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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 49 of 59 22 March 2010 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Welcome to the real world. Spanish, like all the major international languages, has national and regional dialects. Obviously then, at a certain point, one is confronted with the issue of which regional variety to concentrate on. To be more precise though, we are talking about the spoken language. Written Spanish is quite standardized and should not present any major problems. The real difficulty is casual or slang Spanish. This is the same problem in all the international languages. The informal spoken language is the most varied and different from the written norm. I think as a learner you have to ask yourself what kind of Spanish do you want to speak, not only regionally but also socially. I would recommend extreme caution before venturing into slang because the results may be very ludicrous and not what you intended. But the real answer to the question of how to master the spoken form is simply that you have to live in the country. The Internet, television, meeting native speakers, etc. are great ways to improve one's speech, but at a certain point, you just have to immerse yourself in the language. But remember that choosing a country will determine the kind of Spanish you learn. You must also remember that many speakers of Spanish are aware of dialect differences and can adjust to them. Your Mexican Spanish will be understood in Spain quite well unless you use really slangy items. In any case, you have to adjust your language to the situation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5967 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 50 of 59 22 March 2010 at 10:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yes, this is exactly the lesson I learned. I've been out of the classroom for 15+ years, so I don't even remember very well what we talked about back then: it was a lot of high-level literary language I haven't used in real life. I wish the training had been more practical, but it was a good start.
Immersion in the language and culture is necessary to complete my knowledge, but it was not possible to travel as a college student, and it is not possible now. I hope other Spanish learners take advantage of any opportunity to travel. It irks me severely that I can't, and so I am missing the finishing touch, but that how it is, I can't change that at this time. Fortunately, the language resources available online can compensate, somewhat, for a learner mostly confined at home. So, if any student or other learner has the chance to go abroad, to do language immersion, by all means, GO! GO NOW! The opportunity can disappear very quickly after school is over and it is often difficult to find it again. For me, maybe one day! I never though I'd be able to travel two years ago, and and I did, (although it was to German-speaking places) so, there's hope! And once again, emphatically, if you can go, GO! and SPEAK! It's fun! and so, so very much worth whatever it takes to get there. . . . and in the meantime, I'll just follow the Spanish speakers around the store when I can ;) 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 51 of 59 23 March 2010 at 5:22am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Meh, lets get back to Spanish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 52 of 59 23 March 2010 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
There are two issues that I'd like to raise here. First of all, although for some reason Italian may seem easier to understand there is no real difference between Italian and Spanish in terms of the real spoken language and the formal language taught in language courses. It is true that Italian does not have the international reach of Spanish, but it is a language with many distinct regional varieties that differ considerably from the standard language. But the more important issue, in my mind, is the question: why is it important to master the spoken language? Of course, we would all love to speak like a native, but is it realistic? Not for the most of us, especially if we are not able to spend time in the country. If you are able to read great literature without difficulty and understand movies and television easily, you are to be congratulated. This is a lot more than what most people accomplish. At the same time, instead of worrying about understanding the vernacular I would be more concerned with mastering the standard spoken language. That in itself is a challenge. Could you easily do an interview for Spanish-speaking radio or television? What about giving a speech at a meeting? Or maybe just an ordinary telephone conversation? Yes, understanding casual spoken vernacular on the television is challenging when compared to the trained voices of professional media presenters. But that will always be a problem unless you spend time in the country learning the vernacular language. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that, but there is so much else to keep you busy for a very long time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hypersport Senior Member United States Joined 5881 days ago 216 posts - 307 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 53 of 59 24 March 2010 at 5:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I was really lucky during the beginning of my studies to be able to work with and speak with Mexicans who didn't speak English. This was just like being in Mexico at times, in the breakroom with 5 to 7 Mexicans speaking about anything and everything with tons of slang. A lot of it rubbed off.
This last weekend one of the guys that I used to work with came by with his two kids to visit for a while. His kids are like lots of Mexican kids here in the States, they're speaking English all day away from the house and Spanish in the house, although tons of American tv in the house. We talked for about an hour and a half in nothing but Spanish, and his kids didn't even flinch, they would just chime in in Spanish too but knowing that I obviously speak English. Yeah, I still watch tv and movies in Spanish and listen to lots of music and podcasts in Spanish and am constantly reading to try and improve. But it's moments like these that I know that I've learned more than enough to get by. I think if I were to leave the States and only speak Spanish with native speakers for maybe 5 years, then maybe I could claim to have mastered it. But still being here in the U.S., I think I've come as close as anyone can for learning it on their own. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| duschan Bilingual Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 6083 days ago 18 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, Macedonian*, English | Message 54 of 59 25 March 2010 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yes, I know Italian has many different dialects and even there are distinct languages
within Italy. Someone from Sicily not always readily understands someone from Milan, unless they speak standard Italian, which they do when they travel outside their region. But Italian is still not Spanish. As I originally explained, it's not the dialects in Spanish that I find hard, it's the way the real language is pronounced vs. the way the language is taught. Dialects are an issue for a student of any foreign language, and I take that as given, as a fact in learning a language. And no, it doesn't have to be an international language. Take Macedonian for example. Macedonia is one of the tiniest nations in Europe, still the variety of dialects is overwhelming, and I am talking about really distinct dialects with variations in accent, grammar and vocabulary. The nouns in the northern dialects even display case endings, very much as in Serbian (Kumanovo), and the eastern dialects (Strumica) are almost identical to the western dialects of Bulgarian (Petrich). English, with hundreds of millions of speakers is more uniform worldwide than the tiny Macedonian with 2 million speakers. If someone is learning standard Macedonian, they will find it extremely difficult to understand someone from Kumanovo (Only 20 miles from the capital Skopje!) or Strumica. And I take that as normal in most languages. The difficulty in Spanish is very unique. It's the way the language is articulated by everyone in everyday speech (regardless of the dialect). Italian is clearly articulated, regardless of the dialect. Clear sounds (explosive even) are a must in Italian (again regardless of the dialect). Even if I don't understand the meaning (for example, because of a dialect issue, I can't understand a phrase, a colloquialism or similar), I can write down what I'm hearing in most cases. In Spanish, it's the exact opposite. If I don't understand something, I can't write down what I'm hearing. I don't know what I'm hearing (poor articulation). And even more, if I happen to see what has been said written down, I understand the words. All more advanced Spanish learners know perfectly well what I'm saying. It's not a dialect issue, it's the way Spanish is pronounced by everybody except in very formal occasions (TV presenters, speeches by politicians when they read the speech) and in the classroom. By the way guys, with all due respect, I opened this thread to exchange experiences with other learners of Spanish (or even other languages with similar type of difficulty), and I very much welcome every response and I'm looking forward to it. What's more, I've found some of the answers truly helpful and they have given me a good insight into other people's struggle with Spanish. And I like when we compare Spanish to Italian or French or any other language. But this is not a thread to discuss in two or more pages safety issues in Mexico, gangs, muggings, self-defence, wearing a knife or not, immigration policy or George W. Bush. Stick to the point or post somewhere else. In general, this would be a great forum if the moderators did a better editing job. Otherwise, it's very tiresome for someone truly interested in the topic (and I guess there are hundreds or maybe thousands of those people who will open the thread) to read through 7 long pages only to find out that the topic very often digresses into other areas. It's a waste of time and inefficient. This is a language forum. Edited by duschan on 25 March 2010 at 3:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| L1539 Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5358 days ago 27 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 55 of 59 25 March 2010 at 4:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You've said this several times now. It's clear you find spoken Spanish harder to understand than the spoken form of any other language. But with all due respect, I'm not at all convinced that in a neutral, objective sense, it is uniquely difficult. I consider myself an advanced learner of Spanish. I have heard many people speaking Spanish informally (people in shopping malls, for example, or people calling into lighthearted radio stations). It's simply not true that there's two totally different ways to speak Spanish--one in formal situations and one in everyday life. I hear people in casual situations saying basic words and phrases, and much of what's said sounds just like it does in formal speech. While it's true there are numerous elisions and word shortenings, many of these are systematic and can be learned--for example, when there are two of the same vowels consecutively, the vowel is only said once--"ha abierto" becomes "abierto." There's other things too--"para" frequently becomes "pa," and so on. It's true that Spanish speakers often mumble and speak fast and leave out sounds in words ("hablado" often turns into "hablao," for instance). But I'm not convinced that Spanish is uniquely difficult in this regard. English speakers often complain about how words get blended together in Spanish, making comprehension difficult. I used to think this made Spanish objectively harder to understand than English. But then I read something by a native Spanish speaker who had learned English. She said that even years after she had become fluent in written English, she couldn't understand more than bits and pieces of what was said. For her, the problem was precisely the opposite of the "blending" that occurs for English speakers learning Spanish--English sounded like a gong to her, with isolated sounds interspersed with silence. It didn't have nearly as many connections between words as she was used to in Spanish, and this made it hard for her to understand. This was eye opening to me, and has led me to be very cautious about making judgements about the objective difficulty of one language versus another. Each person learning a language has their own particular areas of difficulty. It may well be true that for many people, Spanish is harder to understand than many other languages. But it's simply inaccurate to say, as you did (or at least implied), that there's some sort of "diglossia" in Spanish, where people in formal and casual situations basically speak two different languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5453 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 56 of 59 25 March 2010 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think this partly is a dialect issue. There are several parts of the Spanish speaking world where everyday
speech is quite close to the standard Spanish that is taught. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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