236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6483 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 49 of 94 09 August 2007 at 3:28pm | IP Logged |
Finished unit 17 today. Lo del pretérito fue bastante fácil, como esperé, pero los ejercicios de remplazo y de variaciones... fueron ridiculosos! Como antes, pude hacerlos después de unas repeticiones, pero no sé si voy a poder hacerlos mañana. Mejor que los haga dos veces más mañana, por lo menos.
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236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6483 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 50 of 94 14 August 2007 at 9:46pm | IP Logged |
It has been several days since I've written here, and before today I haven't studied Spanish for days. The reason is because first the tennis business has drained all my time and secondly my computer was infected by a load of spyware programs and was competely disfunctional! Now it is fixed and should be running fine, at least for a few days!
I went through a bit of unit 18 today, which was focused on the imperfect. This is one of the first courses in which the imperfect is introduced before finishing issues in the preterit (irregulars, etc.). Again I will have the nightmare of distinguishing between the two tenses. According to the programmatic Spanish course, the preterit vs imperfect issue is the last thing an English speaker will master - and I'm totally in agreement.
Pensamos ir a alguna parte este fin de semana. Todavia no se donde vamos a ir... tal vez a Montreal?
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236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6483 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 51 of 94 15 August 2007 at 9:26pm | IP Logged |
("adónde vamos a ir" -correction for the part of the last two lines of the last post)
I finished unit 18 and started unit 19. For some reason, the computer is beginning to be infected with spyware again and it is interfering with my Spanish learning. I do hope that course is avaliable for download sometime soon, so I don't have to be listening to a drill sentence, waiting for the answer of an item, and all of a sudden, a full-screen advertisement would stymie all my work. After a while, it gets really annoying.
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236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6483 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 52 of 94 16 August 2007 at 9:51pm | IP Logged |
In unit 19, I notice a lot of words that were not previously introduced. By studying so many years of Spanish now, most of them are easy to recall. But maybe it's because I'm forgetting what has been taught earlier in the course, although I'm sure that in some instances that is not so.
More on this when I finish the unit.
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236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6483 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 53 of 94 21 August 2007 at 2:05pm | IP Logged |
(Off topic)
This past weekend I went to Montreal, and since I had no internet access, Spanish had to be postponed. The trip couldn't be regarded as a "language study trip", since it was too short, and I was with my family 99% of the time, and thus had to speak English/Chinese mainly. Besides, my knowledge of French was inactive as it has been a couple of months since I've studied it intensely.
Still, the trip was definetly worth it because for the first time, I experienced what it was like to be in a place where everyone around you spoke French, and they weren't just students of the language; they spoke it everyday as part of their lives. It was sort of shocking and I took most of the trip getting used to everything being written in French. Of course, being Canada, one can still cheat by reading the English versions of everything, since nearly every public sign or information booklet had an English translation on it (which certainly I didn't read unless I didn't understand the French version!).
However, I didn't understand anything that the people said. I could figure out what all the written material meant, but when it came to comprehending conversations, it was like listening to Greek. They just talked way too fast. I know that Quebec French isn't much different from European French, so it's definetly my problem :(
Hopefully I can return someday to the Quebec region, since it is not more than a 5 hour drive from where I live. I should probably travel alone then, so I can actually have time to talk with the people there.
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236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6483 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 54 of 94 25 August 2007 at 4:42pm | IP Logged |
I finished unit 20 today. The obvious feature for this unit is double object pronouns, which I thought I mastered from programmatic Spanish, but turns out I didn't. Still, the prior experience from the programmatic course has helped me tremendously. I'm especially having a hard time changing le, les into "se", though saying the sentence is easy.
ejemplo:
"Ayer, le mandamos esa taza de agua a Carmen."
Y después de cambiarla,
"Ayer, se la mandamos."
How beautiful. That long mouthful above can be shortened to a four word sentence.
As I mentioned above, I have a hard time producing the second sentence because of my delay of changing le to se, but once I start saying the sentence, the rest is fine.
Additionally, there has been a lot of talk about airplanes and the air force in the dialogues. I don't even know what a squadron is, nor do I care, but I have to learn to say it in Spanish. I guess I should've served in the military sometime before, eh?
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patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6958 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map
| Message 55 of 94 25 August 2007 at 9:32pm | IP Logged |
236factorial wrote:
ejemplo:
"Ayer, le mandamos esa taza de agua a Carmen."
Y después de cambiarla,
"Ayer, se la mandamos."
How beautiful. That long mouthful above can be shortened to a four word sentence. |
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Assuming that you know what the "la" is referring to!
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236factorial Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6483 days ago 192 posts - 213 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 56 of 94 27 August 2007 at 3:50pm | IP Logged |
patuco wrote:
236factorial wrote:
ejemplo:
"Ayer, le mandamos esa taza de agua a Carmen."
Y después de cambiarla,
"Ayer, se la mandamos."
How beautiful. That long mouthful above can be shortened to a four word sentence. |
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Assuming that you know what the "la" is referring to! |
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Isn't it obvious that "la" is referring to the "taza de agua"?
Unit 21 is HUGE. Trying to fit in all the irregular preterit stems in one unit is a little bit catastrophic, but at least the "past I" tense is mostly out of the way.
Needless to say, I'm not done with the unit yet, especially with several not-language-related complications since school is starting!
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