So at the end of my first day of my experiment to learn Spanish for free how do I feel?

Well certainly overwhelmed at the vast amount of resources that there are out there on the internet and definitely a little frustrated at myself for wasting quite a bit of time.  I have pretty much had all day today to get a good start on learning to speak Spanish and despite doing lots of things (ok it was just surfing) I don't seemed to have made as much progress as I would have liked or indeed think is possible.

Once I did get a bit focussed I did learn some Spanish.  I did a bit of research prior to starting this project to look for some free learn Spanish Audio programs and there are quite a few out there, some really good and some really lousy ones.  All well intentioned but nevertheless a well intentioned idiot is still an idiot.  Fortunately I discovered the podcasts of edufone from Jade LIndquist and her team.  This is a commercial site to learn spanish but they offer some really good free podcasts.  You can get them from a variety of places including itunes.

The episode I chose today was called Bebidas – drinks.

I really liked the format and this episode was presented by Jade, an American and her Mexican colleague Carla.  They had a nice approach, very easy to listen to and a general tone that had a supportive and encouraging feel to it and this was the format they presented in:

1.    They gave the vocabulary for the episode giving the English followed by the Spanish translation spoken three times.
2.    They then worked through the dialogue in English and Spanish with the Spanish bit once again spoken 3 times
3.    The dialogue was then repeated but this time only in Spanish.
4.    Carla and Jade then had a discussion about some of the points that came out of the dialogue and highlighted some important grammatical points
5.    The listener was then tested on the vocabulary – Carla spoke the Spanish word or phrase and I had to translate that before Jade gave the English version.
6.    Then the dialogue was repeated in Spanish.

I really liked the pace and tone of the approach and thought that the content was valuable and the approach to delivering it was professional and had many accelerated learning principles in mind.

So on a general level here are just some of the valuable overview type stuff that I got from the listenings:

•   In Spanish nouns take a gender – either masculine or feminine (although Jade mentioned that there are rare exceptions which are neuter) – but so does the adjective associated with them.  For example the word “drink” has its own gender but if you say “favourite drink” in Spanish then the word for “favourite” must end  in the form that matches the gender of “drink”
•  The word order is also different in Spanish.  For example in English would say:

  My favourite drink

In Spanish the word order is:

My drink favourite

Another difference in word order is when questions are asked because the order of the verb and subject is reversed.  Unfortunately the lovely Jade and Carla only mentioned this in passing and used an English question example and then gave the Spanish equivalent.  As I didn’t understand what any of the words meant, I am still none the wiser.  However I shall be on the lookout for that in the future.  Edufone do sell transcripts of the podcasts with all the vocabulary and they are very reasonably priced.  However as my challenge is to learn Spanish for free I won't be buying them (however if Jade you ever get to read this, a free copy would be appreciated .

• In Spanish there is a formal and an informal way of speaking to people.  The informal way tends to use the word “tu” (need to check the spelling here) and is for people you know really well, family, young children.  The formal used the word “usted” for you and is used when addressing strangers, older people or those in positions of authority.  Verb endings are affected by whichever form is used.  The advice given by the girls was always default to “usted” – the formal version – to avoid possibly offending someone until invited to do otherwise.  Understanding the etiquette is important for effective communication.  This did raise another question about grammar – do you study it explicitly or do you just absorb it and learn to use the differences as they arise? (I am certainly not going to go there at this early stage in my linguistic career but I do have my thoughts on that ….later perhaps)
• There are differences between Spain Spanish and Latin American Spanish.  I wonder if this is like the relationship between English and American-English where different words are used eg trash/rubbish, hood/bonnet, etc

So listening to this lesson is highly recommended and I am certainly going to explore the other podcasts in the series.

But today wasn't just about learning Spanish for free.  In listening to the first podcast Iso I could really understand what was being said and grasp the pronunciation, I either had to replay the lesson over and over again or I had to learn to rewind my ipod.  I have had the ipod for a little over a year now and have used it many times but never before today had I worked out how to rewind within a track.  Now I have a 60GB video ipod and I knew the facility to rewind was there because I accidentally stumbled on it in the past turning a Lynard Skynard live version of Free Bird into a sampled rap.  However I had no idea how to do it again.

So I spent 10- minutes or so prodding a variety of combinations of the ipods controls until something different happened.  If you have one of these ipods you probably already know how to do it but if you haven’t, or don’t know then all you do is press the inner button at the 9 O’clock position to change the display slightly (it has a different icon on the track progress bar) and then use the tracker wheel to glide the icon on the progress bar to wherever in the track you want it to go.

Now I have realised that I do need to focus and in addition to the edufone podcasts I am going to work on how to  Learn Spanish From the BBC by using the very impressive resources they have there.  There is a very good introductory program with videos, audios and interactive exercises that is then backed up by an equally good intermediate program.

Another good resource that is proving very useful is the online  translation facility offered by Alta Vista.  Here you can translate words and phrases from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish.  If you want to see how good it is, simply go to a Spanish language website, copy a block of text and translate it.  You will see that it does do quite a good job.  I understand that there will be a 80-90% accuracy so don't rely on it to be perfect but it will help you with basic words and phrases.  There are other translation tools out there and you can find out more about them by getting your own copy of the full list of the resources I have used and will be using, together with a review and overview of each one.  You can also get a free copy of a very comprehensive written Spanish Program too that I am also using.

So see you tomorrow.