Hola, Cześć and Hi,
First of all, I would like to say a massive gracias to my friend Luis, who has been helping me with my Spanish pronunciation. Learning Spanish has been harder than I expected, so his ability explain Spanish grammar has helped me a lot.
My approach to learning a language has always been to learn as much vocabulary as possible, learn the linking words, translate a newspaper article every day and to study the grammar by conjugating verbs and memorising them.
On one hand, this approach has given me a passive understanding of a language, but on the other hand, it has also given me false confidence, and the downside to this is that my speaking can be very robotic (this has been pointed out to me).
The new approach, which I have taken over the past couple of weeks is to send Luis audio recordings of sentences, and he will either tell me it’s ok or get me to repeat it again. This has been time consuming but the end results have been amazing and it stops be from slipping back into the bad habit of mispronouncing certain words, and before anyone says anything, I’m now aware that the stress in ‘gustaría’ is on the accented syllable, not the second syllable.
In addition to this, part of my new approach is to listening to Spanish and Polish chat shows.
My trick is to record a radio chat show, then slow it down with Audacity.
Another person who I would like to thank is Benny Lewis AKA the Irish Polyglot. This month, Benny has name checked me twice on Twitter, so to return the favour, I’ve decided to buy his new book ‘Language Hacking Spanish’
After I’ve purchased and read, I’ll let you know what I think of it.
Finally, if you are struggling to find a good Spanish topical publication to read, I recommend giving Jot Down a try.
Every evening, I select an article and translate it into English.
Bye for now!
learn23eublog 