Spanish Week 3
I’m about to start week 3 of my Spanish course. My subjective impressions is that I’m learning a lot faster than when I learned (for a loose definition of “learned”) French a number of years ago. Even accounting for spending a lot more hours per week on the course, I still seem to be developing some comfort with the language more quickly. Some of that might be that Spanish is simply easier than French for an Anglophone to pick up. It might also help that learning is a lot more concentrated and there’s less time to forget between lessons. And it most definitely helps than I’m in the middle of a city where few people speak English, and even those who do are generally happy to put up with my pidgin Spanish.
One thing I have noticed is that it’s really helpful to start with speaking and listening, and completely omit reading and writing. This is something my first French course did that my Spanish course is not doing, and it shows. Reading text, even in a very predictably pronounced language like Spanish, tends to distract from the actual sounds of the language. Using pictures and sounds, but no letters, really helps to associate the words in my brain. Reading and writing is the easy part. I can almost do that on my own. Speaking and especially comprehending spoken language is much more difficult. In French I eventually achieved a comfortable B2 level of reading and writing, but in spoken communication I’m more like an A1, if I’m generous. So with Spanish I’m trying to prioritize real audio comprehension and natural fluency.
Like a lot of programmers and classics majors (and I’m both of those) I am very, very good at gaming systems and processing rules very quickly. I can conjugate verbs with the best of them. However, using these skills to take shortcuts doesn’t necessarily lead to true fluency, as I learned with French. I have to force myself not to use this as a crutch to get by if I want to really learn the language.
All the Latin and Greek I learned, especially Latin, are incredibly helpful for Romance language vocabulary, but they are exactly wrong for learning to genuinely communicate in another tongue. They were almost exclusively about translating the most formal texts into English by following rules, with maybe a little original composition thrown in on the side. But it really is a different mental process from learning a true living language. Most scholars I know today who claim to be fluent in Greek couldn’t begin to operate on the streets of modern day Athens, or the Athens of Socrates. (With the notable exception of scholars who actually come from modern day Greece or Greek-speaking families of course.)
Also if you’d like to know a little about why we have such trouble listening to foreign languages.
