A language learners’ forum

Why Spanish tapas?
Because it is one of my favourite Spanish food. Maybe I can have tapas while reading Spanish. Or perhaps I can choose Spanish resources as from a selection of tapas dishes.

After having put Spanish on hold for a while, I would like to get back to it with the goal of becoming "fluent". Definition of fluent: I can easily hold a conversation, I can understand radio and tv, and I can read a book without looking up words.

I will focus on input:
- improve listening comprehension. This is important as I find that spoken Spanish can be hard to understand.
- read to improve fluency and expand vocabulary
- I will speak when I have the opportunity, but for now I don't think I'll buy Italki lessons
- I might practice some pronunciation

Other Spanish threads:
Nomadas Magellan transcription
Spanish consonants
imperfect and preterite

I practise listening comprehension with the youtube channel VideoEle. Nice short videos about culture and society, and you can turn on and off subtitles in several languages.

It has been almost a year since the last time I worked with Spanish. Has this break been detrimental? I think some vocabulary has faded, but it quickly comes back. But in general my grasp of Spanish hasn't got any worse - in fact I think my listening comprehension could even be better than it was. I have watched a couple of the VideoEle clips (B2-level) and I understand them easily now, only a couple of times do I need to check the subtitles. Of course, the narration in that series is spoken slowly and clearly.

Here are some resources that I have used before for listening practice:

1 - Easy Spanish - Spanish spoken on the streets - not necessarily that easy. It's been a long time since I used this one. At the time I couldn't follow it without subtitles

2 - VideoEle - aimed at learners; short clips that show society and culture in Spain.

3 - Español con Juan - aimed at learners. He speaks a lot, and fast, but is easy to understand. He explains concepts using a lot of examples. Very engaging to listen to.

4 - El Jardín de Martín - a latin-american youtuber who lives in Germany.

5 - Habla divertido - This channel from one of our forum members looks interesting, and I'll check out his channel more. One year ago I found it hard because he speaks very fast.

6 - Radio podcasts from RTVE: There are some very good programmes from RTVE. A year ago I found them too hard to follow without a transcript, but I will soon use these ones more.

Listening to and reading Spanish...and doing Anki.

I wrote in this post that I wanted to get away from Anki and rely on natural repetition in texts. Well, I realized that that would not be efficient. I need to see a word maybe 7 times before I have it safely "stored". It is indispensible to have some kind of review system of the words I learn. If I want to escape Anki I could try the Goldlist method, which I believe would work well only because writing by hand is a great technique for remembering vocabulary.

I have studied 14 of the VideoEle B2-videos. I find now that they speak very slowly. It is still a good exercise for me as I get used to intonation patterns and idiomatic expressions.

I also listened to the Español con Juan youtube-channel. He speaks fast, but what is good is that he tends to repeat phrases instead of slowing down, so I get used to the speed of normal spoken spanish.

Today I listened to a radio podcast by RTVE, and I have improved my listening skill since last year, because now I could follow it. Even if I couldn't get every word, I understood the meaning of all the parts. It was the recent episode of Un idioma sin fronteras where they interviewed an American living in Andalucia, and where he explained certain misunderstandings and cultural differences. I had to look up a couple of unusual words, though. By the way, he had as they said a nice "mix of an american accent and an andaluce accent". That is, leaving out s, having an american r and american l, and pronouncing the j as an h.

When I can use radio programmes for listening practice it starts to become fun. But I'll continue with the easier youtube-clips for a bit longer.

Does anyone have recommandations for interesting podcasts where you can get the transcript? (preferably not podcasts for spanish learners, but real stuff).

By the way, many words are easy to learn in Spanish because they usually have cognates that I know (esp. in English). But some are hard. I have been trying for a while to learn arrebatar and abarrotado - I keep confusing them.

I watched this clip about Guinea Ecuatorial - the only country in Africa with Spanish as an official language.
https://youtu.be/4o5l22hS-lI
This youtube channel is interesting. However the accent is very unfamiliar to me - seems to be Argentinian. He pronounces ya as "sha" or "ja".

I am collecting "conversational connectors" in Spanish:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iQt ... sp=sharing
Check it out. If you need Norwegian conversational connectors you can also glean some from this document.

I notice there are a lot of small phrases and idioms in Spanish. I collect these in my Anki deck, in addition to single words. These small phrases and collocations are important to learn, and I found that I often don't intuitively and easily understand them. This in contrast to phrases in English and German which I often intuitively grasp, and the reason is of course that Spanish is after all further removed from Norwegian.

Here is a small sample:
- dar con
- pasar de largo
- una vez que
- hasta las tantas
- todo de golpe
- qué más da
- no es para tanto
- que yo sepa