YESTERDAY I RAN to the library with a pocket full of pound coins ~ because they CHARGE for language courses ~ and got out two from-scratch ones in Spanish. I was looking for one that would take me as far as possible and foolishly picked an outsized Berlitz 4-CD one with outsized blown-plastic moulding and two flimsy books that could be reprinted on the amount of paper that would fit in a cigarette packet. In other words hardly anything is explained properly.
The other, a CD-only Teach Yourself Spanish Conversation is excellent as you never have to refer to any booklet (in fact I think there was one, but it is no more and the man at the desk, who looked like he yodelled in lederhosen in his spare hand, was far more indignant than I, who would suffer more from its loss.Frustrated by the lack of grammatical explanation in Berlitz, I've now changed it for Routledge Colloquial ~ only 2 CDs but a nice fat explanatory textbook (I'm such a swot). Incidentally these loans cost £2 a time ~ now isn't that taking the peepee? On the other hand it's good because it keeps them on the shelves for people who actually want to use them, which is something, I suppose...
My Mum got me a bargain-basement CD-player (called a Tesco Value Boombox ~ that wording alone is classic). I had been saving the moment of unwrapping until I had something new to play on it. O man! I couldn't believe it! 
Even though this was the cheapest budget CD player-cum-AM/FM radio you could get, it was more beautifully designed than almost any other small electrical item I've ever come across. It could barely have been any funkier if when you punched PLAY and the CD started to whirr and prattle una habitación individual por favor... etc a rainbow of mouse-sized miniature donkeys didn't irridesce from the speakers in a blaze of stardust and take to clopping round the CD-closed lid in hoof-waving formation.I am having lots of fun with the Spanish language and have no inhibitions about yelling out things like "I want another hire car that doesn't smell of sick!" in those "listen and repeat" exercises ~ in the stately language of Cervantes and Lorca. I'm polishing up the most ridiculously posh Castillian accent I possibly can muster ~ lots of lispy Ss and Cs and B and V pronounced the same... por fabor, theñorita! Probably sounding like I've had too much BINO...
Before I fell asleep last night I had a go on the AM radio and was amazed to get a jabbering 20 to the dozen channel in German on medium-wave with elementary Spanish lessons bleeding in on the side... what kind of cosmic coincidence is that??!?In the end I got fed up with interference in my ear all night and so set the Spanish dialogues on play. This is supposed to embed the language deep in the subconscious. What I can say is I dreamed of old donkeys pulling carts up narrow alleys of the old town...
Illustrated top and bottom you see the Andalucian clifftop village of Rhonda ~ yeah man I've been there. The clifftop is inland and so the soaring town walls go plummetting down to ordinary farmland... quite an amazing place... like a location from a dream...
11 comments:
I want to learn Spanish - I did take a couple courses years ago but have forgotten most of it now.
Gleddy,
I, too, love to over-enunciate and shout Spanish responses. What fun!
Tons of love,
SB
Gled, I never learned Spanish. There is a lot spoken in this area. I like the clifftop village. You will be multi-multi-lingual. Good for you.
Gleds, you must come join my latest un-social network. Well I suppose you don't HAVE TO....but it would be awfully sweet if you did. Just one more thing I've come up with to waste time and keep me from doing anything REALLY productive haha. It's 'The junky underground' badge in my sidebar...
Oh and that pic of the twins isn't from a fashion shoot, it's from the movie "Brothers of the Head" an excellent movie too, if you like that sort of thing. Which I do.
Spanish as well as German - well done you!
Some years ago we learned Turkish before going on holiday. We only learned enough to speak a little but understood more - the locals were very impressed.
We went to Rhonda in February - it's amazing!
Gleds the CD tutorials are quite good. Clare learned 'passable' spanish from them and ended up working in Spain for six weeks before coming home last year. Keep it up . . does the subliminal thing really work?
Jeannie: that should be quite easy in the USA... After all, with 30,000,000 speakers or more, you ought never to be too far away from one..!
SB: it's the only way langauge CDs can be done. And you know that!!
Syd: oo aye. I could never handle being a monoglot. I would kill myself. Also I cannot stand being spoken-over. For that reason alone, aged about 7 I decided I would learn "foreign" and never be left out of a conversation ever again... (THAT didn't quite happen...)
Melody: Righty ho I'm off there in a sec... Have a look at Una Paloma Blanca (Wednesday) BTW...
Akemalamu: Rhonda is indeed fantastical, isn't it. Good on yer for learning Turkish.
I once learned holiday Thai: e.g. "WHY is that so expensive?? Usually I pay just 500 baht..!" Then went to Goa, India!!
Baino: I hope to too, but the first (Berlitz) one, though it had 4 CDs barely took you anywhere. You're only allowed 2 courses at a time, so I exchanged it for a far more "literary" one, with written exercises and the like. I do hope to be able to write SOMETHING afterwards, you know... Also a lot of the words ARE like English but not quite the ones you might expect, e.g. "una habitacion individual" means "a single room". Not that you'd ever in 1000000 years think of approaching a hotel desk anywhere in the English-speaking world and saying "an individual habitation, please..."!!
BAINO: THE last bit of your comment got lopped off by this eejut computer: subliminal ~ I think it will. I'm sure I'll learn more Spanish with it than without..!!!!
You are very clever, gledwood. Much too much brain to waste your life so get on with that Spanish learning, and you can show us all around when we come to visit you in your empire. Spain seems a more likely place to be able to make money than Vienna or Berlin.
I love libraries but for some reason very rarely get there these days. But they are such a treat: all those books and for free!
Domesticated cats on the whole haven't improved much over their wildcat relatives. (I do like cats but they can be so vicious unexpectedly.)
Awesome :-)
aye ~ another place I really really wanna go ~ but have yet to set foot on any of these ~ is the Canary Isles
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