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Learning as much Spanish in 4 weeks | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| djerdap Triglot Newbie Croatia Joined 4257 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, German | Message 1 of 8 15 September 2012 at 8:17pm | IP Logged |
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Hello!
First-time poster here. I have a question that some of you might help me with. I have a scheduled workshop and an interview for a possible internship coming in 4 weeks. The thing is, although the program so far was conducted in English, this particular stage will be in Spanish. Now, the conditions that were stated for the application in the beginning were an intermediate level of Spanish and an advanced level of English. I do understand a lot of Spanish, I can read it and I can construct relatively simple sentences. I did four courses before and I do have to go through the grammar again, especially the past tenses. One might say I'm somewhere between an A2 and B1 level. I speak English and German fluently along with my native language, so I'm not a foreigner to foreign languages. ;) If somebody has had a similar experience, what would be the best advice you could give me? I'm open to all suggestions, online course recommendations, techniques of learning etc. I do have enough time on my hands in the following 4 weeks to dedicate a lot of effort to this. Thanks a lot! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6400 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2 of 8 15 September 2012 at 9:02pm | IP Logged |
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The book "how to improve your foreign language immediately" by Shekhtman is fantastic. It's not allowed to post this sort of links but you can find a pdf online;) in the epilogue, he describes a student who asked for help preparing for some sort of an exam/job interview. She had failed but begged for a second try, and she complained that many who passed aren't any better than her. They had 3 days or so to prepare for that, he taught her the right techniques (that he describes in the book) and she passed.
Your pronunciation will be the first thing people notice, and especially non-professionals tend to base their opinion on it. For this, I recommend shadowing. It'll also help you speak more naturally and with fluency. see this fantastic site for some info on the phonetics: http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/# other than that, here are some other of my favourite resources: http://gloss.dliflc.edu/Default.aspx - free lessons with interesting content, mostly on topics like society, science, economics, politics, medicine. at the end of each lessons you get suggestions for an essay, you may want to post them on lang-8.com to have them corrected... or post just anything there :) http://www.learner.org/resources/series75.html a tv series for learners - don't get burned out! it's ok to have fun too, in Spanish! :P http://albalearning.com/ http://lyricstraining.com/ another helpful resource are podcasts about your field, those for the general public. also, i think an online search for "job interview in Spanish" should retrieve some helpful results:) last but not least, try to get a lot of practice with native speakers! (look for friends, not language partners. social networking is great for that) what a long post. well, you'll get a lot more suggestions, but imo, the book, pronunciation/shadowing and finding specific info about job interviews are all a must. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4295 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 8 15 September 2012 at 11:02pm | IP Logged |
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Besides what Serpent has written above, I would recommend studying discourse markers to help your speech and writing flow more easily. Here is a link to a wiki article in Spanish with a thorough explanation. Be sure to check out the linked references as well.
Marcadores del discurso Also the biggest gain for time grammatically in my opinion, is more practice with prepositions and prepositional phrases, and with verb tenses, especially the subjunctive. The PMP series are good and cheap resources for this. If you want to review your base vocabulary and use Anki, there is a shared deck called "Most frequent Spanish words" or something like that, with close to 9000 entries. Naturally many will be common words or cognates, but you can delete/move them if you want. Also it helps to use the 1000/2000/etc. tags to filter and move to sub-decks for breaking it down into more manageable units and focusing on specific vocabulary levels. Finally, making it a daily habit to read online with a popup dictionary (like German site ifinger offers for one) various articles/sites connected with the area of knowledge the job covers would also likely help. Que tenga buena suerte! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| djerdap Triglot Newbie Croatia Joined 4257 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, German | Message 4 of 8 16 September 2012 at 6:35am | IP Logged |
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Thanks a lot for the tips! Much appreciated!
Don't let that stop anybody else, any kind of advice is most welcome. ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5065 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 5 of 8 16 September 2012 at 2:05pm | IP Logged |
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Try reading and listening to the intermediate articles in the online multimedia magazine for Spanish learners- Veinte Mundos. Each article has good, clear audio and notes for difficult words/phrases.
Also if you could read another book in addition to How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately, I recommend Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish by Joseph J. Keenan. His chapter on the explanation of the subjunctive is worth the price of the book alone. ¡Buena suerte! Edited by iguanamon on 16 September 2012 at 2:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4471 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 6 of 8 16 September 2012 at 3:44pm | IP Logged |
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The most frequent Spanish verbs can be found at the Verbología page:
Fundamental verbs [Grado 1 - Verbos usados por todo tipo de hablantes, incluidos los analfabetos. Saben usarlos la población infantil con educación primaria (que, generalmente, abarca hasta los 11 o 12 años). Estos verbos los denominamos verbos protolécticos, por pertenecer al patrimonio léxico fundamental (o básico) de las personas. Forman parte de la lengua española generalmente considerada como lengua estándar. ] http://www.verbolog.com/usos10.htm Additional verbs (used by all people who graduated from high school): http://www.verbolog.com/usos12.htm Additional verbs2 (known to all people with a university degree): http://www.verbolog.com/usos20.htm Source: The Spanish Verb Encyclopedia (made by the Spanish Academy of Verbs): http://www.verbolog.com/tipouso.htm Edited by Medulin on 16 September 2012 at 3:48pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5194 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 7 of 8 16 September 2012 at 9:52pm | IP Logged |
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All really great resources! I don't have any deadlines with Spanish for the moment but I
may make a commitment to take a month to really work on upgrading my level along with you. All I can add is with my experience getting back into French after it laying dormant for a while, I found it initially difficult to get any words out when speaking. After getting TV5 Monde and keeping it on constantly for a few weeks I found my conversation flowed much more easily. So I'd recommend in addition to deliberate study to just keep some audio tuned up all the time so whenever you have 10 minutes or so you'll already have it queued up and you can concentrate on comprehension. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5954 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 8 of 8 19 September 2012 at 4:35pm | IP Logged |
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If you're trying to learn as much Spanish as possible for an internship interview, I would focus mainly on the vocabulary likely to arise in the interview. Four weeks is very tight for improving a language. There's no point learning vocabulary unless you're going to use it in the interview.
I would also recommend writing short paragraphs about what you plan to say. You should get these checked by a native speaker, and then learn them off by heart. These should also include topics of personal interest. The more you speak during the interview, the better you can control the conversation. Having ready made responses, that seem spontaneous, will really impress the panel. Edited by DaraghM on 19 September 2012 at 4:41pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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