This evening was the first meeting of the 6-week intermediate Spanish class I am taking at the local Adult School. I feel ambivalent about it -- I wonder if it's going to teach me anything I don't already know. Probably not -- what I really need is practice speaking and listening, and most of what I'm going to get in that class will be reading aloud, on a much lower level than what I already know how to read aloud. What I ought to be doing is having conversations with Spanish speakers I know -- this is where I run into the root problem, which is that I'm just generally not a very talkative guy. I was wondering this evening whether the deep longing I've always felt to learn to speak new languages is not at root a longing just to be better at speaking, to have words come more readily, to feel like I have interesting things to say.
posted evening of Tuesday, March third, 2009
Look around for a language exchange group. That's a group that gets together to practice speaking each other's languages. One caution: you may want to be careful picking your group; Spaniards are much more informal in their speech than Latin Americans.
posted evening of March 4th, 2009 by Randolph
Thanks; that sounds like a good idea. Any idea where I would find such a thing? Just by Googling "Language exchange"?
posted morning of March 5th, 2009 by Jeremy
Readin.com shows almost every day and many times a day you have interesting things to say!
If you want to try some spanish you can say hi to me on gtalk! ;)
About Spaniards: it varies according which Spain region are they coming from, but in general it can be quite hard even for other spanish speakers to understand them! Between latin americans there are differences as well. For example argentinians include some variations in verb conjugation even in written form. Chileans do it as well, but basically in informal conversations.
posted afternoon of March 5th, 2009 by Jorge López
Thanks Jorge; the distinction here is between writing and speaking -- I have trouble coming up with what I want to say in conversation, it's a different matter when I'm here on the blog and have a long time to compose my thoughts. I may take you up on the invitation to chat -- quick writing is sort of a middle ground between slow writing and conversation.
posted afternoon of March 5th, 2009 by Jeremy
Try Google on "language exchange ". Or ask at your local library.
Interesting, Jorge. I suppose it's like England, where there are many more English dialects found than elsewhere in the world. My interpreter girlfriend tells me that to be a serious student of Latin American Spanish one must also know at least one native language.
posted evening of March 5th, 2009 by Randolph
Ooops! That was supposed to be "language exchange <your city here>".
posted evening of March 5th, 2009 by Randolph
Thanks -- I'm finding a number of web sites, but they seem to be oriented more towards pen pal exchange than towards conversation. I think I'll check in at the library -- I have several books that are due so I need to get over there pretty soon.
posted evening of March 5th, 2009 by Jeremy
