As far as I see it, you guys haven't found the right class yet. Edited by Dagane on 21 August 2012 at 12:01pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| SirIvalis Newbie United States Joined 4545 days ago 11 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 12 22 August 2012 at 1:27am | IP Logged |
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Second day of class today. It went quite a bit better than yesterday, at least. Everyone seemed to take it a bit more seriously. I've also decided to go ahead and skip the last workshop of the day, which was definitely which had the worst students in attendance. In its place, I've arranged to have an hour private lesson. I think this will do plenty to help.
While I still wouldn't mind having completely one-on-ones, I do full feel like my brain was pretty full from today, so I'm going to hope for the best and push forward. I also brought my Assimil and a couple other resources with me, so I'm going to do some of that before bed too. I'm also watching Spanish language movies on youtube and would be ecstatic if anyone has any recommendations for movies and books (that are at an intermediate level). They have a library here that I can go to for free with my language school I.D card. Tibbles, what level would you say your Spanish is around? As to what I've covered today: Yesterday and today, I've been learning about "conjeturas," a structure one uses to ask a question about a present or past condition which is unknown to the person asking the question and suspected to be unknown to the person to whom the question is asked (correct me if I'm wrong here). The structure requires the interrogative to be in the future or conditional form, depending if it's in the present tense or past tense, respectively. Pregunta: ¿Por que el no estará en clase? Respuesta: Porque ha de estar en su casa descansado. The answer structure is haber + de + infinitivo OR deber + de + infinitivo OR an answer also using the future tense : Tal vez estará enfermo. Pregunta: ¿Cuando nacería Frida Kahlo? Respuesta: Creo que ha de haber nacido en la epoca de la revolución. In this case, asking about a past event, the question is in the conditional. The answer structure is as follows: Haber + de + haber + participle. The verb "haber" really gets to shine here, just in case it wasn't used enough. Consider the question: ¿Habría muchas personas en la terminal cuando llegaste a San Miguel? An answer could be: Han de haber habido demasiado personas y no pude encontrar mí autobús. So many habers! We made the joke in class that there was haber party (a bear party). I also got a review of intransitive verbs and "verbos accidentales" which I find very interesting. Usually, using the verbs used are: perderse, romperse, caerse, macharse, derremarse, descomponerse, irse, and echarse a perder. The structure is "Se" + pronombre impersonal + verbo (en 3a persona, singular o plural, en PRETERITO). So when something bad happens, "Se me olvidaron las llaves" it's a way of basically minimizing your own responsibility in the event, because it has the same general meaning as "Yo olvidé mis llaves" but, as my teacher says, depende del grado de responsibilidad." Very interesting! Keep in mind I'm basically parroting my lessons here, which helps me learn, but I'm far from mastering what I write about so feel free to make corrections. Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| SirIvalis Newbie United States Joined 4545 days ago 11 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 5 of 12 23 August 2012 at 4:04am | IP Logged |
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Today, we started the dive into the subjunctive. I think we'll probably spend most of the month on it, ~90 hours of class time. I should clarify that this class represents only the first 3 hours of my 6 hour day. I then have an hour a day of conversation and an hour a day of pinpointing grammar issues. Starting next week I have an hour-long private lesson every day which I think I'll dedicate to building vocabulary.
I don't know if 90 hours seems like too much time to dedicate to one facet of a language, but I'm actually kind of glad, because I can already tell there's a huge gap between learning the grammar structure and using it effortlessly in speech. In the grammar class we reviewed preterite and imperfect and I learned that when you are speaking of the future in the past, you have to use the imperfect. This now seems like a simple idea, but through all of my schooling in high school, university, self-study, I've never heard of this concept and I'm sure that if I had had to make a sentence which demanded a future in the past, as it were, I don't know what I would have done. Ex. Yesterday, he told me that he was going to come today: Ayer, me dijo que iba a venir hoy. Those are the highlights. I've been speaking as much as I can out on the town, but usually it's only with waiters...but I'm going to be joining a gym tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to talk a lot with people working out in the gym and hopefully get a lot of gym vocab down! Anyone have any advice for me? I'm having a hard time managing my expectations because I'm so desperate to learn Spanish! I want to learn everything right now! and I always find myself wondering when this is all going to click so I can hurry up and start having conversations! I'm not actually that neurotic about it, but I do wonder what the transition is like between agonizing every word/sentence I make and having it come naturally/fluidly. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Dagane Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4510 days ago 259 posts - 324 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishB2, Galician Studies: German Studies: Czech | Message 6 of 12 23 August 2012 at 7:34pm | IP Logged |
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"Tal vez estará enfermo".
That's incorrect. I don't know if that's common in Mexico, although I've got a Mexican friend and he has never used that structure. Anyway, the use of the future there is not correct. The correct one will be: "Tal vez esté enfermo". It expresses guessworks. Also, you can say: "Estará enfermo". But in that last case you don't need "tal vez", because you're already saying "tal vez" within "estará". About "ha de estar" for guessworks, yes that's correct, but it sounds very strange for me. My Mexican friend uses that a lot, though. My whole point here is that you have to be absolutely aware of the differences among regions when you learn a structure. I've got a similar problem with differences between formal, neutral and informal words in English. I often write down "F" or "I" beside each new word I learn. Perhaps it would be good if you nail down the region of every single structure if it's not very widespread. A final note: Sentences with "se" are really used in Spanish!! But it's easy. It's called "pasiva refleja", and although you can translate English passive sentences into Spanish pasivas ones, in the most of the cases the Spanish common sentence involves a pasiva refleja instead of a pasiva. Edited by Dagane on 23 August 2012 at 7:40pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| SirIvalis Newbie United States Joined 4545 days ago 11 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 12 24 August 2012 at 3:43am | IP Logged |
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Ok, great, thanks Dagane! I'll check with my teacher to try to clarify that situation.
Today wasn't anything special. Continuing the trek through subjunctive, reviewed direct and indirect objects and expounded my thoughts on cheesy movies which were great when I was a child, but looking back on them as an adult can't believe I ever thought they were great. I'm going to start re-implementing my Assimil studies as I haven't gotten around to them since arriving in Mexico. This actually goes to some of what you were saying, Dagane. It will be interesting learning from a Spanish source and then having Mexican classes. Also, speaking with the office manager today, in Spanish of course, she stopped and suddenly asked me where I learned Spanish (the amount I do know, anyway). I told her that I had learned some in high school, university, some study abroad, and then I told her about Assimil. When she heard that Assimil was a resource from Spain, she was like, "ah, that's why I asked. You have a Spanish accent." Fun! Which leads me to another thought: I have no idea why my classmates have such terrible accents. I understand if someone is just a really casual learner, maybe going on a vacation and learning some phrases. But a serious learner? Especially when they're in my level (let's say B1) and getting 5-6 hours of instruction a day. I'm sure there's a version of tone-deafness concerning accents, but I think true cases of that are probably rare. Otherwise, why in the world can't you tell how different you sound from the teacher who is speaking to you for hours every day and fix it? Obviously I'll probably always have an accent that shouts "Not a native speaker!" but at least it doesn't shout "Gringo!" either. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Dagane Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4510 days ago 259 posts - 324 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishB2, Galician Studies: German Studies: Czech | Message 8 of 12 24 August 2012 at 12:25pm | IP Logged |
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He, he, my Mexican friend told me once the Spanish accents sound sexy to some Mexicans. Anyway, Mexico has got the largest community of Spanish speakers, so it's excellent for you to study there. No matter if you mix expressions or accents, really, since we all will understand you eventually. That's in case you really want to be proficient.
About getting "any" good accent... I do not know, some people take more care about it than others, I guess. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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