Mostly I use it to [...]]]> 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.

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 [...]]]> 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.

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 [...]]]> 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.

New Psycho-Cybernetics by Dr Maltz and Dan Kennedy

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 [...]]]>

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.

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 [...]]]> 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.

Sreen Shots of En Lengua de Signos

According to Wikipedia, Spanish [...]]]> 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.