What do you mean, Spanish is pronounced differently depending on where in the world you are? Psht.
Seriously, though, I think this could be good fun. Prior to the beginning of July, my grasp of Spanish was limited to por favor and gracias. In the space of 2 days that expanded to cover a whole range of greetings and basic questions. You know, the usual – what’s your name, where are you from, etc etc.
And all achieved in the space of little over an hour. Wahey. This is courtesy not to my amazing language learning skills (although I do rather love them and it’s a shame I didn’t keep up my German and what little French I had) and more to the fact that I found a great little language learning programme online that teaches through bitesized podcasts. So I can do an hour, half an hour or even just 15 minutes of an evening and still feel like I’m achieving something. If I really wanted, I could do it in my lunch break or on the walk home from work.
Puedes hablar más despacio?
Ok, so sure the first few lessons weren’t all that taxing. I’m sure there must be something coming up about genders and tenses and all those yummy things I remember from German and Latin, but I must have a bit of a head start there, right? I studied Latin for 4 years (highest GCSE grade in my class, fuck yeah) and there’s enough similarities between the two that I’m hoping I won’t find it too difficult to grasp. Plus, there’s also quite a few similarities between Spanish and English so hurray for that too.
From starting the course, it’s over a year until I plan to be in South America. Plenty of time, right? I might even start on the French and Italian courses and maybe take a little refresher in German given that currently my German has diminished to yelling Was ist los mit dir? at my laptop when it’s refusing to work. Obviously I do actually remember more than that, but that’s just such a lovely phrase when Bob the Third is throwing a hissy fit and I’m getting hacked off with him.
Moving on.
The programme is called Coffee Break Spanish and it's presented by a couple of Scots. The podcasts themselves are free but you can pay for additional content like lesson notes and whatnot. We'll see how well I do with just the podcasts first, I think, and then maybe I'll look at forking out for the extras.
At the time of posting this, nearly three quarters of the way through the first season of 40 episodes. No doubt I'll need to go back over certain episodes and recap on things that I'm not sure on, but I think that's pretty good progress from knowing just a few words to being able to hold at least a small conversation. I'm also now able to ask for directions and use that delightful phrase beloved of travellers:
Lo siento no entiendo
I'm sorry, I don't understand.
I'm pretty sure that at the moment my understanding of Spanish is better than my spoken Spanish - that is, I can understand what people are saying, but I haven't quite got the hang of speaking it myself. Like I mentioned above, though, I'm not going to be anywhere Spanish-speaking for over a year, so I've got plenty of time to work it out. For a start, there's 3 more seasons of 40 episodes each of Coffee Break Spanish to go at.
Should be fun. Let's face it, learning a language has to be more fun than that time I had a fever and my brain decided to try to operate in Latin. Failing that it switched to German. For an entire night. It was awful...
I'll be making Language Barriers a regular thing, so look out for more posts about my language learning adventures! Maybe by the next time I post, I'll be able to say:
Hablo un poco de español
You can find more info about Coffee Break Spanish and the other courses offered by the Radio Lingua Network here: http://radiolingua.com/
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