Alioth's Journal: Aventuras en castellano

I've arrived at a point in learning Spanish which is at times very exciting, and then immediately enormously frustrating and/or confusing.

Since I'm going to RetroEuskal in July and I'm going to have to actually talk to people, I've upped the intensity of my study a great deal - mainly the spoken word. Reading now is easy. What makes reading easy is when you spot a word you don't know, you just put it in WordReference (which rocks, by the way, if you're on the lookout for a good multilingual dictionary - http://www.wordreference.com/ - and it also has good monolingual dictionaries at least for English and Spanish). But you just can't do that with the spoken word. When you read, you can just stop, take some time figuring out the bits you don't understand, and start again. If you're listening to the radio or watching TV - miss it, and it's gone. Also it's much harder to listen - I find the quality of the sound greatly affects how easily I can understand something (of course, this is true of your native language, but it's much easier to infer the missing words in your native language).

I've been listening to an episode of SpanishPodcast (http://www.spanishpodcast.org) in the morning. Typically these are 30 minutes long, and consist of Spanish being taught in Spanish - because of this I find them very valuable.

I also watch an hour of TV every day. The Spanish public service broadcaster (http://rtve.es) has a lot of their TV output available on demand "TVE a la carta" and it's not restricted to Spain. I have found a really interesting series called "Redes", in which the presenter, Eduard Punset, interviews researchers and philosophers on many interesting subjects - health, the universe, how the brain works, all interesting subjects to a geek. I can understand this particular TV programme almost entirely. In fact about two weeks ago I realised I was just understanding it without needing to think about it. It was an amazing feeling. (And all the episodes are available on Eduard Punset's website - http://www.eduardpunset.es )

But then I watched an episode of some crime fiction show, and for the entire 70 minute show (there's no advertising) I think I understood one sentence and that was it. It was incredibly disheartening after being able to effortlessly understand an episode of Redes. I actually understood the drama - unlike a TV programme on a technical matter, in a drama much of the meaning is conveyed in body language and tone of voice - I was just missing all the detail. But due to the quality of the sound (noisy street scenes, telephones, people speaking fast in hushed voices, people speaking in an agitated manner) I simply couldn't catch any of the words even though I wager I would know 80% of them (or be able to figure them out from context) if I saw the transcript of the show. So frustrating.

One thing I have noticed is when native speakers are talking, they occasionally get genders wrong - they start off something like "Este -" stop, and correct - "Esta -". If native speakers do it occasionally, I don't feel so bad if I make that sort of mistake :-) I do have to wonder why the Romance languages never evolved a neuter gender though, English is far simpler in that respect.

For speaking practise, not having a native speaker to talk to, I just have to talk to myself in the house. I feel incredibly self-conscious despite there being no one apart from my cats to hear me! Something about talking to yourself being the first sign of madness (it's not the language, I feel very self conscious if I speak in English to myself at home!). I also joined Barrapunto.com (a Slashdot-like site in Spanish) and I've been writing a while on foro.speccy.org since writing will help me internalize what I've been learning about the grammar. So far people say I write very well, but what they don't realise is that I spend half an hour agonizing over the grammar after writing a message and going back and editing it :-) Again, writing is much easier than speaking. If I'm not sure a phrase is grammatically correct, I just type it in quotes into google.es. If I get loads of hits with people using the same phrase I can be pretty certain I got it right (as well as getting it right for the context). You can't do this if you're speaking, though...