I was challenged to learn a new language for the first time in school. As our education system requires, every student should learn two foreign languages. Depending on the school, the students were learning English and French (as mine did) some of them English and German, and some of them English and Italian. I loved English (can’t say the same about French)!!! I tried hard to learn it. Believe me, this was a challenge in a class with 30 students and only one teacher! I learned mostly from books, reading and writing… and surprise, when the moment came to talk in English, I couldn’t find my words!!! Did you have the same problem? I know many friends who had the same experience. Some of them learned English with a dictionary and phrase books, and some of them joined English classes. Few of them became fluent in the new language fast, but most of us… we were trying and trying really hard. After many years, moving to India, I was forced to learn Hindi. A difficult language!!! Different sounds, different script, and once again learning from books did not work. I’ve tried for some time, and reached a beginner level. I was able to survive, but I wasn’t content because of the inability to share my deep feelings and experiences with my Indian friends. Miscommunication due to the lack of language knowledge made life really difficult sometimes. In that moment I learnt about OnSite Language Services, an immersion language learning program which helps English/Spanish speaking people to learn Hindi/Urdu and other Indian languages. Its motto is “Immerse to Converse”, because they believe that immersion is the best way to learn a new language. The principles of OSLS are natural, and yet I haven’t thought about them! Let’s learn as children do! What does it mean? Children learn through their everyday experience not through lessons; they acquire language which they need to use; they speak before they write and read. Through OSLS you become a child again; you learn to listen to the new language and to speak before you read or write. This does not mean that writing or reading is neglected, but the program concentrates on speaking. Being a community based language learning program, the students learn the new language mostly out in the community with natives or in private sessions with a language helper. This makes the relationships easy to build and learning culture a natural process. Of course, learning requires sweat, frustration and… humility: to recognize that you don’t know everything, to accept that people will laugh at you and to persist in having embarrassing language contacts. So, what did I learn from my language learning experience? I learned… how to learn! I learned that immersion language learning is the most efficient method to learn a new language… as long as you work hard!!!
Posts Tagged ‘English Spanish’
Learn a New Language by Immerging Into a New Culture
December 22nd, 2009Easy Spanish
December 18th, 2009Everyone who is starting out learning the language looks for some easy Spanish to try and get to grips with it. Often they are amazed to discover that it can be a lot easier that they ever imagined.
Spanish and English share common roots with Latin in particular, and to a lesser degree, Greek as well. This means that many of the words simply need a different ending from English to become Spanish – and they will mean exactly the same thing too! Does that sound like easy Spanish? It does and it is.
Take “plastic,” for example. That word becomes “plastico” in Spanish. Well, you wanted easy Spanish, and it surely can’t get any easier than this. When English-speaking people think about learning Spanish they start to see it as one big problem. No hay problema, and if you can’t work out what that Spanish phrase means, then you do have one.
The best way to get to grips with easy Spanish is to learn all the easy words first. The grammar is a little different, but that will follow naturally. Take the phrase mentioned above: “no hay problema. ” It literally means, “not there is problem. ” It won’t take long for anyone to adjust to this way of thinking and make that, “there’s no problem,” its English equivalent. ”
However, let’s stick with the easy Spanish words first. It’s the endings that change in many cases, and it tends to be a regular thing too. As in the example of “plastic” becoming “plastico,” many other words ending in “ic” change to “ico” in Spanish. Clásico, cómico, histérico, metódico, técnico are all examples where you should have little difficulty in guessing what the English equivalent terms are.
It’s not just the “ic” ending words either. Easy Spanish get’s even easier when you bring in all the other groups, such as “abundant” becoming “abundante” in Spanish, “monument” becomes “monumento,” “pianist” becomes “pianista,” “indication” becomes “indicación,” “patent” becomes “patente,” “religious” becomes “religioso. ”
There are even better ones too. Easy Spanish can be very easy at times. How do you spell, “central”? You spell it quite simply as, “central. ” The pronunciation is different from the English (you emphasize the “a” and not the “n”), but it’s delightfully similar and certainly a good example of easy Spanish.
There are others too. Examples include words like, “animal,” “noble,” “admirable,” and “director. ” Usually these kind of words have the same meaning as in English, but sometimes they are a little bit different. The English word, “conductor” applied to a person usually conjures up a picture of someone leading an orchestra. In Spanish it means the driver of a car or other vehicle.
Sometimes easy Spanish needs a little bit of lateral thinking. A car is “coche” in Spanish. You may think at first glance that it’s nothing like the English, but think back to the days of highwaymen roaming the English countryside looking to hold up a coach. Coaches were the cars of those days, and the Spanish word, “coche” is just the modern equivalent.
There certainly are Spanish words that bear no resemblance to their English counterparts, but that’s to be expected; otherwise they would be the same language. Easy Spanish certainly exists, and it’s easy to learn too. Go on, try it!
