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James29’s Spanish Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5674 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 433 of 668 13 May 2014 at 12:48am | IP Logged |
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They were probably saying "lonche", which in Latin America is often used instead of almuerzo, taken from the English "lunch". In Perú it is more often used to refer to a sort of afternoon snack, usually around the time we eat dinner in the US, though in Perú they generally have dinner much later.
I honestly think you could do the Assimil course, perhaps along with the advanced one or the great "El francés sin esfuerzo" (the old course), and spend no more than 30-45 minutes a day on it and easily be at a B1 level. Your production might need some practice, but writing and reading shouldn't be too much of an issue. Doing it through Spanish will be nice, too, since you will spend more time working on things that a Spanish speaker would have trouble with. You won't have to worry so much about the subjunctive (which is much easier in French), for example. I enjoyed going through Assimil and you'll be surprised how quickly you pick it up. There's still a lot of new vocabulary to learn, but you've already done a large part of the work with Spanish and English. And i don't know if you've seen coursera.org or not, but they have a couple business-related courses going on now. They're all free and tend to include all the material you could need, including texts and videos explaining the texts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5184 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 434 of 668 13 May 2014 at 2:25am | IP Logged |
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Yup, it was definitely lonche. One of those learning Spanish memories that I will never forget.
I am so tempted to do the French thing. I am just not 100% certain I want to put that much time into it. I see how much progress my Spanish comprehension has improved in the last six months... and Spanish is definitely a priority. I'll probably just decide to do it sometime. I checked out the coursera.org courses and joined the website. There was a link posted somewhere else on the forum... probably posted by you. There is a cool looking course on family businesses I would not mind doing. Actually, the search got me looking at courses at Latin American Universities. There are some really cool 2-4 week courses in Argentina that would actually be extremely helpful to my work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5184 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 435 of 668 18 May 2014 at 3:28pm | IP Logged |
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OK, so I am still slowly moving through Rothbard's Man, Economy and State. I'm about 90% done now. Probably a bit more than 100 pages. It is pretty easy to read for me especially after 900+ pages. I am glad I am doing it, but I am not sure how much it is really helping my Spanish.
I watched a bunch of Simpsons episodes also. It is nice and easy to do the episodes. they are still quite entertaining and don't seem to get old even after six and a half seasons. I downloaded a bunch of Grisham audio books in Spanish and hopefully will get started on them within a few months. One of them is his book "The Firm." I actually never read that book, but I saw the movie a few times so I know the story. I figured I'd watch the TV series that is loosely based on the story. I watched the first 2 hour episode and really loved it. The story is very different than the book... follows up on the end of the book after several years. I really enjoyed the show and will probably watch the series (only two seasons). I had very little problem understanding what was going on. Meetup was great. There were five native speakers. I stayed for three hours talking with only native speakers. The conversations were great. No Skype talks. I am just too busy with things at work to coordinate Skype. I really need to find something I can do on my long drives for work. I have had a quite a few lately and will be doing more this summer. I have not found anything that seems to work for those trips. It seems like such a waste to sit in the car and listen to music for one or two hours. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4071 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 436 of 668 18 May 2014 at 4:05pm | IP Logged |
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James, my husband has a 60 - 90 minutes commute each morning and evening. What he finds helpful, in addition to
music, is downloading podcasts of news programs and business & economics topics (in his case, from sources like the Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times). I'm sure you could find podcasts on topics of interest in Spanish, on iTunes, for example. Gives a break from music, and car time is a great time to really focus on the listening. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5184 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 437 of 668 25 May 2014 at 1:44pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the suggestions, Vivian. This week I actually did listen to a news podcast on the way to work. I re-found Voz de America in some of the old posts in my log (suggested by iguanamon, I believe). It is great... they have a daily 5 minute radio news summary and also a 30 minute radio news summary. It is what I need... I don't like news programs that are obviously political... either direction... it just makes me shut them off if I feel the hosts are trying to advance a political agenda.
I'd say this was a pretty good week. I have still been working on Man, Economy and State and only have about 26 pages left. I could probably finish it this morning, but I'll save it for later this week as I have a lot of things I'd like to do today with my free time. I'll make a more extensive note when I finish the book, but I am quite impressed that I have been moving through the book so well and understanding it so well. I still remember being so impressed with myself when I read it in English... now I am reading it in a foreign language. I have gotten into the storyline of the TV series "The Firm." It really does not have anything to do with the Grisham book it is based on, but it is a cool story... and it keeps my interest. I have a hard time watching TV shows because they just don't keep my interest. I think I have now watched seven or eight episodes. I also watched a few Simpsons episodes. I had a few calls from Spanish speakers at work. Kind of strange how I had three days back to back to back with Spanish speakers. Anyway, I want to improve my Spanish because I had some difficulties... I had no problem with understanding "most" of the conversation and I had no problem at all speaking and explaining what I needed them to understand. My problems were obvious to me: the small fraction of what I did not understand was very important and I needed to look up some words during the conversation. That was awkward... "hold on for a minute please"... as I look up a critical word. Also, I have a difficult time switching to usted in place of tu. I am just not used to it and it was obvious that I had problems with making the switch because I'd quite often slip back into the use of tu with the callers. This is not a big "problem" but, rather, something that just needs practice and time. I also received my new business cards which say I am a Spanish speaker. That kind of motivated me... it also made me think that I better not quit Spanish because I have a ton of these cards and I don't want to have to throw them out. I talked to my website folks and they are somehow going to try to work their abracadabra magic to get more visitors to the Spanish page on my website. I feel clueless about all of this technology stuff, but the salesman says it is going to work... we'll see about that. I had a nice talk with an old Skype partner. Someone I talked to quite a bit about two years ago. We had a nice talk a few months ago and I was told that my Spanish was worse! I think I made a note about that in my log. Anyway, this week I was told that my Spanish was MUCH better than it ever was in the past. I must say that I agree... sometimes my Spanish really flows awesome. Sometimes I can have conversations with people and it really feels just as easy as English. I need to think about what I am going to do when I finish Man, Economy and State. I'd like to whiz through some easier books instead of getting entrenched in another thick book. I'll probably read Cuando Era Puertoriquena, the next Theodore Boone or, perhaps, the next Harry Potter. We'll see. I have been thinking a lot about French lately. I am traveling for work and have had a lot of free time this weekend and I brought Michel Thomas French with me with the intent of finishing the course. I once again decided to quit French. I'd like to make one good hard push in Spanish and get my Spanish up to a better level... a level where I feel confident I can really do my job in Spanish... then, hopefully, get to a point where I am doing a decent amount of my daily job in Spanish. Then, maybe I'll dive into French. It just seems to me that putting additional time and effort into Spanish is going to be much better for me now than putting it into French. Edited by James29 on 25 May 2014 at 1:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5674 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 438 of 668 26 May 2014 at 1:08am | IP Logged |
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To be honest, i'm not sure what you can really do to improve your Spanish. I have a feeling working on vocabulary would be worthwhile alongside lots of reading and listening (watching TV, for example) to provide context and help you activate what you're learning. Do you have any particular plan in mind? I still have lots of holes in my grammar, but it's hard to fill them since textbook explanations tend to be so simple and shallow. My textbook the past few years has been massive exposure and almost no intensive study.
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| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5071 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 439 of 668 26 May 2014 at 2:19am | IP Logged |
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I agree with Crush! In order to polish your Spanish you're going to need massive input and output, using your grammar book as a reference.
I had an idea for something you can listen to in the car. Since you like Caso Cerrado (one of my favorites too) you might try La Tremenda Corte. LTC was a pre-revolutionary Cuban radio program almost 60 years ago, that, believe it or not is still broadcast today on WPAB 550 AM from Ponce, Puerto Rico and on other stations throughout Latin America and the US. Each episode lasts about 10-15 minutes. The humor is timeless and gives a window into Cuban Culture. The accent will help with Caribbean Spanish. I listen to it in the car whenever I happen to be driving at the time. I also download a couple of episodes a week. The quality isn't pin-drop perfect, but not bad considering the age of the radio show. The characters are always the same but the cases are always different. My favorite character is José Candelario "Trespatines". He can be extremely difficult to understand, but not impossible. He does a lot of word play with the Spanish language. Once you get used to him, it becomes easier. There are three episodes on the site with transcripts. It's all colloquial, common speech. After the Revolution, the show and main characters moved to Mexico where they did a half an hour tv show with most of the episodes on youtube. If you need to figure out a word or two or three, a good dictionary site for slang/regional speech is tubabel.com. Also I would suggest, since you like economics, there's a very good and very active forum at Rankia- Foro de economía y política economía. It mostly has to do with Spain. You may enjoy it. Edited by iguanamon on 26 May 2014 at 2:49am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5184 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 440 of 668 26 May 2014 at 1:38pm | IP Logged |
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Great posts. Thanks.
I have three obvious weak points: 1) writing, 2) vocabulary and 3) understanding natively spoken Spanish (TV or conversations between natives). Without a doubt my writing is my weakest link, but I am still focusing on the other aspects of my Spanish because I don't see my writing as being as much of an impediment to what I want to do with Spanish. My grammar is definitely not perfect. I make plenty of mistakes and there are even some fairly basic things I still screw up. When I was speaking with a customer last week and switched to usted I found myself saying... wow, I cannot use te with this guy and I don't know if I am supposed to use lo or le (when I mean you). I also still cannot get my mind around negative commands. I don't know why... my brain is pretty good with understanding the logic of Spanish and I can infer a lot of things about the language, but my brain just tells me when the language was developed the way they do negative commands is screwy. I know that sounds strange because on paper it does not look hard. When I read it I say to myself "that's simple, what's my problem." But then a few weeks later my brain gets confused again. I must say that the subjunctive has just sunk in. It makes sense and I don't feel like I really have problems with it. At the beginning of the year I set a goal to work on the subjunctive, but since then I feel like I'd be better off working on other things. I still think I will spend some time on it just to cement it and perfect it. Crush asked what my plan was... well, I have noticed that focusing on input (TV and reading) this year has really helped a lot with the things I need. Amazingly, it has also helped with the fluidity of my speaking. I am going to continue reading books and watching TV for a while. Probably toward the end of the year I will do a few months of grammar development. I'd really like to get to a point where I can just put in an adult audio book and understand it fairly easily. I tried this yesterday, but could not do it. I put in a Grisham audio. I had not read the book and I did not know the story. It is quite frustrating because when I listen there are not unknown words... it is just that I cannot keep up with the audio. It's like... if I could just slow it down I'd understand it fine... or if there were some sort of clue like the text in front of me or familiarity with the story... that would help a lot. Over the past five or six months this has gotten much better so I am going to ride the wave as far as I can go and just keep doing what I am doing. I like it and that is half the battle for me... I still say "I like learning Spanish" every morning when I finish up. I'd never be able to sit and use flashcards or Anki. That would drive me nuts. My basic plan is to simply alternate between doing massive amounts of input and then intensively do grammar studying. La Tremenda Corte looks like it could be almost perfect for my morning commute. My drive is about 20 minutes in the morning (in the evening with traffic it can approach 45 minutes... ugh). It is the perfect length... plus, it has my preferred type of Spanish... from the islands. (I have pretty much given up on trying to find resources from the islands). I listened to an episode and... here again... I seem to be able to know all of the Spanish but simply cannot follow the story. They aren't using words I don't know... it is just that I cannot keep up with them. I am sure if I just keep at it I will get better. I definitely like reading financial material. I still read and listen to quite a bit of investing material in English. In a strange way I don't like to read certain things in Spanish. I sometimes feel that "important" things in my life should still be done in English. I have been reading investing material for decades and my interests are quite narrow and quirky. I read a few of those forum posts and links on Rankia and it made me chuckle because they say basically the exact same things as folks say on forums in English. Reading the articles and posts there was quite simple for me. I can intuitively understand what the guys are writing simply because I can read between the lines and guess very easily. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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