¡Aprender español! (Y no me digas que dije eso mal.) I’ve been learning dozens to hundreds of words a day, using Supermemo. So far I’m at around 3200 items, (where common words have many items for different senses and idioms,) and still have a long way to go. But I think I’m at the point now where I can start practicing actually using the Spanish. When I was learning it in school (I’ve had about three years of classes, all told) I was always so frustrated by having an extremely limited vocabulary that I never enjoyed using what I’d learned, and of course I couldn’t understand a damn thing any native speaker said anyway. But by learning gobs and gobs of vocabulary using this great program, I think I’ll be able to get past that point easily now.
Oh, and how could I forget to mention WordReference, whose neato lookup will tell you if the word is a conjugated form of a verb, has a conjugation reference, and a fairly complete inventory of idioms? Pretty neato.
By this point I can actually say quite a bit, and even hold non-trivial, if limited, conversations with other intermediate learners. But when it comes to understanding the language spoken by native speakers, I’m still mystified. I can maybe catch 10-15% of the meaning on average, even though I know 80% of the words being used. ¡Qúe coñazo! So I plan to start reading a lot of Spanish, starting maybe with El Blog del Capi, which uses a lot of good varied and colorful non-specialist language, and is occasionally funny. Then maybe go to a bookstore at some point and pick out an easy read in Spanish, like maybe a Harry Potter translation. (If the bookstores here have anything in Spanish, they’d have that, right?) Once I get to where I’m only coming across unfamiliar words once every few hundred words or so, then maybe I’ll be good enough to start listening? And I guess I should learn the subjunctive mood at some point. And the future tense. And imperfect, and conditional, and the perfect moods. Yeah.
Damn, it takes a hell of a lot of memorizing to learn a language.
BTW, why is it that 95% of the most active blogs at es.wordpress.com are porn or warez or otherwise complete fluff? Oh well, I guess English blogs aren’t any different, I just haven’t had to look at “most popular” lists in forever.
Anyway, look for this blog to become Spanish language only in the near future.
