Alioth's Journal: Spanish: I can feel some progress...

So in my continued attempts to learn a human language, rather than a computer language, I've continued with Spanish.

What I do on my breaks at work, is read articles on es.wikipedia.org, and read BBC Mundo (the Spanish BBC website), and browse through WordReference (usually I keep a browser tab open on WordReference, because I frequently need to look up words in the first two things).

I'm also re-reading "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". Early on in the book, Richard Feynman makes the observation that technical and scientific documents in Portugese were easy to read, while he was learning that language, but everyday speech was almost impossible. I've observed the same thing about Spanish, too - I have little trouble understanding an article on something technical on the Spanish Wikipedia. In order of difficulty when reading, I've found it goes like this - Spanish Wikipedia technical subjects - apart from the odd sentence, I can almost completely understand. So many of the words are similar to English. BBC Mundo - much harder, although I can get the gist of many stories, and understand a few of the sentences without having to translate them to English first. Every day speech - I find extremely difficult. Many things just don't have a good literal translation. Fortunately, WordReference contains many figures of speech and phrases when you look up a word.

I'm slowly getting to grips with all the grammatical glue of the language, but it's slow going. I think I'm probably best off doing a course at the college to learn the grammar properly.

Listening is by far the hardest, because if you don't grok most of the words, you're two or three sentences behind very quickly. However, tonight, I could pick out more words than ever when listening to the speech on the BBC Mundo videos that accompanied the news stories.

Anyway - some useful links:
WordReference - very useful for many languages! http://www.wordreference.com/
BBC Mundo - portada - http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/news/