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Showing posts with label The Spanish project. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Spanish project. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Spanish versus Korean

En français
So I have been learning Spanish for a while now, or should I say, I have been trying to learn Spanish.
What I'm mostly doing is using pimsleur, (when I don't forgot) and reading from the travel blog ¿Donde andan estos?. At the beginning of course I tried to implement a Spanish environment by listening to Spanish music, watching movies in Spanish but as much as I wanted to do it, keeping the Spanish environment turned out to be more difficult than expected. Each time that I was starting to do something in Spanish, I wanted to do it in Korean instead.
Having my Korean environment on is something absolutely natural for me. I can switch it to Japanese without problem when I'm studying my kanjis or decide to watch Japanese cartoon. I also don't have that much problem to switch it to Chinese. But with the Spanish for some bizarre reasons, that completely different. I can watch a movie and listen to some music, without too much problems but after a while that becomes kind of painful and stressful. I think the reason is that I'm not that much into it.

Reading the blog in Spanish is easy. I'm not saying that I understand everything, I'm saying that with my background in French, Italian and Latin, understanding most of it is really easy. That should make me happy but at the contrary I find it extremely frustrating. The words are so close to the one I'm used to, the sentence structure as well, but I don't remember those words as Spanish words, I remember the translation. It's like my mind is translating everything all the time. I don't really feel that I'm learning something.
And now I realize how important that feeling is. That's probably what keep me going with the Korean environment and the kanji repetitions, that sense of achievement when I finally, (accidentally ?) understand a sentence or remember a kanji without struggling.
With the Spanish I didn't feel anything like that yet. Maybe I need to be more Spanish, to have more fun in Spanish. It's a bit of a conflict between something that I really like and enjoy, learning Korean, because I completely felt in love with that language sometimes ago for no particular reasons and Spanish that I'm learning a bit because I feel that I have too.
Getting ride of my Korean even for a short time to do some Spanish feels more like a core than like something really helpful.
I'll keep on trying, we'll see how it goes in the future.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

New Challenge : Spanish

En français
I always feel like I would have to learn Spanish one day out of necessity. Well that day have come, on the 21st of November I'm going to Peru for holiday.
So the new challenge is to learn as much Spanish as humanly possible or to have enough Spanish skills to be able to communicate with the local population.
I also want to work a great deal on this challenge before the beginning of November as I will have an other challenges starting on the 1st of that month (see detail later).
So I'll try to update how it goes regularly (difficulties and such).





















Here is the list of my Spanish material for beginning:

-Pimsleur Spanish (3 months)
-FSI language course (basis and programmatic) available here
-A very old Spanish text book from my father
-Almodóvar's movies : Volver, Todo sobre mi madre
-Other movie : El Laberinto del Fauno, Nueve Reinas, L'auberge Espagnole (but that one contains a lot of -French and English)
-Music : Mano Negra, Manu Chao, Ska P (5.36h worth, minus the english song I'll find in it for sure)
-A small French-Spanish dictionary
and of course everything I can find on the web such as this interesting blog ¿Donde andan estos?

Spanish is probably the only language I never intented to learn for some reasons, so that's quite limited but that's probably going to be enough for the next month and a half.