Is it worth me continuing my Spanish studies...?!

huesped   Sun Mar 02, 2008 4:13 am GMT
My point is that you can't really say that French is anymore useful than Spanish and other big languages because they are all useful, but in a limited way when compared to English which is truely international.
Mitch   Sun Mar 02, 2008 5:06 am GMT
Back to the original topic:

There are many examples from antimoon threads (not just Tom and Michal) of successful learners, who used "comprensible input"--and consistency--as their means to fluency:

Just a couple of examples, both from 2007:

My friend speaks English like a native speaker. He never visited any English speaking country. Absolutely fluent. Never stumbles for words. He is 23 years old. I have asked about his method.

He does these things almost on a daily basis.

1. Listen to BBC for 30 minutes daily.
2. Watch two movies a week.
3. Read out loud newspaper articles for 30 minutes daily.

He does not spend so much time on learning the language yet he speaks the language fluently like a native speaker. Spending one hour per day daily is nada or sometimes 2-3 hours a day when he watches movies.

That's what he does but he does it regularly.


and:

I speak english like a native speaker, and I can also understand 100% of the dialogues of movies like "Boyz 'n the hood" and stuff, I can recognize the different regional accents and I swear to <insert supernatural almighty powerful entity you believe in here>, I never, never, NEVER touched a single page of an english grammar book in my whole life. oh, and just for the record, I never visited an english-speaking country in my whole life either and nobody in my family speaks english.

They key is input, input, input from everywhere. Your mind should become a searchlight, continuously scanning for new words, different contextual meanings, confirmations of already-consolidated constructs and so on.

My take on this is that if you "force" it, you will never get it. Languages should not be "studied". They are a mindset, a different way of thinking which should be absorbed through exposure to continuous, variegated and interesting material. It is not necessary to stay in the country as long as you have access to the same material available to the natives of that country, something that it is even easier now thanks to the web. When I was a kid I learned my first english sentences from Bugs Bunny so... go figure.
Xie   Sun Mar 02, 2008 6:35 am GMT
Mitch:

You said you don't read a grammar book, but how do you master rules before you know them? By this I mean you seem to be understanding a new chunk of English, a word, phrase, or sentence, without relying on explicit explanations.

English: I'm 20 years old.
German: Ich bin 20 Jahre alt. (I am 20 year old)
French: J'ai 20 ans. (I've 20 [year of age]; to have, not to be)
Chinese: 我二十歲。(I 20 [year of age]; no explicit verbs needed)

How do you understand a new message - do you just rely on clues (a young person in a movie who says this) or translations (given above)? While I won't certainly want to learn any language with a hardcore grammar (like in the boring classroom), I do see the point of having a little grammar manual beside your desk, when I do want to look into some linguistic details. How do you make sure that you can be filtering every single ungrammatical utterance, esp. even before you learn a grammatical counterpart, and thus not fossilizing something you might later find to be a mistake?

Even given my present knowledge of English, I find it rather difficult to filter ungrammatical stuff since virtually everybody makes loads of mistakes every day. As you'd probably understand, not doing anything about this would result in garbage in, garbage out.
Guest   Sun Mar 02, 2008 12:23 pm GMT
<< Do you pretend us to believe that it's better to have many non native French speakers in Africa than true Spanish native speakers? Those 150 millions of non natives are mostly the African inhabitants of former French colonies, not people who learn French as a second language in the first world. Spanish instead has native speakers in Americas, so French loses again. >>

That only proves that Spanish is undesirable. Most of its foreign speakers are in the US but outside non-existent. That's it's not an international language and those variants will declare linguistic independence from Castellano. Remember that there are strong anti Spanish feelings in hispanic America especially in Venezuela. That's they pronounce Y as Enflish J as in "Jo" instead of "Yo" and "Ehpañol" instead of "Español".
bill   Sun Mar 09, 2008 7:16 am GMT
"I've been learning Spanish for 8 years now and have failed in a spectacular fashion. I really wanted to speak it at a native like level (some of my family are native speakers). While I have a very extensive vocabulary, sadly it has been learnt in school via hundreds of vocabulary lists, as such I use a lot of words in the wrong context. I learnt the grammar out of textbooks and have to think of it when I speak."


You're story sounds like that of a typical American. Most Americans complete foreign language requirements in school for this long (middle school, high school, college), and can not speak a word...or speak very poorly.

Although you may have started studing spanish 8 years ago, you most likely have not studied spanish consistently for 8 years time, so don't beat yourself up about that.
mac   Sun Mar 09, 2008 10:32 am GMT
<< That only proves that Spanish is undesirable. >>

How exactly?

<<Most of its foreign speakers are in the US but outside non-existent. >>

Yes, it is the most popular in the US, but the US is a very large and quite important country as far as global influence goes. Don't forget about Brazil either as Spanish is not uncommon there. Although English, French and German are more studied in Europe, Spanish comes next, and that's not too bad.

The thing is that Spanish doesn't need to depend large numbers of foreign speakers to be relevant. Unlike French with much less native speakers, it depends on having many students/2nd speakers, a factor that is more vulnerable to change.

<< That's it's not an international language >>

Some say that French is international, but that doesn't mean much nowadays considering that English is dominate and the only true international language. All other big languages are semi-international or regional when compared to English.


<< and those variants will declare linguistic independence from Castellano. Remember that there are strong anti Spanish feelings in hispanic America especially in Venezuela. That's they pronounce Y as Enflish J as in "Jo" instead of "Yo" and "Ehpañol" instead of "Español". >>

That's funny becuase as a non-native Spanish speaker, I have found little trouble speaking with people in Latin America or Spain. My friends from different LA countries have absolutely no trouble speaking with each other and those that have been to Spain said they have no difficulty.

OMG! They say Yo like Jo...sorry but that isn't a big deal. Minor differences in pronunciations and accents can be found in any big language. Instead, you might want to worry about French getting butchered in Africa.

Adios.