Sweet Tea, No Lemon

In the lengthy time since my last blog post, I’ve been steadily improving as a Spanish student, mostly through reading and watching shows on DirecTV Más.

I was reading through some posts on one of my favorite American-Expatriates-in-Mexico sites (Falling in Love with San Miguel) when I came across a brief mention of a language learning resource called LiveMocha.  Wow!  I had no idea what I was missing out on.

LiveMocha is one of the most innovative uses I have yet seen of social networking on the Internet.  It is a vibrant community of people who are learning various languages, and the community knowledge is leveraged in a fascinating way.  I am a native English speaker learning Spanish, so as I progress through the lessons, my writing and speaking exercises are graded by Spanish speakers.  In return, I assess the progress of students who are learning English.  It’s brilliant!

The lessons themselves are really excellent, and I can tell this is going to jumpstart my learning process yet again.

It seems that language learning comes in steps up to a plateau, followed by a period of time where it seems like you are making no further progress.  I’m excited to feel the beginning of a new learning acceleration, fueled by this excellent new tool.

Head over to LiveMocha and check it out.  Feel free to send me a friend request.  I am registered there as KenSmith.

Several years back, I bought Barron’s “Mastering Spanish” volume 1, which included a book and 12 audio cassettes.  It’s a good program, and I learned a lot from it.  I now know that this product is merely a commercial repackaging of the government-funded FSI Spanish Basic Course.

Great news!  This course is now in the public domain, and some volunteers have begun the process of making the entire course available for free download.

The Spanish course is available here:FSI Spanish Courses

The entire workbooks for Basic Spanish I and Basic Spanish II are available as PDF files, and so far, 9 of the 15 units in Basic Spanish I have MP3 files available.

There is a second FSI Spanish course, called Spanish Programmatic Course, which is available in its entirety.

Check out their homepage to see the many other languages that are available:

http://www.fsi-language-courses.com

What a great resource!

I mentioned the entertaining Spanish travel show “Fuera de Serie” in a previous post.  At the time, I noted that closed captioning wasn’t available on the show.  However, the last few of these shows that I have recorded finally do have closed captioning.  If you’re using this show for practicing Spanish comprehension, check it out.

The show airs on the Galavision network, which is part of many satellite and cable providers channel lineup.  Currently, the schedule is 2 PM Central time, Monday through Friday.

Among the many Spanish language shows I’ve been watching lately (see my last post), one of the best is “Las Joyas de México”, or The Jewels of Mexico.  It’s a half-hour documentary about various sites in Mexico, airing on HITN-TV at 7 PM Central on Sundays.  There are repeats at other times as well.

HITN is DirecTV channel 438, and is also available on DishNetwork on channels 843 & 9401.  According to the HITN-TV website, some cable systems in major US cities carry the network as well.

Las Joyas de México features well-produced stories about interesting sites in Mexico, and I find the Spanish to be easier than most shows.  Unfortunately, there’s no closed captioning available, but I think most students of Spanish will be able to follow enough of the dialogue to make it worth tuning in.

The series has its own website, at http://www.lasjoyasdemexico.com, although it doesn’t have much information about the actual shows.

My normal DirecTV satellite TV package included a couple of Spanish language channels, Univision and Galavision.  However, I found that only a handful of shows on those two networks were interesting to me.  On a whim, I decided to head over to the DirecTV website and see what else I might could get.  They have a package called En Español, which adds 26 additional Spanish language networks to my choices.  (They say 33, but that includes some music channels and other items.)  At $19.95 extra per month, it’s not cheap, but I think I’ll keep it for a while.
Now I can actually find something interesting to watch while improving my language abilities.  Many shows are subtitled as well, so don’t forget that option.  My favorites so far are HITN, which shows a number of interesting shows, and EcuaVisa from Ecuador.  I’ve heard that Ecuadorian Spanish is among the easiest for non-native speakers to understand, and so far I’d have to agree.  They seem to speak a bit slower, and drop fewer letters from their words than other speakers.

CNN en Español is always a good choice, as is Discovery Channel Español.  Now my ReplayTV is chock full of Spanish language shows.  HITN also runs 2 episodes each Sunday of Destinos, a Spanish language instructional show.  The best part of all this Spanish TV is that I can really see the difference in my comprehension.  In my last exposure to Destinos, I was able to understand only bits and pieces, while now I can follow along with much of the dialogue.

Tomorrow night I’m hoping the skys will be clear, so I can pull out the scope for a rare treat. On Saturday and Sunday nights, just after dark, the planets Venus and Saturn will be close enough together in the sky (2/3 of a degree apart) to view them both at the same time through a telescope. Nice!

See more at the SkyAndTelescope.com site:
The Evening Star Greets the Ringed Planet

In recent weeks, I’ve been watching a lot of Spanish language TV, and I’ve found the process to be very helpful in my efforts to improve my Spanish comprehension. On History Channel International, they run a show called “El Canal de Historia” at 7 AM Eastern Monday-Friday. The shows are documentaries dubbed into Spanish. For example, this week I watched a biography of Cristobal Colón (Cristopher Columbus), and an episode of America’s Castles.

The shows feature a mix of Spanish only commentary with closed captions, and English language segments that feature Spanish subtitles. Both types of content are helpful to reading and listening comprehension. I’m also pausing the shows when I sense that an unknown word is common or particularly useful. At that point, I look up the word in my Spanish-English dictionary, and if I think the word is a useful addition to my vocabulary I make a quick flashcard for it and resume watching the show.

For flashcards, I’m using a tip I learned from the Learning Spanish podcasts I mentioned here recently. I went to Kinko’s and had them cut business card stock into blank business cards. They’re the perfect size and paper weight for homemade flashcards. I keep a stack of the resulting flashcards handy to use whenever I have a few minutes to spare.

The second show I want to mention comes from the Spanish language network Galavision. Check your schedule for “Fuera de Serie”, a half-hour show focusing on various travel destinations. Unfortunately, the show does not offer closed captioning, so it’s quite a challenge for me to understand much of what is being said. Still, the shows feature interesting destinations and it’s enjoyable to try to keep up. The title of the show, Fuera de Serie, translates roughly to “Out of the Ordinary”, though I’ve seen it translated elsewhere “Out of this World” or “Something Outrageous”.

I happened across some very nice San Miguel de Allende photos posted today over at TravelBlog. Click on the “more” caption under the first photo to open a window for easy navigation through the shots. For more photos, you can visit our travelogue from a 2004 trip to Guanajuato and San Miguel.

The bloggers, Carlos y Amber, also have posted photos and stories from several other parts of Mexico.

Students of Spanish may be interested in the these sites that I use for practicing my reading comprehension. I generally read at least one major news story from a Spanish language newspaper site each day. I visit each and try to pick a story I will find interesting.

• Mexico City’s largest newspaper: El Universal
• A newpaper from Guanajuato, in central Mexico: Correo
• A newspaper from Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, TX: El Diario

Here’s another useful resource for students of Spanish.

The UltraLingua Online Dictionary will let you look up English translations of Spanish words of course, but it also has a neat useful feature for helping you read entire webpages in Spanish. The site provides a “dictionary enabling” feature, where you provide a web address and the page loads with every word of the text as a clickable link which pops up the translation. This way, you can read as usual, but if you see an unfamiliar word, you can click on it for an immediate translation.

Existing hyperlinks are undisturbed, while the rest of the page gets transformed as described. My only complaint so far is that it appears to mangle non-English characters, such as letters with an accent over them in Spanish.

According to their terms, usage is free for light, casual use, but free use has a limit on the number of lookups per day, after which a subscription would be required.