A recentguest blogfor us by Lizzie Davey made me realize that in addition to the many small things that help you learn a language, there is clearly one big thing that helps your new language: READING.
As some may recall fromearlier blogs, Spanish was a language I started to learn last year; first with our 36-lesson Spanish 1 course, then during our 2 month stay in Spain, reading newspapers, watching TV shows, talking to thelocals in shops and restaurants.
And now, I continue to read Spanish articles online and sometimes even watch a soap on our local Spanish TV station.(A great app and Chrome extension is Lingua.ly, which not only lets you look up words you don't know, but also places them in a list you can later review and practice!)
Reading Zorro
A few months ago, my wife gave me two books for my birthday: the original Spanish version of Zorro by Isabel Allende and its English translation. (According to Wikipedia, Allende's book represents a prequel to the original Zorro story, Johnston McCulley's 1919 novella "The Curse of Capistrano.")
I have been reading two to three pages most nights and I am enjoying the book tremendously. Reading a novel is quite different from reading newspaper articles, which often deal with familiar topics. The language of news reports is also easier to comprehend than the literary and sometimes abstract language of a novel.
A handy Spanish-English dictionary would help me translate the many new words I encounter. However, having the excellent English translation of the text has several benefits: You start to understand the story much faster; you pick up on the Spanish idioms and expressions as well as their English equivalents; you often experience the "aha" effect that makes learning both fun and effective.
English First
When I started to read the Spanish version first, I quickly became discouraged. There were many words I did not know and I became lost in the events of the story.
But then, when I began reading the English translation, the history of Zorro's beginnings - which I certainly did not recall from the movies and which, I assume, Isabel Allende invented - became interesting and intriguing.
And, when I went back to the Spanish version, words and phrases became clear and obvious and became further proof of one of our gamesforlanguage key credos: Once you understand the context, you can more easily decipher sentences and structures.
For several chapters I continued with this approach: I read a paragraph or two first in English, then I switched to the Spanish version.
Spanish First
After several chapters, I experimented reading the Spanish version FIRST. Not surprisingly, I was already able to read much further along before starting to "lose it" and having to switch to the English version for a quick "context refresher."
As I continue to read about Diego de la Vega's early life - his childhood, his travel to Barcelona, and his life in Spain - his later life as "Zorro" starts to make sense. I discover, for example, the significance of the name "Zorro", meaning "fox" in English, as well as his reasons for wearing a mask!
The narrator tells us: "... era todavía un mozalbete de orejas salidas, ..." (he was still a stripling with protruding ears).
"... El problema de las orejas fue la razón por la cual se le ocurrió la idea de usar un máscara,..." (The problem of the ears was the inspiration for wearing a mask).
Isabel Allende was able to create an image of the young fictional Zorro in which is both plausible and fun to read!
A (Big) Language Tip
There are "Easy Readers" and "Dual Language Readers" that work quite well for many learners. But, if you have already mastered some of the basics of your new language, want to expand your vocabulary, and challenge yourself, get the foreign and English versions of books that interest you. Your new language will grow in leaps and bounds!
Summer camps abroad are becoming an increasingly popular choice for both children (ages 5-18) and their guardians.
The extended summer break provides children a wonderful opportunity to experience new cultures, improve at sports or other activities, and enjoy a well-earned break with friends. Parents see the educational opportunities available and encourage children to take part.
I work at a summer school in Alicante Spain and am fortunate enough to help mentor 14-18 year olds and teach them the Spanish language.
Our ISC Spain program promotes the Spanish language and culture through educational, sport, cultural, and leisure activities.
I am amazed how fast young students learn the language when they visit. It also made me realize how different the children's experience is at a summer school - where they learn or improve a language as part of a cultural event, as opposed to a classroom task.
The benefits of a summer school are huge for students. Their cultural experience ranges from reading city signs to find their way, to absorbing the language by listening and engaging with the local people.
As students mix with locals, they will become interested in their customs and traditions. Taking part in local activities and sports means a unique integration into the community and gives students a chance to establish a network of friends with whom they can communicate in their language.
The environment of learning becomes one with the culture. Here are my seven top tips to help young students and their guardians learn a language when visiting a summer camp abroad.
7 Language Learning Tips
1. Visit all the local shops and services when you first arrive. Make a note of their name in the language and only refer to those services in the native language. 2. Revise and learn three good ways to open a conversation. This will encourage you to talk to people and communicate in the native language. 3. When eating at restaurants, engage with the waiters and ask them to explain phrases you might want to know. They are friendly and happy to help.
4. Take part in local activities and events. Immersing yourself in the culture will help you learn the language and customs. 5. Keep a language guide handy at all times and study it whenever you have a free moment. 6. Always listen to the conversations around you. Try and pick up on what other words mean and associate them to things which are familiar.
7. Befriend a member of the local community and spend time with them. They can help you understand the culture and communicate in the language you want to learn.
A summer camp abroad will be an experience students will remember for years to come, especially if they have forged friendships that continue afterwards. And, the acquired language will have many benefits for their personal and work life.
Last year my husband and I spent seven weeks in Spain, both to try out our newly acquired Spanish and to retrace the trip of our Spanish 1 traveler "David."
We started out in Barcelona (as described in our blog post), and then visited Granada, Seville, and finally Madrid.
It was great fun to use our Spanish in daily life - shopping at the open market, navigating our way through the city, visiting many of Gaudi's masterworks (see his Casa Milà on the left), making small talk with people we met as we went about our daily activities.
We found that it's fairly easy to acquire new words, especially if they are items you can picture or point to. But it was more difficult to learn and use expressions that have an abstract meaning. And such expressions often include those little connecting words that are called prepositions (eg: to, in, for, by, off, over, about, etc.).
The Challenge of Prepositions
Prepositions sometimes provide a special challenge for language learners. That's because they often have several meanings and don't translate in a logical way into other languages.
For example, if you google the Spanish translation of the English preposition "to" in an online dictionary such as wordreference.com, you'll see that the ten "principal" meanings of "to" require 5 completely different prepositions in Spanish: a, hacia, de, contra, sobre.
Phrases with the English Preposition "to" translated into Spanish
• to fly to Madrid/to Spain - volar a Madrid/a España (a = to) • to go to the airport - ir al aeropuerto (al = to the) • to walk to the house - caminar hacia la casa (hacia = until) • along the way to there - por el camino hasta allí (hasta = until) • a vote of three to one - tres votos contra uno (contra = against) • to apply pigment to a canvas - aplicar pigmento sobre el lienzo (sobre = over)
Making Mistakes
Let me say at this point that it's perfectly okay to make mistakes, and even if you use a wrong preposition, people will usually understand what you're trying to say. In a conversation, folks can easily ask you what you meant and you can quickly correct misunderstandings. And this means you'll have the kind of feed-back that will help you to learn.
How to Micro-Learn
It's a great feeling to master an expression in a foreign language. Once you've got it, it's yours and you can build on it. So it's worth spending a little time learning common expressions that contain prepositions, and there's no mystery about how to do it:
1. Tackle each expressions individually. 2. Practice saying it until it stays in your ear. 3. Write it down, and/or read it, again and again, until you have it in your visual memory. 4. Start using it in conversations and in texting and emails.
Your new expression will soon begin to sound and look right. Once that happens, attach a rule to it. For example: in Spanish, going/traveling to a city or country always uses "a." Then, when you try to say, "I'm flying to England" - you'll know what preposition to use: "Vuelo a Inglaterra."
I've been learning Spanish for about eight months now. After a few lessons with Rosetta Stone (see my blog #3) and the initial 6-week boost with our Spanish 1 course, progress now is slow but steady. Learning a new language means building new skills, gradually.
During the weeks before election, one or the other candidate spoke or had ads in Spanish. I could understand most of these, no problem! I feel that I'm ready to add Social Media to my tools for improving my Spanish further.
30 Minutes a Day
Life is busy, but most days I do manage to squeeze in about 30 minutes of Spanish - 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there. My learning "schedule" is scattered throughout the day. Generally, it consists of:
Reading a few pages of my Spanish ebook (at the moment, Zafón’s La sombre del viento) );
Playing a couple of Vocabulary Games with sound;
Reading Spanish newspaper articles online;
Watching a Spanish soap for 10-15 minutes in the evening
Doing a couple of grammar exercises from an old fashioned book with my husband over coffee. We chuckle over some of the weird and useless sentences that come up - such as: ¿Cómo come Juan? (How does Juan eat?) and ¿Dónde beben los animales? (Where do the animals drink?)
Social Media for Learning Spanish
It's easy to add Spanish to your Twitter(left) or Facebook feeds. And, you can read the posts when you have a spare moment or whenever you feel like it.
Choices are endless, but they'll all grow your grasp of Spanish and the culture of Spain and Latin American countries. You'll begin to better understand how opinions are formulated, how regional humor is expressed, how discussions are carried on, etc.
12 Social Media Terms in Spanish
So, if you are ready to participate in Spanish on Social Media, here's a start with some basic social media terms:
Compartir - Share
Conectar - Connect
Comentarios - Comments
Enviar - Send
Escribir - Write
Recuérdame - Remember me
Seguir - Follow
Twittear - Tweet
Usuario registrado - Registered user
Lo más visto en ... - The most seen on ...
Lo más debatido ahora - Most talked about now
Lo que hacen tus amigos - What your friends are doing
Once you have mastered some of the basics of a new language, using your Social Media News Feeds is also a great way to foster your motivation. News Feeds let you connect to the topics that interest you and expand your vocabulary in just those areas. Research has shown that learning new words and phrases in context will help you retain and use them more easily.
As part of our recent trip through Spain, we tried to combine “must see” tourist destinations (such as Granada and Seville) with smaller towns that are off the beaten track.
On our drive from Seville to Córdoba, we decided to stop at Carmona, a town of about 25,000 inhabitants and the first major town, about 25 miles east of Seville.
Our travel guide only had a short entry, but we were glad that we got off the main highway. The town is located on top of a hill overlooking fertile plains and it has an interesting history.
"Europe's Oldest inhabited Town"
As we walked through Carmona’s Puerta de Sevilla, we found a dense cluster of houses and winding streets that led to a plaza in the middle of town. We actually walked to the plaza only later - after we had taken a tour in a brand new electric mini-bus.
The tour and bus were the idea of an enterprising young attorney, Alfonso, who had realized that in the current economy, his legal skills could not provide sufficient income for his young family.
Alfonso took us and a Canadian couple on a leisurely half-hour drive through the town. As the mini-bus slowly wound through the narrow streets, he gave us a synopsis of the town’s history. He noted that Carmona is one of Europe’s “oldest continuously inhabited towns.”
(This tour was, by the way, one of the few times that we listened to a talk in English; our Canadian co-passengers did not understand Spanish.)
Moors, Washington Irving, And Movies...
During their long occupation, the Moors fortified Carmona, but also built palaces and fountains.
The town was captured in 1247 by Ferdinand III of Castile and served as an important crossing point between Seville and cities to the east. The bell tower of the 15th century church of San Pedro, is often called "little Giralda" as it is a replica of Seville's Giralda. (above)
Apparently, as we later learned from a sign outside the city, Washington Irving had visited Carmona less than two centuries earlier, in 1829. In “The Route of Washington Irving,” (published by the Fundación El legado andalusì), there is a long entry about Carmona, describing it aptly as a town with a “welcoming atmosphere.”
Today, the town is often used as a setting for movie shoots, 26 last year alone. We actually passed a movie set on our tour, but the crew was resting after a 50+ horse scene which had taken place the previous night in the narrow streets.
Clearly, the difficult economic climate has also had an impact on Carmona. While we were there, we saw a demonstration of town residents who expressed their anger especially with Spain’s drastic cuts in education. (see picture)
Before we left Carmona, we sat down at a café in the town square to have a “cortado” (espresso with a dash of hot milk). At the next table, a group of local men and women were talking about events in their lives; our waiter was friendly and chatty, and we were happily soaking it all up.
During our stay in Spain we became cognizant of how identical the payment process in restaurants and cafes is in the four (4) regions (of 17) we have visited - Catalonia, Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha, and Madrid.
Getting your Check
Whether you are making the international sign for your wish to pay across the room or on a terrace - pretending to write with one finger in the palm of your other hand - or whether you say “la cuenta, por favor” or "Me gustaría pagar": your waiter or waitress will go back to the register and produce a check, which she or he will present to you most likely on a plate, held by a clip.
(If you'd like to practice to call for the check in Spanish with "Me gustaría pagar", you can do so HERE)
Getting your Change
Unless you immediately put your euros onto the plate, the waiter will leave again, and return after a (short or long) while. S/he will then take the plate with the payment and return with the change.
This is even true, if the waiter has to cross a street from an open air terrace, or if the register is located on another floor. The reasons for this method may range from the taxing authorities’ precise requirements, to a distrust of the waiter’s ability/honesty to handle the payment on his or her own.
Swiss and German Ways
Recent trips to Germany and Switzerland made us aware of the differences.
In Switzerland any order of a coffee or a meal in a restaurant is typically accompanied by a small register slip, which is placed in a little glass when the item ordered is brought to the table.mWhen the check is requested, the waiter just adds up the slips - sometimes in his/her head, sometimes on paper - then collects the (cash) payment and returns the change from a pouch he/she is carrying.
Visitors to Europe will also have noticed that any credit card payments are done at your table with a wireless gadget. Your credit card stays in sight!
In Germany you may encounter the same methods as in Switzerland, or the waiter may just add up your check right at your table, either from memory or by consulting the menu. The typical way to call a waiter in German is simply: "Zahlen, bitte", or a little more polite: "Bitte, ich möchte zahlen."
(f you'd like to practice the German expression to pay, you can do it HERE)
It should be noted that the “Spanish process” - as we may call it - is also typical for cash payments in hotels or finer restaurants in Germany or Switzerland. What we are finding interesting here in Spain is the fact that the check/payment process has never varied - whether we were in a little sandwich shop on the road, or in a hotel in the city.
In a previous blog post, we wrote about meeting several natives of Barcelona. Apart from the pleasure of making new friends and practicing our (Castilian) Spanish, we also got an interesting glimpse into the Catalan/Castilian issue. We were aware of it, but certainly hadn’t appreciated it enough.
Spain vs Catalonia
The struggle of Catalonia with “Spain” dates back to the early 1700s and the war for the Spanish succession. (on the left a re-enactment of a 1870 citizen revolt on the Plaza de la Vila de Gracia).
However, Franco's prohibition of the Catalan language during his 40-year dictatorship is still a quite recent memory. (Franco died in 1975.)
Our language-exchange contact, an architect whom we’ll call Fabian, explained to us the nature of “bilingualism” in Catalonia. He told us that basically (Castilian) Spanish is taught together with other languages in the first grade.
He then clarified, “In the educational Catalan system, the weak language (Catalan) is always used as the language of communication, but subject matters also contain a lot of information in Castilian. It means that pupils are constantly switching between languages and thus, in fact, use both languages simultaneously.” So, when they finish high school, students are indeed mostly bilingual.
The (Language) Struggle continues...
A “Spanish” decision last year to give parents in Catalonia the right to have their children in primary and secondary state schools instructed only in (Castilian) Spanish led to huge protests and is now in a stand-by mode.
What amazed us especially were certain statements Fabian made, such as: “When I go to Spain...”, or “The taxes we are paying to Spain...”. Catalan people still don't see themselves as a part of Spain.
The current economic crisis has renewed questions about how taxes generated by Catalonia – still Spain's industrial powerhouse – are allocated by Madrid to poorer regions, when Barcelona's youth unemployment stands at 50%.
Rafael Nadal also speaks Catalan
We also learned that in addition to Catalonia and Andorra (where it is the national and only official language), Catalan is also spoken in the Balearic Islands, including Mallorca, i.e. the home of tennis champion Rafael Nadal. Rafa speaks both Castilian Spanish and Catalan, as well as Mallorquí, a dialect of Catalan. (See the Wikipedia entry for more about the Catalan language and other parts of Spain and France where Catalan dialects are still spoken.)
If You Want to Live in Barcelona Permanently...
Barcelona is really an amazing city. The architecture of the city, the cultural and recreational opportunities explain why so many people come to visit – and indeed many are staying. We are truly astonished by the bilingualism of everyone we have met in Barcelona to date.
We also realize that while knowing (Castilian) Spanish is important, it is not enough. If you really want to live in this city permanently, you should also learn Catalan!
One of our pleasant surprises in Barcelona was the plethora of very reasonably priced restaurants, especially in our Gracia neighborhood.
A couple of days ago we stumbled upon what we thought was a real find: “O'Gràcia” - located on the “Plaça de la Revolució de Setembre de 1868” [sic]. We saw the evening menu advertised for 15 Euros, IVA (tax) included, and decided to give it a try.
O'Gracia is a small restaurant, with two tables to seat 4 or 5, and four tables for 2. We were early, with with only one other couple there. And, we were seated without a reservation. (But we read later online that we may have been lucky and also saw it listed in the Loneley Planet's Barcelona Guide - so others found it before us!)
Our Menu Choices
The menu, in Catalan and Castilian Spanish, showed a choice of seven(7) “Primeros” and six(6) “Segundos”.
Our Primeros - “Esparragos verdes con queso de cabra” (Green aspargus w/ goat cheese) - “Crêpe de Jamón O champiñones y queso” (Crepe w/ ham, champignons and cheese)
Our Segundos - “Pollo a curry” (Chicken curry) - “Lubina al horno” (Baked sea bass).
Included in the menu price was: a bottle of water, ½ liter of wine or local beer, as well as a choice of desserts. Both Primeros and Segundos were delicious, and when we asked for a copy of the menu as we were leaving, the maitre d' was happy to oblige.
Catalan Clues for Castilian Choices
We are using the menus to both learn about the local cuisine as well as to decipher/compare the Catalan and Castilian terms. For example: If we had not known “queso” (cheese), the Catalan “formatge” with its similarity to the French “fromage”, would have been a clue; on the other hand, the Catalan “pernil dolc” (ham) told us less than the Castilian “jamon”, which is close to the French “jambon”.
But there are plenty of words, where none of the languages we know is any help. We understood from the waiter that “Lubina” was a fish (“Llobarro” in Catalan), however, could not identify it, when it arrived on a plate, head and all. We later looked it up online and saw that “lubina” means “sea bass”. We should have solved the mystery of “al horno” right away, as the Catalan “al forn” - close to Italian “il forno” or French “le four” (the oven) – would easily translate as “(baked) in the oven”.
We continue to have fun unraveling the mysteries of Spanish food and dining expressions. We also know very well that language courses such as our Spanish 1 and other beginner courses cannot cover the astounding variety of lunch and dinner offerings that we find here in Spain. It takes curiosity, persistence and, yes, a little dictionary work!
PS 1: A few days ago - on a Saturday evening - we went back to O'Gracia. We discovered that there was actually a second room in the back that seated another 24-26 people. The food was as delicious as the first time; the fixed price evening menu still included a Primero, a Secundo and a Postre (dessert), but the beverages were now extra and the price had increased to $16, still a deal!
PS 2: As we updated this post, we looked in vain for the O'Gràcia website. There is no TripAdvisor entry any longer and the Yelp entry seems to indicate that the restaurant is not open.
Good Friday in Barcelona started with rain again. Undeterred, but armed with umbrellas, we decided to follow in the steps of our "hero" David.
Those of our users who have completed Level 1, may recall that David's aunt Carmen lived on Calle Mallorca, (which is not far from our apartment in Gracia). As you see on the picture, most streets in Barcelona, however, use the Catalan name for "street", therefore "Carrer de Mallorca".
If you follow Carrer de Mallorca to the Northeast, crossing the "Avinguda Diagonal", ("Avinguda" is Catalan for "Avenida") you will soon see "La Sagrada Familia" appear above the roof lines. It's an impressive sight, the still unfinished masterpiece by Antonio Gaudí (1852-1926), and arguably Barcelona's call sign and best known monument!
Good Friday was quite obviously not the day for us to visit the interior of the church - the waiting lines stretched around an entire block. But we took our time, circled the entire complex and will be back after the holidays.
Walking towards the harbor, we passed by another impressive complex, the Plaça de Toros, the bull ring. (Note the Catalan form for "Plaza", using the French "ç".)
With the sun out, the walk along the harbor front promenade was delightful. We drank a freshly squeezed "zumo de naranja", enjoyed the sidewalk performers with the many, young and old, who had also ventured out on this first day of the long Easter weekend.
Learning Spanish - Today is only our second day in Barcelona. We experienced unusual thunderstorms and heavy rains during the night, but ventured out anyways in the morning drizzle.
While we are still exploring the district where our apartment is located - Gràcia - (see our favorite Vila de Gràcia square above) we also are figuring out how to get around the city with public transportation.
Public Transportation
Our first goal: to get a metro and bus pass. The number of choices are amazing!
Using our basic Spanish (learned with GamesforLanguage Spanish 1), we found out about passes for 10 trips, 50 trips in 30 days, 30 days unlimited, daily passes, etc. etc. We finally settled on a pass of 70 trips in 30 days for families (including couples). The price: Euro 51.80 - which breaks down to only $.74 per trip for each of us, if we use all of them. Quite a deal!
Learning Spanish in Museums
With this pass, we took our first subway trip to the Plaza d'Espanya and the CaixaForum. Inaugurated in February 2002, CaixaForum is the Barcelona headquarters of Fundació "laCaixa" - a social and cultural foundation belonging to "la Caixa" savings bank. The Forum is situated in an old but wonderfully renovated textile factory.
Benefiting from the free admission, we saw two fabulous exhibitions: one of Francisco Goya (with many works lent by Madrid's Prado), the other of Eugène De La Croix (with works lent by Paris' Louvre). All descriptions of the paintings were in two languages: no, not in English – but in Spanish and in Catalan. Barcelona is indeed a bilingual city.
Not having had any exposure to Catalan before, we were surprised that we could easily understand the Catalan descriptions of the paintings as well as the Spanish ones.But why be surprised?
Yesterday, fresh off the airplane, I bought the “blue” edition of “el Periódico,” the local newspaper. Sitting in an outdoor café, we skimmed over some of the headlines and read a few articles. We only realized after a while that we were reading the Catalan edition! (The Spanish edition has red as a background color.)
As stated in the Lonely Planet guide, Catalan “belongs to the group of Western European languages that grew out of Latin, including Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.” Many of the words in our newspaper resembled Italian and French. A knowledge of both of these languages helped us understand the newspaper articles and the descriptions in the CaixaForum.
At both lunch and dinner, our menus came in two languages: Spanish and Catalan. (We are describing in "Solving Lunch and Dinner Mysteries" some of the clues we used...)
So all you anglophiles: Brush up on your romance languages, if you want to know what you are seeing and what you are eating in Barcelona!
Bio: Ulrike & Peter Rettig are co-founders of Gamesforlanguage.com. They are lifelong language learners, growing up in several European countries before moving to Canada and the United States. You can follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
A recent guest blog for us by Lizzie Davey made me realize that in addition to the many small things that help you learn a language, there is clearly one big thing that helps your new language: READING.
Our 
I've been learning Spanish for about eight months now. After a few lessons with 
