Anyone learning Spanish

ahelg · Jun 22, 2006

I'll answer in English as I don't have time to work it all out in Spanish.

The reason I'm fluent in English is because I'm bilingual. My father is from Norway and my mother is from England. Esperanto is a hobby of mine and I'm a board member of the Norwegian Young Esperantist Asociation, but I can understand Esperanto much better than I can speak it. I was a bit iffy about being a board member due to the fact that I'm not fluent but the other board members agreed that the important thing was that I wanted to spread the word and get others interested. Basicly help inform people about Esperanto, just as long as I'm willing to learn. I must say, it was pretty stupid of me to say kion instead av kiel. Even I should have spotted that a mile off.

Also as you can tell, my Spanish isn't anything to boast about, but I'm hoping that it will be soon. I'm spending two weeks doing an intensive spanish course in Valencia and if I can get a job and get enough money together by next summer I'm hoping to spend a month there. Also my plan for my future is that once I've done my national service I'll work for a year in a shop or something like that and then spend six months or more at one of Don Quijotes schools in Spain somewhere. I'd like to do Madrid, but it's to early to decide that.

P.S. I have dyslexia and so there are no doubt spelling mistakes all over my text. I can't really tell.

ahelg · Jun 22, 2006

Well I got my card today but I don't know if I dare buy a domain name using it. I just signed up with paypal and I agreed to have $1.95 detucted from my account to have it varified and guess what. They charged me over $30. So I immidietly removed my card from paypal and sent a complaint.

ahelg · Jun 22, 2006

Well turns out it was my own fault about the money. Apparently Norwegian debit cards cost 100 nok for every transaction to a foreign bank and I need to wait for my credit card to arrive before doing anything, so I might as well just link to my forum in it's current state.

www.vision-park.net/spanishforum/

Hope to see some of you there, and lets hope no one buys the domain I want and holds it to ransome.

Oldfireguy · Jun 22, 2006

LaFoto I'm impressed!

I will be in Mexico July 8-24 working and taking photos. Why don't you meet me and 40 others in San Diego and you can come down with us. Put that Spanish to work. I'll even take you to the best taco stand on the Baja.

Unimaxium · Jun 22, 2006

That's really cool that you're doing a program in Valencia. I did something really similar with the Don Quijote school in Granada for 4 weeks last summer. Although I must admit, it was nowhere near as intensive as I expected it to be.

And yes, you're right that llamar means to call, both in the sense of to call by name as well as in the sense of to call on the telephone (i.e. llamar por teléfono). ;-)

PS: I had a Norwegian in my class at Donquijote, and now I'm discussing spanish with another Norwegian. Small world, eh? lol :lol:

ahelg · Jun 23, 2006

How much did you feel that you learnt during those 4 weeks? I was originally thinking about doing three weeks but I didn't have time to save up enough money.

LaFoto · Jun 23, 2006

When I did Spanish over 20 years ago, I suddenly arrived at a point where I thought "I'll never learn this. Never ever!"
That was when I decided I would need to go to one of those summer schools. I went to the south coast of Andalucia, La Costa del Sol. I took a 4-week course for advanced speakers and must say I learned quite a lot.
In the end, however, it was not the school and only the school that helped me get some kind of self-assurance and fluency in my Spanish, but the fact that I was THERE. In the country. Surrounded by Spanish speaking people. (The Spanish down there was not AT ONCE recognisable as Spanish to me, but I got used to their accent after a while, though there were SOME people I met who I haven't understood until the very end). It was the people I met OUTSIDE the school, in the coffee and tapas bars, and who I became friends with, who "taught" me to speak it in the end.
I have returned four times after that, privately, no longer booking a course in that school (but never again in the past 18 years), and have found that being there for a prolonged period of time is THE means to learn the language. (After that comes reading in the language, though I have neglected THAT aspect, too, in the past very many years, so my Spanish is in the process of getting lost ... when I read, I read in English. Unfortunately NOT in Spanish

).

spako · Jun 23, 2006

I took Spanish in Highschool for 4 years, and I got along really bad!
We had 3 oral exams we had to take for graduation and we had the right to choose which languages we would pick. Our Spanish teacher gave us the opportunity to have some try-outs to test our capacities, and after 4 years of Spanish I was there talking just like markc explained earlier.

I wanted to talk about myself but kept conjugating the verbs in the third person...
I think I really got confused :blushing::blushing::blushing:... In the end the teacher just said he would think it would be better if I wouldn't go for Spanish in the exam... So I took my exam in English, French and German an it went well...

The next year I had to take portuguese classes to become a teacher (we have many portuguese people living in Luxemburg).. At first I just thought "OH no!!! I'll never get along but in the end I was really surprised because I ended up getting along really well because of the little knowledge I already had in spanish...

LaFoto · Jun 23, 2006

I might add that "a Paco" (replace name by whichever suits you best) also helps tremendously to improve your foreign language skills when you are in the country ...