Learning Spanish
Jan. 5th, 2005 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beige_alertFor about three months now I’ve been reading, or trying to read, Spanish newspaper web sites, some Spanish blogs, and some Spanish magazines. I studied Spanish for four years in school, some fifteen years ago, and did not, at the time, consider myself to have any useful ability with the language. After fifteen years of total disuse, three months of casual self-study has brought me to the point of being able to read and mostly understand articles in Foreign Affairs en Español, which is not exactly beginner material. It’s kind of like skimming or speed-reading---I pretty well know what’s going on, but I know I’m missing all the subtlety. The typical newspaper article is easier. These days I actually frequently read about “breaking news” in Spanish before I see it in English.
I wish I could compare my ability now with what it was fifteen years ago, but in class we never read anything other than the textbooks so I can’t compare my ability to understand newspapers now, for example, with my ability then. I tried listening to a few minutes of the Comunicando podcast recently and I can just barely understand bits of it, which seems to be more than I could do with Spanish TV back then. Given how quickly I’ve learned enough to understand newspapers and the like it amazes me all the more that we never read anything of interest, anything besides the textbook, in school.
I must be drawing upon memories from class to be reading newspapers easily in just three months, even if it seems like I’d forgotten everything. I did remember the pronunciation rules, which are a lot more useful in Spanish than in English because in Spanish they are actually followed.
Reading is easy, of course. I’m going to have to do more listening. There’s at least one podcast out there. Free Spanish-language TV is a wasteland of soap operas, but maybe I’ll pay for the Spanish package on cable TV, which includes, among other things, the Discovery Channel in Spanish. Most of all, now that I’m learning a significant amount of vocabulary I need to write. There are web sites and LJ groups for people learning Spanish to mangle the language together in.
I wish I could compare my ability now with what it was fifteen years ago, but in class we never read anything other than the textbooks so I can’t compare my ability to understand newspapers now, for example, with my ability then. I tried listening to a few minutes of the Comunicando podcast recently and I can just barely understand bits of it, which seems to be more than I could do with Spanish TV back then. Given how quickly I’ve learned enough to understand newspapers and the like it amazes me all the more that we never read anything of interest, anything besides the textbook, in school.
I must be drawing upon memories from class to be reading newspapers easily in just three months, even if it seems like I’d forgotten everything. I did remember the pronunciation rules, which are a lot more useful in Spanish than in English because in Spanish they are actually followed.
Reading is easy, of course. I’m going to have to do more listening. There’s at least one podcast out there. Free Spanish-language TV is a wasteland of soap operas, but maybe I’ll pay for the Spanish package on cable TV, which includes, among other things, the Discovery Channel in Spanish. Most of all, now that I’m learning a significant amount of vocabulary I need to write. There are web sites and LJ groups for people learning Spanish to mangle the language together in.
Try to read the script of Comunicando podcast
Re: Try to read the script of Comunicando podcast
Date: 2005-02-15 07:09 am (UTC)