Author
Bill Ferguson |
Spanish Teaching Resources Getting good quality teaching and resources
The information I am going to share is an honest account of what I have tried over the past year and my opinions are just that. . opinions. I will share my likes and dislikes, what works for me and what doesn't. This is a personal experience, I am not an expert but if you share my ambition of learning to communicate in a third, foreign language, then maybe we can help each other along the way.
Getting good quality teaching and resources is vital to success: encouraged by an influential book by Harry Ferber I now view language acquisition as a military campaign, I need to use my resources efficiently to overcome all resistance, I need to capture vocabulary and not let it escape. I need to wear down the opposition by attacking daily and not allowing it time to regroup. I need to learn the predictable tricks that the new language will play on me and be ready for them (this means learning grammar). Like any military campaign good quality intelligence is vital.
Learning a Third Language My current ambition is to be able to communicate comfortably in English, French and Spanish. I began to study Spanish in 2008. I have been a student of French, on and off, for about 30 years and up to last year ....read more Strategic Planning When I started to think about taking on a third language I realised I had two main worries: firstly I didn't want to lose my second language ...read more Fear of Losing French As I see it there is a simple choice ....read more |
22 July 2010
Google Translate is a free Google service that translates between dozens of languages. It is quick and occasionally excellent. I use it sometimes like a dictionary – type in a word choose your source and target language and up comes the translation just like a real dictionary.
Mostly I use it to check that what I have written in French or Spanish is understandable by translating it to English. I do this routinely with email replies. Recently a French friend sent me a video clip showing celebrities with and without make up. In my reply I wanted to say that my wife never goes out without her lipstick. The mistake I made was to assume the Spanish verb to go out, "salir" was the same in French. Luckily, the translator reminded me that the French verb to go out, is "sortir". In French salir means "to dirty".
A good combination is to use Google translate to check your meaning and Word spellcheck for the grammar and punctuation.
22 July 2010
It’s late July and suddenly the end of L140 is in sight. The 4th TMA is due in 4 weeks time then soon after is the end of course assessment – an essay and a telephone interview. And that’s it. I think I’ve reached the end of the line with OU for now. The next course is more demanding, 15 hours a week! In my experience when OU says 15 hours/week, it means 15 hours to read and do the material if you already know it, or are blessed with a photographic memory, otherwise you can safely double that estimate.
So I need to fall back on my original principles:
- study stuff that is interesting
- do something each day
- make it fun
12 July 2010
Two tips to share with my fellow students:
The first is mnemosyne, the second is get a monolingual dictionary.
Thanks to Tim Ferris for the link that introduced me to mnemosyne. It’s a piece of free software that acts like a study companion – every day it throws questions at you and you get to grade your replies so that the stuff you know well doesn’t come up too often and the stuff you hardly know hits you over and over until you remember it. Here is the link
Here is a screenshot:
Screenshot – Mnemosyne Software |
When you answer the prompt you are invited to click a number from 0 to 5 depending on how easy it was. Click 0 if you didn’t have a clue, 5 if you know it intimately. It’s a painless way of drilling vocabulary. You make your own lists or import other people’s, and you can modify to your heart’s content.
The second tip is linked to the first. You don’t want to spend precious time learning phrases and words that might be wrong. Buy a monolingual dictionary (I bought Salamanca, about £40 from Amazon) and use it to find good sample phrases that you can type into mnemosyne. A useful tip is to search words that you already know and see what examples it gives.
Someone asked me how I knew which phrases to save into mnemosyne. I think you just know instinctively if a phrase or word is going to be useful. Choose examples that you can easily imagine yourself saying to someone. And choose examples that make good templates where you can easily change one word 50 times to make 50 new sentences, for example in Spanish: ¿Qué tipo de XYZ tiene? or in French Qu’est-ce que vous avez comme XYZ? are well worth learning; just swap XYZ for whatever interests you.
25 May 2010
I want to share a technique that I have been experimenting with, I first came across it on Dr Maltz’s Psychocybernetics course.
This unusual method for improving any skill was described by Maxwell Maltz as "Theatre of the Mind". He developed it into a course on sales techniques but it can be applied to mentally practising speaking in public to an individual, a group or even a large audience, using the power of your imagination.
Sit quietly with your eyes closed. Maltz suggests that you imagine a theatre where you can perform on stage and rehearse your performance, perhaps giving a talk in French or Spanish to an eagerly receptive audience about a topic you are familiar with. The beauty of this approach is that you are in charge of every aspect of your imaginary performance, you can rewind, go into slow motion, overwrite as often as you want until it is exactly as you want it. Then strangely the skill and confidence from your mental rehearsals will start to bleed through into your everyday reality. You will find yourself confidently using the words and phrases that you have rehearsed without even trying.
The method is not limited to theatre performances, imagine yourself in a sports stadium practising your football skills, or in a gym reaching a personal best on your favourite machine, or on the golf course or tennis court, playing the perfect shot over and over again, or better still imagine yourself in a social situation confidently speaking beautifully fluent Spanish.
Don’t just take my word for it – try it for yourself. As an experiment I suggest trying it for 10 minutes every day for a couple of weeks and then you will have some idea of the power of this method.
3 May 2010
If you have ever studied with the OU (Open University) you will know what I mean. The TMA (tutor marked assignment) is something that is capable of reducing a sensible, mature adult to tears of grief, rage or frustration.
| SECTION 1 STUDENT INFORMATION |
SECTION 2 TUTOR INFORMATION |
| Name |
|
| Address |
|
| OUCU |
|
| EMail |
|
Personal
Identifier |
|
Sent By
Student |
01-Apr-2010 |
| Course |
L140 Feb 10 |
TMA No. |
02 |
|
| Tutor’s Name |
|
| Tutor’s Number |
|
| Appointing Region |
|
| Date Returned |
29-Apr-2010 |
|
| Question Grades/Scores |
Overall
Grade/Score |
| 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
235 |
| 90 |
70 |
75 |
The psychology of the OU is very clever. Like any successful cult it lures you in by being nice, you see the potential, if you only do one or two little things, to gain a big reward. So you follow the trail of crumbs more and more intently, quite enjoying the cycle of small effort and reward until suddenly the TMA hits you. The System is in your face demanding that you prove yourself worthy by completing a task. No more Mr Nice Guy! Nit-picking purists will pull your assignment to pieces. They will subtract marks ruthlessly at the slightest excuse, sometimes telling you nicely where you went wrong, and you can see the post mortem when your computer spits out the results sometime after the cut-off date.
If you do well it feels good and you carry on until the next one, and next time because you want to do well again, the pressure is greater. If you did poorly, the pressure is on to make up for it by doing well next time. Either way the pressure grows and you find yourself taking more and more time to study until eventually the Course dominates your life.
So that is the reason I haven’t posted here for a few weeks
5 April 2010
It’s been a month since the new satellite dish was installed and I am still very happy with it. The station I watch most is TVE but when they revert to old movies I go first to TV Canarias then TV Madrid. Canarias has programmes about cooking, local politics, games shows and quite a lot of wrestling. The wrestling might be a seasonal sport I’m not sure yet, it happens outdoors inside a sandpit arena, the audience are in tiered seating around the arena and there are groups of musicians who play during the bouts. It reminds me of Thai boxing where the musicians encourage the fighters by playing uplifting music.
TV Madrid has a lot of talking heads and a few game shows, one of them involves the contestants answering questions then we see them singing (usually very self-consciously) on a recording. The quizmaster is a professional extrovert who keeps breaking into song, joined by the audience (well primed), sometimes he even sings the questions. Good tacky fun.
I still use the TVE website, radio nacional and classical are good background and I am wading through Aguila Roja, I am up to capitulo 12, it’s like Robin Hood with more angst and more cleavage – and lots of sword fighting.
Update on Open University – I’ve just sent in my second TMA, two weeks ahead of the deadline which is a relief. The coursework is getting harder now, we are meeting lots of new vocabulary and moving from imperativo to preterito tense ready for the next assignment.
Maintaining French – this is becoming more of a worry, I have almost stopped watching french TV and reading french newspapers, mainly due to lack of time but I have started translating some of my internal dialogues into both spanish and french. If I didn’t have to work full time I am sure this wouldn’t be such a problem.
1 March 2010
My new satellite system was installed on Friday and it’s wonderful. I thought I might get half a dozen or so Spanish stations but I can actually get 14 and there may be more that I haven’t found yet.
The installation went smoothly, the guys from Challenge TV in Tenterden, Kent, did a great job – have a look at the photo sequence to see what was involved.
Challenge TV, Tenterden, arrive to install a new satellite system to pick up Hispasat at 30 °W and Astra at 19.2°E with a motorised dish. |
The old satellite Sky dish used to pick up Hotbird and Intelsat but since they went mainly digital it hasn’t been much use |
They inspect the old satellite dish, it was about 15 years old and rusty and needed replacing |
The old satellite dish comes down |
The old satellite dish and the new dish – the old dish was 80cm the new one is 78cm |
New satellite dish with its motorised unit |
Fixing the mount for the new satellite dish. This was the skilful part – the mount had to be vertical so that the presets on the motor line up with the right parts of the sky |
The new satellite dish installed and now ready to test. We all watched the satellite dish move when a different satellite was selected from the TV |
The new satellite decoder (SatCatcher Voyager). This is the clever bit that converts the signal into TV language. It can cope with 3000 channels according to the box |
For those of you who are technical minded the satellites I can recieve are:
HOTBIRD
TURK1C
ASTRA 1
HISPASAT
INTELSAT 10
THOR 2,3
ASTRA 2A, 2B, 2D
EUROBIRD 1
There may be more to come but so far I have found these Spanish channels:
TVEi
Canarias
Galicia
Extremadura
Madrid
Andalucia
Telesur
Popular
CNC
Vit
TBN
RTPA int
Aragon
EHS
Overall I am delighted with the choice of stations, I feel like a kid in a toyshop, I don’t know what to play with first.
22 February 2010
At last all my heavy hints for the ideal birthday present have paid off, the installation is planned for Friday. After suffering Eurosat as my only Spanish TV channel for the last six months we are upgrading to a motorised dish that should be able to pick up at least a couple of European satellites including Hispasat 30°W and Astra 19.2°E and maybe half a dozen or so Spanish channels. I am looking forward to the breakfast show on TVE to accompany my bacon and egg in the mornings. More details to follow…
26 January 2010
This is one of my “must watch” weekly programmes. I used to watch it on television but now that TVE has gone from Sky I watch it on my PC.
It is a half hour news and human interest show aimed at the hard of hearing, all the dialogue is at normal speed, texted simultaneously and presented with signing. I find the combination of speech and text very helpful, after a year of learning Spanish I find I can understand three times as much written as spoken and this is a great way to break into what my OU course calls “the wall of sound”.
Being online and recorded means you can use the pause and rewind buttons while you look up unfamiliar words and write down useful phrases. I’ve included a couple of screen shots to show what I mean.
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Sreen Shots of En Lengua de Signos
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26 January 2010
I’m getting started on the L140 Open University course, one of the suggestions is that students arrange some conversation practice with native Spanish speakers. No problem you might think. I put out lots of feelers but so far I haven’t found anyone to practice with, so I started looking for conversation classes.
According to Wikipedia, Spanish is the 2nd most widely spoken language in the world. You wouldn’t think so if you lived in Kent. I have been trying unsuccessfully, to find a Spanish conversation class for the past few days, today I got through to a very helpful person at KAE (Kent Adult Education) who looked through their database on my behalf and confirmed what I thought – there are currently no Spanish conversation classes run by KAE in the entire county. I knew that foreign languages were having a hard time but I didn’t realise just how bad things were.
Maybe my comments on KAE were more apocryphal than I realised at the time (http://thirdlanguage.co.uk/adult-education/local-authority-adult-education-classes/ ), perhaps the bureaucracy has worn down the teachers and the hard-to-navigate website has put off enough potential students so the classes have withered and died.
I haven’t given up yet, there is a possible lead I am following. I will write more when I know more.
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