Comments for Third Language Blog

Comment on Fear of Losing French by Bill Ferguson

Bill Ferguson — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:50:46 +0000

Hi Charmian

I have the same problem. I was talking to some French friends recently and every so often I would notice a blank expression appear on their faces and realise that I had lapsed into Spanish. It doesn’t happen so much the other way unless it’s a word or phrase that I know without thinking from French.

I recently bought a French/Spanish dictionary and started looking up words that I know well and use a lot in one language to see what they are in the other language. It seems to me that there are trigger words or phrases that make you switch tracks and it should be possible to neutralise them by learning their equivalents equally well.

Some of my common triggers are siempre/toujours, il faut/hay que, il y a/hay and no matter how hard I try the odd oui or si tends to pop out at the wrong time.

If you are into NLP techniques you could try using a visual method to separate the two languages. Without being too analytical ask yourself the question “where does French live?” your eyes and or attention will want to go in one direction. If you want to stay in French mode in future, keep glancing in that direction.

I just tried that exercise with each of my languages: English took up the whole of my front view about 160 deg, French was slightly left of centre maybe 5 deg wide and Spanish slightly right of centre and slightly wider than French. Let me know if that works for you …

Comment on Fear of Losing French by Charmian

Charmian — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:59:24 +0000

Hi Bill
I realise you posted this some time back, but am just wondering how you are getting on with learning your third language, because I am having real difficulties. My first language is English, my second Spanish (I have lived in Spain for over 20 years and I have a very high level) and a couple of months back I decided to brush up my schoolgirl French by enrolling in the Institut Français here in Madrid. The problem is that I totally block when speaking (no problem with writing) French, I mix French with Spanish if I do manage to get a sentence out and sometimes even find myself wondering which language “las” belongs to. I have been told that this is because my brain has organised languages into “native” (English) and “non-native” (all other languages)….
Many thanks for listening,
From a very frustrated third-language learner!
Charmian

Comment on Reading Spanish novels with Kindle 3 by Bill Ferguson

Bill Ferguson — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 07:46:51 +0000

Hi Bernd
The Kindle 3 only lets you use one dictionary at a time but you can easily switch between dictionaries using the menu to select whichever one you want. Maybe in the future there will be automatic language recognition but its not available yet for Kindle 3 (as far as I know).

Comment on Reading Spanish novels with Kindle 3 by Bernd Waltman

Bernd Waltman — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 18:59:41 +0000

Hi Bill,

I’m about to order a Kindle 3 in the US. At the moment I’m living in Spain (I’m from The Netherlands) and want to use the Kindle 3 for both Spanish & English literature. Do you know whether it’s possible to download the Spanish dictionary and use both the Spanish as the original dictionary at the same time or do I have to change the settings whenever I’m going to read a book in another language?

Comment on Open University: learning a foreign language – is the OU better than evening classes by Bill Ferguson

Bill Ferguson — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 17:51:36 +0000

The reason I parted company with OU is that the courses became too academic for me after the second level. I found this for French (L120) and for Spanish (L194/140).

If your objective is to become a language teacher or professional linguist then the higher level courses would be ideal. I suppose what I really wanted is not “Open University” but “Open Polytechnic” where the emphasis would be more on practical communication skills rather than theoretical details. After L140/120 the workload doubles. So having followed two 30 point courses in two years, the prospect of taking a 60 point course with more academic rigour and only online tutorials, and a compulsory summer school, was a big turn-off for me.

I have always found that when the OU say that you need to study “X” hours a week that is an underestimate. If you already know the material that is how long it will take you to cover the exercises and tasks that they set for you. It does not include learning time (unless you are blessed with a photographic memory – which I am not).

Compared to evening classes/adult ed, the OU is going to make you work much harder and achieve a lot more in a relatively short time. However you will not have so many opportunities to practice speaking, face to face, with a teacher. In my last year of OU (L140 in 2010) the majority of tutorials were online using “Eluminate” which I found pretty useless and frustrating. The trend seems to be towards more online tutorials and fewer classroom experiences.

I have continued to study Spanish, first at level 7 (Conversational) with Adult Ed and currently with a private tutor, once a week. And I am grateful to the OU for getting me jump started, to go from nothing to this level in 2 years exceeded my expectations but as you will see from my blog I did a few other things as well that helped my progress.

So in summary, I am a big fan of OU. They provide good value for money and give you a solid foundation in your chosen language at basic/intermediate level. Be warned it will take over your life if you let it, and it can drive you to tears of frustration at its worst. It’s worth it though if you want to be good at your languages.

Bill

Comment on Forgetting a language by Josemaria

Josemaria — Thu, 26 May 2011 05:27:47 +0000

I do think it’s important to learn more about other languages. In our school, we had required units in Spanish. There was a documentary I once saw, on I think, the Discovery Channel, stating learning more than two languages is actually beneficial to the brain. But at the same time, it’s also quite easy to be attached to a language which like you’ve pointed out, connected to you emotionally.

Comment on Reading Spanish novels with Kindle 3 by Ronald Howard

Ronald Howard — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:29:25 +0000

I, too, use the Kindle 3g extensively for language learning, however; instead of a bilingual dictionary- I use a monolingual dictionary. The Larousse Spanish for kindle dictionary has over 100,000 entries and recognizes conjugated verbs. I also use the Priberam Portuguese dictionary, which is of similar high quality to the Larousse, when reading in Portuguese. I find that I learn more whilst staying in the language whenever possible. I am at an advanced level in Spanish and at a basic level in Portuguese, though I find my knowledge of Spanish helps me a lot with Portuguese.

What a joy it is to simply move the cursor to the left of a word and have the definition pop up!

I also download audiobooks from librivox.org and gather the e-text for the books (all public domain). I then convert the e-text into mobi format with the free and open source Calibre program and put it on my kindle. I then listen and read using my built-in dictionary for help when I need it. Yeah, the kindle is a bit clunky to use with audio but for $138 it is a fantastic resource that I use everyday both indoors and outdoors.

Calibre is a great way to download news and blogs and view them at your leisure on your kindle for free.

Comment on Reading Spanish novels with Kindle 3 by Bill Ferguson

Bill Ferguson — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 09:15:31 +0000

Hi Tom
As far as I know this works for all Kindle Spanish books and anything you can get onto the Kindle as a text file. The dictionary lives on the Kindle and all you need to do to look up a translation is to move the cursor to the left of the word. It is very good for simple nouns and verbs, if there are enclitic pronouns on the verb it doesn’t do so well. It also doesn’t do combinations, for example “quiero decir” would not be translated as “I mean”, it would only pick up the word to the right of the cursor; so it would translate “quiero” as I want and you would have to move the cursor to translate “decir”. So, no it is not perfect but overall I find it very useful, it probably gets 80% or more of the words I look up. And for a freebie I have no complaints. The file size is 6.22Mb which is not much out of the 3Gb available on the Kindle. You can always remove it if you decide after a while that you don’t like it, or if something better comes along.

Comment on Reading Spanish novels with Kindle 3 by tom strotman

tom strotman — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 22:31:41 +0000

Does this work for every Spanish book or just for a few books? Gitana is an easy word, will it also find more complicated words? How big is the dictionary to which these books are hyper-linked?

Comment on The Theatre of the Mind by Bill Ferguson

Bill Ferguson — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:12:41 +0000

Yes, the original book was my first encounter with psychocybernetics. I bought the audio version more recently and I find it suits me better to listen, than to read.

Please let me know how you get on with the technique.

Bill