The last time I wrote on my OU studies I had submitted the EMA for U214. I took a break from OU study for a few months and I enjoyed having the chance to read novels and pursue other interests. It helped me get the chance to reactivate my Spanish and Japanese in particular and improving my abilities in those languages has become my main focus.
I am just about to start the L204 Viento en Popa module which is a Level 2 Upper Intermediate Spanish course. I have already looked at the materials and it is pitched at about the same level as my Spanish is at now. There will be a lot of revision needed for me because I have some bad habits. My Spanish spelling is not particularly good as I have a tendency to spell it like French and I also put accents on the wrong vowels. From that point of you I hope that this course will polish up my written Spanish.
In the last while I have really got into Spanish short stories so I have asked my italki teacher if we can start discussing stories in our classes. Tomorrow I will get to talk about one of my favourites called “Las cartas de los tristes” by Andrés Neuman. I have that story in an audio version as well so I have listened to it many times in the last while. The beauty of reading and then listening again and again is that you really soak up the words once you understand the whole story. Spanish is such an evocative language; nothing is more pleasing for me than to be able to enjoy it as a literary language.
My Spanish course also includes a residential school in Santiago de Compestela so I will do there in July for that. That should be a great chance to really improve my spoken Spanish.
With Japanese it is a bit different because I have been concentrating more on learning Kanji and increasing my vocabulary. It doesn’t translate into active conversational ability but it is a lot of fun nonetheless and will surely reward me in the future when I have more time to concentrate on Japanese.
OU Diary #20 – The Wind in my Sails
January 31, 2013 by Aidan
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Spanish is a lovely sounding language – evocative, as you say.
I am jealous of your ability to pick up all these languages. I’m just starting U214; maybe once I have an understanding of how my own language works, I can make the step over to learning others.
Good luck with L204!
Good luck with U214, it’s has some very interesting parts to it. To be honest ability is not really the main factor in acquiring other languages. Of course some people have a natural aptitude in the same way as others have an ear for music but that only really comes into play when you are exposed naturally to other languages (e.g. I don’t really have to learn Polish because I hear it all the time). Most of the time you expose yourself ‘unnaturally’. I started learning Spanish in 2003, I think it was. At different times I gave it a high priority but I have done many other things around it. There is one thing that is really clear though. The times I made major progress were when I decided to ‘live’ Spanish. That means going out of your way to watch the Spanish news, reading a Spanish short story rather than an English one, arranging to meet Spanish speakers I know. More than anything it involves a certain amount of pain because you have top stumble and fall and sound like a mumbling idiot before you can start to sound like an authentic speaker of the language.
Spanish repays the effort because it is a world language with an amazing literary culture. I am at the point where I can appreciate more subtle usage of the language. That makes me really excited because I remember the thrill of finishing books in German or French for the first time and feeling that I had crossed some line. It’s like you can finally dive into the pool of words that is the other language and feel that you are not drowning any more, you are swimming and keeping up with the other swimmers who were born into the tongue.