Has anyone ever tried...
 

Has anyone ever tried learning French or Spanish on their own?! What was your experience and what was the method - what results were you able to achieve and how long did you stay committed?!

I am trying to learn spanish right now. Its tough. I am getting there. I use google translator on my phone a lot and listen to lots of music in spanish. A lot of its reallly good too! I am sitting in my car right now listening to ximena sarinana singing in spanish. It helps to have a lot of friends who are from mexico as well as a lot.of.customer who are willing to teach me whenever they come in. I am also going to start watching spanish television. I have been working on this for months and i have a long ways to go. Good luck with your endeavors.

I did Spanish and used Pimsleur. As opposed to Ro$$etta Stone this is a very inexpensive way to see if you are condusive to learning by this method (like $10). 30 minute sessions on 4 CD's - did it on the morning drive time. They sent me Vietnamese CD's the first time:D I called and they quickly sent the Spanish out and told me to keep others - if anyone needs Vietnamese language CD's I am your guy.

He utilizado cintas de casete mientras viaja. He escuchado a ellos constantemente. Es sólo mediante persistencia que usted va a ganar.

They still make cassettes?

That sounds good... did you buy it on-line?! I wonder if you could put these lessons from a CD onto an iPod?

Marrying a beautiful and young mail order bride from Peru, and staying with her for 10+ years is beyond the shadow of a doubt, the most EXPENSIVE way that there is, to do it.

On MANY levels.


Don't do it.

Trust me on this.

No me tomes el pelo.

If you want to just try it, you might see what's available from your public library.

Our public library also allows us access to a limited assortment of eAudiobooks from NetLibrary. When I last checked, some of the Pimsleur material was available to us that way. No joy for Mac or iPod users, though, if I recall correctly.

I would not look to marry outside my culture - for many reasons.

You guys will be undestood despite your errors. The issue is: whether or not "making your way" in the language is what you want, vice learning it to the level of proficiency required to do something more complex, like write a one-page repair instruction from scratch.

You want be guy who find toilet?

Or do you want to acquire a command of the language?


You won' be able to get to choice #2 without a lot of interaction with educated natives who can explain to you why they say what they say.

Most Americans never learned enough grammar to explain why we say things the way we do, and it's not often taught outside of specialized courses, so most people have the proficiency level needed to succeed as far as they have gotten.

This is a brief reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Proficiency_Tests

I have taken a gazillion DLPTs and was a Test Control Officer in the 1980s-90s.

The curriculum of DLI is pretty good in most cases, although always focused on practical things and specialized military/peacekeeping terms, once you get beyond the basic course.

Very good training in medical terminology and tech terms.

Parlez-vous pamplemousse?

De veras. Born bilingual, I taught English as a Second Language for many years. Language acquisition begins prior to birth and continues until about pre-teen years. Believe it or not you learned over 80% of the english you now possess prior to the age of 12. During this time, the brain is actually hard wiring itself for language. The more a child is exposed to spoken language, the more neural pathways are created. At a certain point in development this process stops. This is why a person may be exposed to a foreign language as a young child and speak it fairly fluently, forget it as he gets older, and then later in life find himself in a situation where he needs to use the language and be surprised how quickly it comes back. That's because those neural pathways are still in there, waiting. Vocabulary may be lacking, but the basic structure of the language will come back fairly fast as well as pronunciation. In college I had a girlfriend who had lived as a toddler in the Phillipines and according to her mother had spoken spanish and english equally well. We went to spend the summer in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. She enrolled in a language class at the local college and was essentially fluent by the end of the summer. She did not remember speaking spanish as a child.
Unfortunately, learning language as an older person is much harder. My kindergarten thru 3rd grade kids from Mexico and central America would pick up english incredibly fast, but the 7th and 8th graders who came in from southern Mexico and had no exposure to english had a terrible time. Basically, anyone adolescent or older has to rely on memory rather than the childhood language acquisition facilities of the immature brain. You gotta use it, all the time in order to get that vocabulary and structure into long term memory. Be immersed. Listening to tapes may work for the exceptional individual but not for most. A three or 4 month stay in an immersion program in Mexico, Central America, France or Spain would be the hot ticket. The languages do not directly translate. Forget college courses. They are not geared towards conversation and are about as useless as high school courses. You didn't learn english by filling in correctly conjugated verbs in blanks on a workbook page. Whatever you can do that most closely imitates immersion will get you there the fastest. There is a system of books and if I remember correctly tapes produced by an author named Margarita Madrigal. I don't know if they're still in production but they are geared towards conversation and break the language down into pretty simple systems that will give you a jump start. You might want to look them up. I have copies of and have used Rosetta Stone english version with older spanish speakers and it has not proven worth the money. If you have spanish speaking friends, have them speak spanish to you all the time WITHOUT translation. YOU figure out what they're saying. Use context clues. Watch the novelas on Telemundo or Univision, NOT sports. Watch the news on those same networks. Music and songs can wait. Song lyrics are highly idiomatic, often slang and will only confuse you at the outset. There's no magic bullet that will give you another language, you've got to combine as many sources as you can and immerse yourself as often as you can over a fairly long time if you can't arrange some kind of intensive immersion in a foreign country. Buena suerte!

The year of college Spanish almost ended college for me. My zeal died in that classroom, and it boiled down to getting the piece of paper and getting OUT, ASAP.

I am with a native Spanish speaker. I think my cats know more Spanish than I do. We go to Spain every newyears and it's remarkable how much I understand. Signs are very very easy to read and in normal conversation I understand about 1/2 of it. I don't know specifics but I know what is being talked about. It sorta dawns on you what is being said... think about too much and your lost. Sit back and listen and it comes to you. I watch Simpson's and family guy in spanish everytime we are there lol. Actually spongebob in Spanish is a riot.

Then there is late night Spanish TV....... Full blown sex on public tv :eek:
Makes you not want to come back to the US.


I need some rosetta stone for sure.