Learning the Spanish Language — Project Day 33

Sentence Work

I worked on 50 sentences from Glossika's Spanish Business . But as usual, I departed from the instructions to simply repeat the sentences twice.

Before each of the identical pairs of Spanish sentences that you are supposed to repeat, the narrator gives the English version. I stop the playback immediately after that and attempt to guess (i.e. translate to) the Spanish sentence.

I get it right more often than not, and although my failure rate on those guesses is still quite high, it's reducing significantly.

Then, rather than listening to the first Spanish instance and repeating it in time with the second instance, I read the Spanish sentence and attempt to pronounce it, before the Spanish speaker.

So I'm using the Spanish speaker's first instance to check my pronunciation, rather than as something merely to copy.

If the first Spanish instance sounds radically different from my own reading out loud, or if I simply can't find a way to wrap my tongue around the written Spanish, I practice mimicking the Spanish speaker — until I have something that sounds similar to it, or equivalent.

Only when I'm semi-comfortable pronouncing the whole sentence, do I attempt to repeat it along with the second Spanish instance.

If the sentence is very long and complicated, or contains lots of adjacent phonemes that are difficult for English-speaking mouths to reproduce, I simply can't pronounce the second instance within the time allowed before the next sentence.

In that case, I stop the playback and carry on repeating the sentence aloud, until I can get the whole thing out fluently — without looking at the written version or repeating the audio version.

I'm doing a lot more work than is called for. And sometimes it takes a frustrating amount of time. But I'm finding that the phrase patterns are sticking much better now — than they were when I followed the instructions 'blindly'.

This is hardly surprising, since it confirms everything I've ever been taught about teaching and learning working best when the student is actively engaged in the process — and especially when the student has to struggle for mastery.

I recognise that the low information density of Spanish means that it is spoken much more quickly than English. But I can't help but think that many native speakers would struggle to parse some of the longest and most complicated sentences in the Glossika recordings.

It often feels like the speaker is swallowing half the phonemes in a desperate attempt to finish the sentence in an artificially short amount of time.

Or, maybe, it's just another case of my English brain needing to separate the parts of speech by stress and pause, because I'm not sensitive enough to the inflections of case, gender and conjugation?

Possessive Pronouns

I did a translation exercise on posessive pronouns and was pretty disppointed with my effort.

I got 100% of the pronoun forms correct. But on four occasions, I included a definite article where one wasn't called for.

The impulse to include the article may be partially attributable to negative language transfer from Italian, but there's definitely more to it than that.

I'm certain that there's some aspect of 'the rules' about when to include or omit the article that I haven't fully understood or embedded.

Another wrinkle that needs more ironing.

Por vs. Para and Ser vs. Estar

I think that I've almost got these distinctions 'down pat'. But, I ended up practicising both today, largely by accident. They just happened to feature in the next two Language Transfer recordings that I worked with.

Despite being fairly confident about my understanding of these distinctions, I was glad of the opportunity to practise them. For several reasons:

Memory needs continual refreshment — until it's absolutely stuck
A sliver of doubt remains — idiomatic uses, alien conceptions of state
Getting them right builds motivation

The latter is very important, because few disciplines exhibit the degree of systemic governance with idomatic variation that languages do.

So, even if you've accumulated a great deal of knowledge about how languages in general work, when you learn a new language you constantly and unnavoidably make lots of errors.

Progressing to mastery of any discipline involves some unpicking of 'beginner knowledge', but rarely does it throw up the degree of doubt I feel over every utterance in a new language.

Every morcel of evidence that I am making some progress, is a priceless defence against that constant barrage of self-doubt.

Verbs that follow prepositions

Are always in the inifinitive — without exception.

Typically equating to the English gerund '-ing', but occasionally to the English infinitive.

I did 12 questions on this topic, with no errors on using the inifinitive, but three slip-ups on whether the inifinite itself should be followed by a preposition — I missed out one that was required, added one that was not, and omitted one definite article

Mirar dentro del cartón
Sobre usar ordenadores — I had 'sobre de usar'
Jugar al golf

The second case is probably attributable to negative language transfer from English and Italian. The third is simply ignorance of the idiom — I correctly included the definite article with 'la leche'.

Is there some category rule that embraces golf and milk — e.g. indivisibility?

Learning Tasks Checklist

Task	M	T	W	T	F
Word/phrase aural+oral	✓	✓	✓	✕	✓
Sentence aural+oral	✓	✓	✕	✕	✓
Socratic aural+oral	✓	✓	✕	✕	✓
Verb exercises	✓	✓	✕	✕	✓
Pronoun exercises	✓	✓	✕	✕	✓
Preposition exercises	✓	✓	✓	✕	✓
Reading	✓	✓	✕	✕	✕
Physical exercise	✕	✕	✕	✕	✕
Non-subbed video	✓	✕	✓	✕	✕
Subbed video	✓	✕	✓	✓	✓
Research lang. learning	✕	✕	✓	✕	✕
List 'issues'	✓	✓	✕	✕	✕
Prepare materials	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓