Field Notes for Spanish Learners: The Method

My Method

Let's call it the Crispy Method. The main goal is to learn to speak, to learn conversation. Why?
Well, although I used to study languages for the intellectual satisfaction of it, I now view foreign languages as an interpersonal tool to derive greater enjoyment out of life. I love becoming friends with people from other countries, I love listening to unfamiliar music styles, and I love the challenge of mimicking a foreign accent as closely as possible. For me, speech is the most direct path to excitement when it comes to learning a foreign language.

I'll divide the method into its components:

Conversation
Notice that a small set of words and phrases are used over and over in everyday conversation. Listen attentively and try to identify them. Then, make it a game: deliberately insert colloquial words, phrases, and idioms into conversation every chance you get. For some Spanish examples, look at the "Castellano Phrasebook" post below.

You won't necessarily be able to identify these on your own; you may need the help of a native speaker, maybe even a speaker who speaks your language in addition to their own, to determine the exact meaning. I learned words like tipo and ponele ("like...") from a native speaker who explicitly pointed them out to me, and I only learned este ("um...") after directly asking my teacher Marisa what it meant.

Podcasts
Podcasts for learning a specific language are abundant. They're audio, which means you start developing your comprehension of the spoken language early on. And unlike programs like Pimsleur, they tend to use natural speech rather than stilted dialogues. Podcasts are also an easy way to pick up some extra vocabulary; I find that a few new words/phrases usually stick in my mind after listening. Finally, many high-quality podcasts are available for free.

Language Exchanges
In a language exchange, you meet with a partner and help each other practice a new language. For instance, as a native English speaker looking to improve my Spanish, I would seek a native Spanish speaker looking to improve their English. If you're unable to spend time abroad, you can do language exchanges over the internet using the program Skype and websites like Mixxer or MyLanguageExchange. If you can spend time abroad, I recommend joining CouchSurfing. CouchSurfing (CS) is primarily a hospitality organization, similar to Servas but with greater youth participation. As it turns out, many cities around the world have local groups open to all CS members; in Montevideo, the group meets every Thursday night to talk and mingle. In the Buenos Aires group, there's actually a whole page devoted to finding partners for language exchanges; whatever the local situation, CouchSurfing is a great medium to set them up.

Borrowing from various websites, here are a few things to keep in mind with language exchanges:

• Encourage your partner to correct your mistakes and suggest alternate ways to say things
• Be sure to resist the temptation to "generously" give up all your practice time. It's an exchange, so both partners should spend an equal time practicing the foreign language they're trying to learn

In fact, I've still barely explored the possibilities of language exchanges. As I wrote in my journal:

4/29/10
If I could have 3-4 different language exchanges going at once, like with Viki and her friends, I would learn so fast!

Flash Cards, Pocket Notepad
Barry Farber gives good tips on making flashcards in his book (see the post "How to Learn Any Language" below). They're really indispensable, but they can also be supplemented with a pocket notepad to jot down any new words or phrases as they come up in everyday life. Alternatively, you can carry around a supply of blank flashcards.

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Field Notes for Spanish Learners: Reflections

5/17/10
Crispy realization: my Spanish will only advance according to how hard I work.

5/18/10
1. I learn to understand Spanish faster than I learn to express myself in it
2. Gestures! It's such a cliché, but it's true: when people can't fully communicate, everyone starts waving their hands around and drawing pictures in the air
3. You become proficient with numbers very quickly, out of necessity
4. As you're immersed in Spanish, you start to be able to talk faster
5. A lot of what I say takes the form of comprehensible fragments, rather than complete sentences. For instance, subí vos, y después... ("you go up, and afterwards...") Context makes it clear that the missing fragment is ...yo bajo ("I'll go down")
6. The more you learn, the more you realize how brokenly you speak
7. Expanding your vocabulary is like decoding a cryptogram. First you learn a new word or phrase. Then it pops up later in conversation, and for the first time you recognize and understand it. With each decoded "letter" (that is, each new vocabulary item), you understand a little bit more of the cryptogram
8. As noted in point 5 above, I often speak in chunks separated by silent pauses. What you want instead is fluid speech connected by stalling words like tipo and o sea
9. In these first couple weeks in Córdoba, I notice the effects of immersion when I write an email: common phrases come to mind first in Spanish, and then I remember the English. For instance, first I think hasta luego and then I remember "see ya", because while I say hasta luego several times a day, I almost never say "see ya".
10. Speaking Spanish all the time is exhausting—I wasn't expecting that.

6/2/10
It's interesting that I still don't think in Spanish. It's not like I consciously translate when I speak. It's just that when I'm alone with my thoughts, those thoughts are in English. I wonder how long you have to live abroad before you start thinking in a foreign language?

6/3/10
What are my biggest weaknesses in Spanish?

1. Often don't complete my sentences. Choppy speech
2. Need to communicate key information faster. Get to the point
3. Have no method to ensure my skill steadily increases. Create a study plan
4. People rarely correct my blundering speech. Even when they do, I often don't remember the correction for long. I need someone to listen to me speak, stop me whenever I make a mistake, and suggest improvements. The best way to achieve this is a language exchange, where I could help someone with their English in exchange for critiquing my Spanish.
5. Translating from English, not thinking in Spanish. This leads to saying stuff like gracias, a vos también instead of gracias, igualmente (“thanks, you too”).

6/10/10
Other observations

1.When someone is speaking Spanish and they suddenly toss in a little English—for instance, the phrase "heavy metal"—there's a good chance I won't understand them unless their pronunciation is really perfect. It's just that I'm not expecting to hear English, so it catches me off-guard.
2. Whenever I'm on a computer, I tend to avoid websites in Spanish. It's like I hunker down at the computer to immerse myself for an hour or so in the familiarity of home and English, and I'm unwilling to let Spanish intrude on that. But really I should actively pursue websites in Spanish. Similarly, I tend to avoid answering the home phone for fear of screwing up. But in the future I should make a point of answering the phone every time, to practice extemporaneous speech.

That's the end of Field Notes for Spanish Learners. Hope some folks found these posts useful, and look out for more Field Notes posts in the future!

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Field Notes for Spanish Learners: Vocabulary

According to my notes, by late June I felt “functionally, conversationally fluent” in Spanish. "Fluent" doesn't mean "perfect" or "native-like." Instead, "functionally, conversationally fluent" suggests that I can be in any situation and talk my way through it. I might mess up and say stupid stuff, but I will definitely survive.

My Castellano phrasebook was motivated by the observation that spoken language is 70% responding to what other people say, and only 30% producing original speech. In a given conversation, therefore, you spend the majority of the time saying things like "Oh, great! Cool! OK, yeah... Of course..." To be a good conversationalist, you need to expand your stock of natural-sounding phrases. The phrasebook is a small attempt to do that.

There's still that 30% of the time, though, where you have to express your own ideas. To deal with those moments, you need to expand your vocabulary to cover more situations.

What's tough about producing original speech is, your vocabulary will have grown naturally in a few areas that get constant use when living in a foreign country:

House and home (words and phrases for eating, sleeping, cooking, throwing things out...)
Business (words and phrases for buying stuff, numbers...)
Asking directions (words and phrases to ask for help on the bus, in the street...)

To move one step closer toward the goal of approximating native speech, however, you'll need to put some effort into developing a couple more areas:

Filler or “pause” words (uh, I mean, you know, like...)
Vague adjectives that convey emotion (cool, nice, great, weird...)

To develop natural-sounding speech faster, first identify and then assimilate the little nonsense words that fill up so much of everyday speech in any language.

If you want to conduct business or give lectures in a foreign language, this approach won't be very useful. If instead you're looking to hang out with people and sound natural, I recommend you use it.

Now that you know what vocabulary you need, how do you learn it?

Make flash cards. It's a much better method than just writing up a long list of words to memorize. (Interestingly, flash cards don't seem to be all that widely familiar in Uruguay.)
I've always made my own flash cards by cutting up index cards, but since this is the 21st century, you might want to try SuperMemo, Vis-Ed (free), or VTrain ($25 but apparently very user-friendly), which you could use on your cellphone or computer.

Besides making flashcards, I also bought myself a little pocket notepad in Uruguay, which I always had on me so I could record new words and idioms as soon as they came up in conversation. This may have come across kind of strange, although sometimes I tried to be subtle by writing on my hand instead of whipping out a notepad all the time.

Don't be afraid to explicitly ask what a word means, whether you're listening or conversing.
Also, drawing from other language learning advice websites, I recommend increasing your vocabulary by reading texts that are slightly more challenging than you're comfortable with, as well as deliberately learning the most common words in the language first, using statistical lists like this one.

Appendix
6/14/10
I've noticed that vocabulary acquisition breaks down into a few categories.

1. Random words and phrases that inexplicably stick in your head
   (yuyo, "herb", pasarla bomba, "to have a blast")
2. Words and phrases you comprehend, but don't know well enough to use yourself (inodoro, "toilet")
3. Words and phrases you’ve noticed popping up a lot, but haven't figured out their exact meaning or proper usage (no más, "just"—as in "just take a seat")
4. Words you don’t even notice because you haven’t learned them yet; you are blissfully unaware of their presence

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Servas Youth Language Experience

I made this video for a Servas Youth conference in Seattle. It's pretty cheesy, but after all the time I put into making it, I can't just let it gather dust in my YouTube account.

The SYLE is a program of Servas Youth, where local Servas members volunteer to host an exchange student for one month. You buy your plane ticket and bring some spending money, but other than, it's basically free. My SYLE was in Uruguay from May 15 - June 15, 2010.

Field Notes for Spanish Learners: Castellano Phrasebook

Castellano is the name for the Spanish spoken in Argentina and Uruguay, where people say things like "vos tenés" instead of "tú tienes." I overheard these phrases constantly in conversational Spanish, so I put them on flashcards and made a deliberate point of trying to artificially insert them into conversations whenever I remembered. As a result, I probably sounded like a Valley Girl, but also got a lot of compliments on my Spanish.

Dale (tranquilo)
Go (right) ahead
Come on

Ya está (pronounced “yastá”)
That's it
All done

Ahí está
There it is
Exactly
That's it

Ahí va (pronounced "ay va")
Now you've got it
There you go
Exactly

Bueno
Okay!

Buenísimo
Awesome
SweetReally cool

Bárbaro
Great

Tá (Uruguay)
OK 

Bien
Good!

Pah!
Woah!
Wow!
Geez!

En serio?
Seriously?

Viste?
Ya know?
You see?
See?

Ah, mirá/mirá vos
Oh, huh!
Huh, look at that
Oh, that's interesting

Tipo, ponele, o sea, digo
Like (tipo is slightly classier than ponele)
I mean (o sea, digo)

Este
Uh
Um

Raro
Weird

Rico
Good (describing the taste of food)
Delicious

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Songs from 2010

This is the soundtrack to my four months in South America. Some of these songs got played a lot on the radio during that time, some bring back good memories, and some just represent a style of music, like bachata. If you want to skip a song, hover your mouse over the video and arrows will appear on the side.

Yo No Sé Mañana...Luis Enrique (Nicaragua, salsa)
Si Voy Al Bajo Soy Yo...Mc Caco (Uruguay, cumbia villera)
Chora, Me Liga...João Bosco e Vinícius (Brazil, música sertaneja)
Dile Al Amor...Aventura (Dominican Republic/NYC, bachata)
Todo Se Transforma...Jorge Drexler (Uruguay, pop)
Cuando Me Enamoro...Enrique Iglesias and Juan Luis Guerra (Spain, pop)
Pedro Navaja...Rubén Blades (Panama/NYC, salsa)

28 Quirks of Life in Argentina and Uruguay

1. European cars (Peugeot, Citroën, FIAT)
2. Old-fashioned skeleton keys
3. Lots of graffiti
4. Stray dogs
5. Horse-drawn carts collect recyclable garbage in cities. The urban poor can make a (meager) living by exchanging recyclables for a small refund
6. Clothes are dried on a clothesline
7. Stoves must be ignited manually by match or lighter
8. Most people do not have a printer or photocopier at home; instead they go to a cyber or kiósco and pay for these services
9. Toasters are uncommon
10. Dishwashers are uncommon
11. Public displays of affection: couples sprawl all over each other and make out in public [Córdoba]
12. Public baños usually lack toilet paper and soap, and very often require a donation of a few coins for "upkeep"
13. Trucks cruise slowly through town with giant speakers in back, blasting advertisements
14. Showers take place in an unmarked corner of the bathroom floor with no curtain
15. Coca Cola signs dominate every restaurant facade so that you barely notice the actual name of the restaurant
16. Mayonnaise on everything [Uruguay]
17. Milk comes in squishy plastic packages
18. Cooked eggs are normal at dinner but unthinkable for breakfast
19. Fondness for crackers
20. Waiters do not stop by periodically and ask "how does everything taste?"
21. Sidewalks made of corrugated tile
22. Mullets are popular among soccer-hooligan guys
23. Girls wear bangs a lot
24. Keffiyehs are popular
25. Lots of unappealing rock and ska in Spanish (I like cumbia better)
26. Electrical outlets in Argentina look like this
27. Outdoor trash baskets made of wire, instead of garbage cans [Córdoba]
28. Blue street signs. In Uruguay, they're affixed to walls of buildings