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Monday, February 7, 2011
I forgot a highlight from my week in review! I was chatting with some people in my portuguese class and one was surprised I had only been here a semester. He said that, from listening to me speak, he figured I was from the US but had been living here a while.
I have good days and bad days with Spanish and it really depends on the subject as well (me trying to explain football last night?), but its always nice to hear comments like that.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Finally figured out the shortcut on my computer for inserting accent marks and tildes!
á é í ó ú ñ
(Still no electricity, so back at Starbucks to do a bit more work before heading out dancing)
Thursday, November 4, 2010
What? Sorry? Pardon? Come again?
8. órale:
Friday, October 8, 2010
The Spanish language has masculine and feminine words and differentiates el (m.) and la (f.) as opposed to English's gender neutral the.
For example:
la mesa (the table), la casa (the house)
el gato (the cat), el teléfono (the phone)
It is a masculine-dominated language in the sense that a group of girls is chicas, a group of guys is chicos, but a mixed group (even if it's all girls and 1 guy) is chicos --the masculine form.
It's very interesting to me to see the approach people are taking for a more gender conscious language. I've now seen on various advertisements and almost all the emails from my program and classmates the use of "@", which can be an "a" and "o" at the same time -- therefore including both the masculine and feminine versions of the word equally/simultaneously.
For example:
tod@s (everyone), compañer@s (classmates), chic@s (guys/girls)
Monday, September 13, 2010
Sometimes my mind gets stuck in a place between Spanish and English.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
A friend introduced me to a cool language resource: www.livemocha.com
"Livemocha is the world’s largest online language learning community, offering free and paid online language courses in 35 languages to more than 6 million members from over 200 countries around the world."
I can't speak about their paid courses, but the free courses are pretty cool (at least for intro to language). I tried it for the first time last night for some portuguese practice. When you sign up you indicate the language you want to learn and your native language. They offer a wide range of languages -- Portuguese, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, etc.
In the lessons you learn (pictures, text, spoken), review (matching and multiple choice based on picture, text and spoken clues), write (from a prompt based on what you just learned) and speak (reading aloud and recording a text). The "review" section is corrected automatically. The written and spoken sections are submitted to "language partners" to review and give feedback. These language partners are native speakers who are also learning another language through livemocha. Once I completed my lesson in Portuguese, I was asked to review someone else's work in English.
Interested in learning a language? Check it out!
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
I started an unofficial Portuguese class today!
The master's program I'm in requires that students demonstrate understanding of 3 languages by the end of the program. My goal is to learn portuguese, not just to pass a reading comprehension exam, but enough to get by in reading/writing/listening (enough that I can travel to Brazil and be ok!).
I was bummed when I found out I wouldn't be able to start classes this semester because language registration closed before my registration even started.
However, I have a friend in the master's program from Brazil, so we're exchanging Portuguese and English classes.
