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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| duschan Bilingual Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 6083 days ago 18 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, Macedonian*, English | Message 1 of 59 13 March 2010 at 1:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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I would like to hear from learners of Spanish if anyone has actually mastered the
spoken language, and if so how long it took and what they did to get there. After two years of study, I've come to the point when I'm thinking about stopping any further study, because I don't know how to continue. I've come to the point when I can understand any newspaper article, no matter how complex it is, or read Nobel prize literature in Spanish without any major difficulty, but at the same time unable to understand a relatively simple conversation. In Spanish, there is a what seems to me an unbridgeable gap between the standard written language and the standard pronunciation that we are taught on one side and the actual everyday language of the people on the other. The way people speak on the streets of Madrid (I know only from movies, and limited TV and radio access) does not have much if anything to do with the Spanish we study at school, at home or anywhere. And I'm NOT talking about slang, colloquialisms, dialects or even speed of talking. That's a problem in learning any language. I'm talking about the strikingly different way the Spanish is written and taught and actually spoken (pronounced) by 99% of the native speakers. When I watch the news in Spanish, I can understand the presenter around 80% (for those familiar with Spanish TV, I'm talking about Pepa Bueno or Ana Blanco), but when people are interviewed in the same news broadcast, my understanding can drop as low as 30%. If I could turn on closed captions my understanding would go up to 90%, so it's not that I have a problem with the actual words used. And those 30% can be even lower when I'm watching a movie. It depends. And I found this incredible. The language is pronounced differently by the people (very poorly articulated with countless sound omissions and elisions and often spoken at the speed of light) and that's the real language that we should be taught from day 1 of our studies. But we never are. We learn (we spend countless hours listening to CDs and podcasts) an artificial Spanish that is used only by TV presenters, language instructors and no one else. I've spoken to people who learnt Italian and I did some Italian studies myself, and in this respect Italian is very different from Spanish. Actually, when I think about it, I can understand as much spoken Italian (with my very limited studies) as I can Spanish. And I cannot easily read newspaper articles or literature in Italian. But once you learn the words, you know them - you recognize them when people use them in a sentence (unlike Spanish), no matter how fast people speak, you adept, you get used to it. Well, I never seem to be able to adept with Spanish. I know you'll tell me to listen to the language as much as possible and I'll be OK understanding in due time, but I doubt. But before I quit, I hope someone can give me few words of encouragement to persist. I had the same difficulties when I studied German, and I practically quit after several years of study (in German I had a big problem with the many different dialects and the vowels). Maybe it's me - maybe I'm a quitter. But as I said, I'd like to hear from actual learners of Spanish, who understand what I'm talking about from personal experience, has anyone actually mastered understanding the spoken language completely and competently without having lived in a Spanish-speaking country? And if yes, how? Is it just a matter of years and years of listening to TV, radio etc? How many years? How many hours of active listening? Are there any general guidelines? Unfortunately, I have very limited access to Spanish TV (only the news). By the way, my native language is a Slav language that uses exactly the same 5 vowel sounds as Spanish. The consonants are another story. Edited by duschan on 13 March 2010 at 2:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5422 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 59 13 March 2010 at 4:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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Listen to Spanish music and radio and watch Spanish TV and movies, you'll get used to the spoken language very quickly. I'm sort of in the opposite boat as you, I can hear Spanish and (most of the time) separate words, but because of my limited vocabulary I can't understand most of it (knowing some Latin helps me out with reading though)!
Anyways, ¡mucho suerto con español! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kerateo Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5646 days ago 112 posts - 180 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, French Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 59 13 March 2010 at 8:55am | IP Logged | |||||
correction: Mucha suerte con el español o Mucha suerte con tu español. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5585 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 4 of 59 13 March 2010 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
o buena suerte con el español :D ! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5560 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 5 of 59 13 March 2010 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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OK, this is a second-hand anecdote so may not be true, but a friend who lives in Spain
said even between native speakers, every second sentence is "What?" My own belief is that it depends on the route you took to learn. I learned French from books, and struggled for years to understand it spoken. With German I started using audio much earlier, and I can watch German movies roughly as easily as French ones, despite my vocabulary and litery skills being vaaaaastly inferior. For future languages, I am concentrating even more on audio only learning. (of course it may be that German is intrinsicly easier for English mother tongues I don't know how well it's possible to relearn the original misslearned language. When I am trying to remember words, they come to me as "spelled" rather than "heard", but here is my strategy: the preliminaries: Learn another language Spend ten years studing languages Read books on phonetics but mainly: Separate "listening" from "understanding". Just listen to the sounds. Let them echo in your head. (sometimes. obviously other times you will want to understand or enjoy) Listen intensively. Use audacity. Highlight the phrase you can't understand, and listen to it on repeat (ctrl-play). Drill down to the individual syllables that you can't hear. Once you've got it, listen to the whole phrase again and (hopefully) you will be surprised how clear it now seems. Do chanting/shadowing. And don't worry about "quitting". You are able to read Spanish. Thats not going to go away in a hurry. You can try again with the spoken skills whenever you feel like it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 6 of 59 13 March 2010 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been learning for 5 years and I'm now reasonably happy with my spoken language. I got comfortable by making friends with Spanish speakers and talking lots.
If you're going to try to improve your Spanish by listening to something, try to make it reasonably consistent so that you get used to the speakers' accents. For example: you can watch TV news on the internet. If you watch the same channel every night for a while, you'll get used to the regular reporters' accents, but guests and witnesses being interviewed will provide variety. If you watch a TV series, you'll get the same characters week in, week out, but guest stars will again provide some level of variety. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robsolete Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5385 days ago 191 posts - 428 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 7 of 59 13 March 2010 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not sure if it's popular where you are, but try www.conversationexchange.com, a free site where people seeking language exchanges register to meet up.
My city has a lot of students from Spain and Latin America who are trying to learn English, and after only five or six exchanges I'm finding my comprehension improving quite a bit. True, they will slow things down a bit to make it easier, but that's how you start learning. I was in the same boat before I started doing conversation exchanges. I'm nowhere near 100% comprehension, but it's getting better. Also, almost *every* language with an international spread has very wide variations between formal news and local dialects: many of my Asian ESL students can converse easily with me, but are hopeless if they run into an Irish or Australian person. I don't think it's exclusive to Spanish. So it makes sense to me that Italian, being generally contained in a smaller area, would have a bit more regularity than Spanish, which is influenced by dozens of indigenous Native American languages in different places, and thus has developed an "international tone" out of necessity. The most extreme example I can think of is Arabic, where the print/news version is considered a *different language* than what people speak on the streets of Casablanca or Beirut! Native speakers from different places can usually understand each other despite these dialects. But just as my Asian students have to spend time "adapting" to different *varieties* of English speakers, you and I have to do the same for Spanish. And you can't really do that well without talking to native speakers. If you can't hop on a plane to El Salvador at the moment, then you need to find natives in your neighborhood. But hey, you're lucky, because most Spanish speakers who make their way to Oz are probably going to be looking to improve their English. This is the biggest gift of English, really: the ability to find conversation partners from any other language who want to learn it. Since it's your second language as well, you might even be especially helpful because you can give insights that native speakers can't, so long as they can comprehend your accent (if you have one that is). Edited by robsolete on 13 March 2010 at 11:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5735 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 8 of 59 14 March 2010 at 1:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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If you have close captioning available, try that thing that (at least) many of us Asian language learners do:
1) Watch the movie, listen to the dialog. If you don't understand the dialog: 2) Look at the subtitles, rewind, and play again. Do this until you hear what the subtitles say. 3) After going through the movie (or TV episode is probably more doable) like this, rip the audio to mp3, and casually listen to it, trying to understand what they're saying without the help of the subtitles (which should be easier now, since you already 'understood' it once). Let us hear if that works out for you. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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