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Jasmine’s Spanish Learning Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| SaffronCicely Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4564 days ago 14 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 12 05 June 2012 at 12:04am | IP Logged |
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I'm a beginner to Spanish, and although I have picked up a very small amount of vocabulary from short trips to Spain and from listening to music, as well as an introductory 8 month class a few years ago in high school, I'm going to get serious about studying.
My plan is to finish Michel Thomas' 'Advanced' course in the next week (I'm halfway through and have finished the foundation course), to watch the Intermediate courses from 'TheSpanishBlog.Com' lessons in 1 month, and to work through Practice Makes Perfect Complete Spanish Grammar in 1 month. I aim to put Spanish subtitles on everything I watch, and to watch a Spanish movie at least once a week with Spanish subtitles. I want to read and translate a newspaper article, noting any vocab I come across, at least once a day. I've also just discovered Anki, so I'm working through doing 10 new words a day on that. After I've done all that, I'd like to join some Spanish forums and try to chat and also do some language exchanges with Spanish students here in Edinburgh, there are plenty going on and that won't be hard to find at all. The main thing I worry about is learning to express myself. Does anyone know any way I can practice that right now? I know there's a site where you can write essays and have them corrected by native speakers, could somebody please remind me what that's called if anyone is reading? According to 'Spanish-Test.Net': A1 - 100% A2 - 80% I didn't do level B1 as I know I'm not yet at that stage! Has anyone any tips for a language newbie like myself? Thanks! Edited by SaffronCicely on 05 June 2012 at 12:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Icaria909 Senior Member United States Joined 5596 days ago 201 posts - 346 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 12 05 June 2012 at 5:41am | IP Logged |
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One of the great things about Spanish is all the material you can use. If you're looking
for things with subtitles, I would recommend destinos (http://www.learner.org/series/destinos/watch/index.html?ep1 ). Destinos was made to look like a telenovela but progressively gets harder as the episodes progress. Even better is the fact you can turn on Spanish subtitles to match the Spanish you're hearing. If you're looking for great Spanish forums, I would recommend looking into the Spanish forums on wordreference.com. The people there are very knowledgeable and helpful. As for a program for writing, I think quite a few people used lang-8.com for that, but I've never used it. Could someone correct me if I'm wrong on that? anyways ¡Suerte! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| SaffronCicely Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4564 days ago 14 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 3 of 12 05 June 2012 at 10:53am | IP Logged |
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Wow, fantastic link - thank you! I heard people talking about Destinos on here, and went to the bookshop and found an ERASMUS preperation course from the University of Barcelona - is this from the same series? Lang-8 is also exactly what I was searching for. Edited by SaffronCicely on 05 June 2012 at 11:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5212 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 12 05 June 2012 at 11:22am | IP Logged |
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Hey Jasmine,
I'm in Edinburgh too! There's thousands of Spanish speakers here, so you shouldn't have a problem finding people to practise with. To be honest I'm quite jealous of people learning Spanish here because of all the practice opportunities they have access to; finding people who speak French and Italian and who are willing to help me is a lot harder, while even just in my regular social life I end up meeting quite a few Spanish people and some of them have even said that they'd be very willing to help me if/when I take up Spanish. When I was unemployed a couple of years ago I ended up partying with Spanish people quite often as they were always up for a night out during the week, and I ended up picking up a bit of the language, most of which I've forgotten now. There's a Spanish meetup every Wednesday evening at the Greenemantle pub (yes, I know, everything in Edinburgh is on a Wednesday!) and by all accounts it's popular with both learners and native speakers. Also there's the Language Café at Victoria Bar which is quieter, and while it's very hit-or-miss for other languages, there's always a few Spanish speakers there. And if you're a student at the UoE, I'm even more jealous because I believe the University organises some sort of language exchange meetings and perhaps even free language classes. Anyway it seems that you already know about opportunities, I'm just emphasising the point to make you consider yourself lucky :), and you're looking for ways to prepare yourself and build up some basic ability before you go out there and speak to people. The things that have helped me most for this have been courses with an "active" component where you translate dialogues from English to the target language or fill in gaps (Assimil is an excellent course for this) and self-talk exercises (there's a good thread on improving speaking ability and in particular Arekkusu's method has helped me a lot). These are particularly good if you're like me and you know and understand the language fairly well but your speaking ability lags behind. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| SaffronCicely Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4564 days ago 14 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 5 of 12 05 June 2012 at 12:36pm | IP Logged |
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Hi GaryB, nice to see a fellow Edinburger on here (although I'm really a West Coaster) - thanks for letting me know about the Spanish meetup! You're right, there are about 30 ads on Gumtree posted every day from Spanish speakers wanting to meet up for a language exchange. I've even randomly met people wanting to do language exchanges with me on the bus. It's definitely a very Spanish city. Although I don't go to the UoE (wish they did my degree) I'm at Queen Margaret, there are still so many opportunities.
Don't feel too down about the French, there are a lot of French speakers here too! 2 of my flatmates are from France; a Parisian and a Dijonnais. There's another French bunch on the building (do you live in an area with a large student population?). They report that their entire University populace is French (Engineering & Transport Department at Napier). Like you, I've ended up partying with French people randomly - pretty sure we attempted to communicate in a horrible mix of English, French, Spanish & Chartreuse. There's a few French cafes up Leith way, but I'm sure you already know about them. Thanks for the advice about moving into the active phase of language learning, it's definitely easier to sit and absorb - does a lot for the comprehension but not a lot for speaking! Edited by SaffronCicely on 05 June 2012 at 12:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5212 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 12 05 June 2012 at 2:35pm | IP Logged |
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Don't worry, I'm not a true Edinburger either, I'm from Central Scotland, just came here
to study then ended up staying. I know there's lots of French people here, I hear French quite often when I'm out on the street, and yes I live in a studenty area, very near the UoE; I just hardly ever seem to actually meet many of them, especially ones my age and with similar interests. At language meetups it's mostly older people who I don't have much in common with. Maybe I just need to be less shy and just start talking to young French people when I hear them on the street or in the supermarket or at a bar or whatever, haha. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| SaffronCicely Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4564 days ago 14 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 7 of 12 05 June 2012 at 9:30pm | IP Logged |
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We must live close by as I'm right by the University too; I'm sure most people would be more than happy to practice their English with you! I've never been to a language meetup myself; for some reason I had imagined it to be a more studenty affair. Like you say, there's an overwhelming amount of young Spaniards out there searching for language exchanges but I do see far less, if any, ads of the same from French students.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6602 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 12 05 June 2012 at 11:27pm | IP Logged |
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Um just a couple of my fave links:
lyricstraining.com - for playing with song lyrics http://gloss.dliflc.edu/ - plenty of lessons with interesting content. in most of them the last part is an essay and there are guidelines and the main points in English with translations for testing yourself. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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