Archive for the ‘spanish’ tag
Mi progreso en español
Finalmente siento que estoy listo para escribir mi primer artículo en español en este blog. Hace casi dos años que he estado practicando español y cada día me gusta mas. Es un placer ver como despacio pero con seguridad mi nivel de idioma mejora y profundiza.
Desde el primer día cuando empecé conocer el español he tenido observaciones interesantes sobre esta lengua. El primero es que todos los aspectos de español que no existan en inglés, existan in ruso y ucranio que yo hablo como lenguas maternas. Y todo que puede parecer extranjero para gente ruso y ucranio, es común para anglohablantes. Lo que sobrentiendo son las cosas como conjugaciones de verbos y géneros de sustantivos que presentan un obstáculo difícil para estudiantes de español cuyo idioma materna es inglés. Por el otro lado los aspectos como artículos y presente pasado son las cosas que producen problemas grandes para estudiantes rusos y ucranios. Así que pienso que tengo muchísima suerte de poder hablar ruso, ucranio y inglés antes de empezar estudiar español.
The Simplest Way to Conjugate Spanish Verbs
I came up with an elegant solution to conjugate a Spanish verb in seconds using Firefox. Here’s how.
As you maybe know there is a wonderful resource for learners of Spanish out there called SpanishDict. They have a section on the site where you can type in infinitive and get complete conjugation tables for any verb. This is not rarity on the web of course, but the format they have is particularly convenient and clear, at least for me.
To make things simple I use Firefox where I create a bookmark:
Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks > New Bookmark
Then I enter following into the fields:
- Name: Conjugate Spanish Verb
- Location: http://www.spanishdict.com/conjugate/%s
- Keyword: con
Now all I have to do whenever I need to conjugate a Spanish verb in Firefox is following:
- Press Ctrl+T to open a new tab
- Type “con escribir” and voilà!
Past Summer Experiences
This year’s summer proved to be very exiting. A lot of bright and positive things have happened to me both externally and inside my head. I’m happy to say that I remained loyal to all of my self-development commitments.
Indeed, I have continued to swim, exercise and do yoga regularly. I’ve done quite a bit of reading and language learning. I still practice playing guitar and roller-skating. And what is the most important here is that all these activities keep bringing me more and more pleasure and satisfaction. I even started to think of myself as a self-development addict.
My traveler’s outlook was enriched by unexpected journey to the entertainment capital of the world Las Vegas in the middle of July and wonderful trip to the heart of Europe — Czech Republic in late August where I fulfilled two of my biggest dreams at once — visited Prague and attended live Radiohead concert.
There were many things that I discovered, found to be of great use and loved during the summer.
First I will recall my findings in the area of Spanish language. As I wrote before I currently learn Spanish using only materials targeted to English speakers. I already had been listening to several podcasts aimed to teach the basics of Spanish when I accidentally came across very good audio materials based on Michel Tomas’ method of language learning. During one month I listened to four audiobooks called “Foundation Spanish”, “Spanish Advanced”, “Spanish Language Builder” and “Spanish Vocabulary” course. I’ve found those audiobooks really effective and I believe that I now have no problems with most of typical tenses and grammar constructions.
Language Learning Advices
I am really happy to be born in Ukraine. This gives me a huge advantage over any American, Englishman, Frenchman or German. You may wonder what possible advantage there may be. Well, my answer to that would be that we learn two of the most complicated European languages in early childhood — Ukrainian and Russian.
Then in school and university we learn some English which is rapidly becoming vital for everyone willing to get a well-paid job in this country. So by the age of 22 years majority of educated young people have at least some command of three languages.
Certainly, in every other country they have foreign languages as a part of standard curriculums as well. But the structure and grammar of Slavic languages is much more complicated than that of German and Roman.
It’s so entertaining to see explanations written for English-speaking learners of Spanish about nouns that have genders (”el libro” vs. “la vez”) or different verb endings for different persons (”yo hablo” for “I speak” but “usted habla” for “you speak”). We Slavic people understand this momentarily because it’s nothing compared to dozens of cases with different spelling and pronunciation which every Russian or Ukrainian word may take.
Nonetheless English proficiency is of vital importance to learn any other language. This is not only because there is the biggest amount of books and quality materials available in English, but also because English is the most straightforward and flexible tool for any kind of explanatory stuff. I honestly tried to use Russian materials for learning Spanish in the beginning and it proved to be no more than 5% as effective as using English ones.
Emergency Spanish Grammar
What a thing I’ve just discovered! It’s a brief reference of Spanish grammar in tables called “Emergency Spanish Grammar“. I was thinking about writing such a thing for myself but now I have one. It’s only 8 pages long but very well assembled. Take a look if you’re interested in topic. I’m gonna print it and stick to a wall in my apartment so that I finally learn all that tricky verb endings.
