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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7067 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 1 of 1 09 June 2008 at 7:07pm | IP Logged |
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I studied Spanish throughout the six years of middle/high school, but, as often happens for me, I found that my desire to learn the language was slowly drained by the frustratingly ineffective format and had pretty much lost all real interest in it by ninth or tenth grade. That is, until I went to Argentina and Uruguay for a month during May and early June and was both excited by how much I remembered and amazed by just how useful I found my language skills to be. I also fell in love with the Argentinian accent and manner of speaking, which sound far more rhythmic to my ears than Mexican or "Spanish" Spanish. I decided that I want to make the push for fluency, so now I have to lay down a gameplan for accomplishing this.
Currently, I'd rate my reading comprehension a seven or so (I have very little difficulty at all reading an average novel or newspaper; more scholarly texts give me more trouble, but I can still understand a fair amount), my writing a five, my aural comprehension a four (I still have a bit of trouble with the sheer speed of most native speakers' speech!) and my speaking probably also a four, although it could drop to a three on a bad day (the vocab and grammar are there, for the most part, but I have a tough time stringing together sentences quickly). Unfortunately, the skills I most need to work on are the ones which are the hardest to find resources for; I think by far the quickest way for someone at my level to improve would be to just have informal conversations with native speakers every day. Anyway, I'm starting off by clearing up some of the things I learned in school but have forgotten or gotten rusty on in the two and a half years since I've formally studied Spanish. The three main ones off the top of my head were: -Por vs Para. For some reason, "para" sounds a lot more natural to me and I end up using it as my default translation when I'm unsure, even though "por" is actually used in a majority of cases. Reading up on this clarified the issue a bit for me. -Subjunctive! I'm not sure why, but I'd remembered the formation of the present subjunctive being supremely difficult and was very gratified to find out, on looking it up, that it's actually very easy. -Imperative. Much like the present subjunctive, I was convinced that the imperative was difficult to form and not particularly logical in its construction, but apparently it's not particularly hard at all, which is nice to know. The whole thing about using present subjunctive instead of the affirmative imperative form for negative informal commands might have been what I had remembered as being tricky, but I don't foresee that presenting any real difficulties now that I've rechecked it. I also FINALLY figured out what grammatical construction people were using when they said things like "que lo hagas tú," which I heard absolutely all the time in Argentina. So... next up: find a good online Spanish-language radio station! Edited by Sierra on 09 June 2008 at 7:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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