Spanish - a final report

I've enjoyed studying Spanish and plan to continue...just because it's fun, but I suspect that I missed the train on conversational Spanish. It's normal for people to lose the ability to learn new languages easily as they get older, especially if it's not a regular part of their lives but it seems that I have another problem. I've always had auditory processing disorder (APD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder) which makes it hard to process speech, but my jobs in the past have kept me involved with others and their speech. Now that I'm retired, there's less exposure and, with age, my learning disabilities are getting worse.

On the other hand, I can read most of the Spanish signs and labels around town. My ability to read Spanish has improved dramatically. With a little help from the translator in my Kafui Utils Smart Kit app (which I wholeheartedly recommend), I can read Spanish novels like Cien anos de solidad by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I also recommend).

The video, Destinos, is educational, entertaining, and pretty and I have a way to go to finish it but it has my attention, so I will.

Are there communities in your town that speak a different language? See if you can learn it. Often, native speakers will be excited to help you with the conversational part, you just have to learn the phrases, "Speak more slowly," and "I don't understand," in their language.

--- More language at the library ---

                                                   [Schlessman Family Branch Library]

I have volunteered as a conversation partner for exchange students so I figured the Spanish conversation group, Habla Ya!, presented every week (currently on Tuesdays from 4:00 to 5:00), would be a perfect opportunity to learn what the students feel. Sure enough, it was interesting and profoundly tense. The conversation group is well moderated and everyone was friendly, but after 6 months of study, my Spanish is not nearly conversational.

This would be a great tool for my Spanish studies but it would require two buses, 45 minutes and a trip ticket each way and that's a little too much for a weekly activity.

The Denver Public Library system has other aids for picking up new languages. For instance, the library website provides access to Mango Languages, a learning resource for over 70 languages. The courses are taught entirely in the user's own language, and it provides learning through foreign films.

There are also a variety of popular series such as Pimsleur, Living Language, and Berlitz, and, of course, there are books (it is a library), eBooks, DVDs, and eAudiobooks.

Although I'm hardly a genius at foreign languages (I have a friend that is just a few months difference in age that has 15 language or more - but he's been doing it for a long time.), I'm getting to where I can understand the signs in Spanish around town, and slowly I'm getting to where I can read books in Spanish.

As for Schlessman Family Branch Library, it's in a residential area. The bus stop across the street is an artistic production called Flight Ride 7, created by Erick Johnson in 2002 as part of the Flight Ride series in the Lowry neighborhood.

                                                                      [Flight Ride 7]

Perhaps a school near you has a program to help foreign students adapt to local language and culture. Since those are likely your language and culture, that would be a great opportunity to help other people and to, incidentally, learn about their language and culture.

--- Language on the Internet ---

I can't say that I'm spectacularly successful in my adventures in Spanish, but, at least, I'm having fun. The core of my coursework is the MIT opencourseware for their first year 21g-701 Spanish class of 2003. I picked up the textbook and workbook for the class and jumped in.

MIT offers course materials for several languages including Chinese, English as a second language, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. The Spanish courseware is available online here:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/#cat=humanities&subcat=language&spec=spanish

It's structured around a "Spanish soap opera" called "Destinos". In that way, you get to not only see and hear Spanish as it is used in several parts of the Spanish speaking world, but you also learn quite a lot about Spanish culture, history, and art.

I am enjoying the story of a dying Mexican aristocrat trying to find his lost first wife and child through a Los Angeles lawyer. The series is available through the Annenberg Learner site here:

https://learner.org/series/destinos

Annenberg provides learning materials for a wide range of subjects. The video series are generally well made and entertaining.

I supplement the coursework with several other resources including the games on the Digital Dialects site. Many commercial Spanish course products use these kinds of "video games" to engage their customers. Digital Dialects offers free learning tools for many (many!) languages. Check them out here:

http://www.digitaldialects.com

The last time I tried to learn Spanish, I started with a book by Kato Lomb - Polyglot. Lomb worked in 16 languages and won an exalted reputation as an interpreter and teacher. Although I strongly recommend the book, it didn't lead to me learning Spanish. Still, I attribute my failure more to my own lack of aptitude in acquiring new languages. One of the tips from the book stuck with me though. Ms. Lomb suggests reading books in the new language. That process, of course, is arduous at first and becomes easier and easier as you pick up the language. The problem for me is that it doesn't seem to help me much with conversational Spanish.

I have several Spanish language educational and literary files saved on my computer though. They're easy to find on the Internet, for instance, on sites like The Gutenberg Project and The Internet Archives.

While reading through Spanish materials, I keep Google Translate open on in my Internet browser. It's easy to get to by searching for "translate spanish to english", for instance. You get two boxes. Type a word or phrase in one box and the translation appears in the other box. You can switch languages in process and you can even here the phrase spoken. I counted 99 current languages covered by Google Translate. There are some I have never even heard of.

How many different languages are common in your community? I lived for twenty  years in the small south-central Alabama town of Selma and met many people from their Spanish and Chinese communities. Denver has a vast diversity of cultures and languages.

As one gets older, picking up a new language typically becomes more difficult, but it seems that, if you make it a regular thing when you're young, it's easier. I have a friend in Auburn, Alabama that regularly adds on new languages and surprises exchange students by conversing with them in their own languages. Learning new languages is fun. Start when you are young.

--- How complicated is language? Try speech synthesis ---

We take language for granted until we try to learn a new one. I don't think anyone would say that Spanish is more difficult than English, in fact, there are a lot of similarities. There's a lot more that you have to match up between nouns, verbs, modifiers and other word forms, and modifiers tend to follow the words they modify, unlike in English ("Little Red Riding Hood" instead of "Hood Riding Little Red") but the differences aren't huge.

I had little trouble in my 20s learning German and American Sign Language, but Spanish, I find unaccountably hard. But I'm having fun anyway.

Consider, though, the problem of computer language recognition and speech synthesis. They've come very far in the last 20 years. This century has seen some huge breakthroughs. In the 1990s, computer speech was still pretty much science fiction. What there was, was pretty clunky. But now, I routinely let my computer read books to me, a God-send given my dyslexia.

My computer still has a few problems though. Consider the word "read". Should it be pronounced "reed" or "red". It depends on it's context. Words exist in context. In fact, there are four things that have to be considered when you are parsing out words. It's amazing how easily a human does all that without breaking a sweat.

The meanings of any particular words are usually many. Just choose any word you thought you knew well and look it up in the unabridged Oxford Dictionary of the English Language. Then words exist in relation to the words around them. How you pronounce "read" has a lot to do whether you read a book yesterday or where you will read it today - tense determines the pronunciation. But "read" can be an adjective since a book can be a "read book" (or one that you have already read and, so, can mark off your reading list). Where words appear in a work also has meaning. One reason "It's was the best of time. It was the worst of times." is so well known is that it was the fist statement in Dickens "A Tale of Two Cities." Everything else being equal, first and last are most likely to make an impression. And other things can strongly influence how words are understood and pronounced. Intonation is one. Read "You are a fine one," out loud several times,placing emphasis on different words and see how the meaning changes.

I use a screen reader called NaturalReader, produced by NaturalSoft Ltd. It does a great job but, when I first started using it, I noticed a humorous snag. Frankly, I don't know if it was in the screen reader, the Windows dictionary or what but, when it came to the word "Nazi", it said "ne'er-do-well". "Appropriate" maybe, but not accurate. Today, my screenreader just boringly announces "Nazi". The older way was more entertaining.

--- Spanish ---

A funny thing happened during my first session of Spanish. I suddenly became emotional. I'm not that kind of guy! Things don't usually move me that way. I hope it's a good omen. Watching the video felt...joyous.

One session for me is about three days. I start with the Class Activities list on the MIT website, watch the video episode, and then complete the textbook assignments. The next day I do the activities in the workbook. The third day I play around with the supplementary materials. I have all the resources in a single file - here's what it looks like in Windows explorer.

                                                                        [Spanish explorer]

And I keep all my notes in a LibreOffice spreadsheet one page to each session.

At this speed, I may be able to finish the first MIT course in a year. Hopefully I'll be able to talk with my Hispanic neighbors (with only a little good natured laughing.)

--- Spanish ---

Well, I have my Spanish textbook and workbook and am ready to embark on this year-long (and maybe more) adventure. I'm starting with MIT's Spanish I course, which is available on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare site (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/global-studies-and-languages/21g-701-spanish-i-fall-2003). The online course tells you which materials they use (you have to buy your own but they're not expensive) and provides a syllabus, calendar of activities, assignments, related resources, and in-class activities (which has handouts as PDFs).

I have set up a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet as a notebook and I have other resources that I will be using including the exercises and games on  the Digital Dialects website (http://www.digitaldialects.com). There is also a (fairly) nearby branch of the Denver Public Library (the Schlessman Family Branch) that has a regular Spanish conversation group. I may attend that once I become a little conversant.

The MIT course uses a Spanish TV series (which can be accessed through the Annenberg Foundation website http://learner.org/series/destinos) as a core learning experience and a companion textbook and workbook. There are 26 episodes and 52 class sections. The course is designed as a semester course but I will be taking more time with it for additional exercises (and because I'm old).

I think I've mentioned that I've tried to pick up Spanish twice before and failed. As you get older, it's harder to pick up new languages. German and American Sign Language were easy and Spanish looks like it should be easy also, and I would like to be able to converse with my Hispanic neighbors.

There are many ways to pick up a new language - commercial and free Internet resources and community programs. It's fun and you can spend as much time and money as you want. Especially check out the MIT OpenCourseWare language courses.

--- Social and language education at the library ---

The Denver Public Library is scattered all over the Denver area with 24 branch libraries in addition to the big, castle-like central library in downtown Denver. In addition to providing books, movies and educational materials to their patrons, they offer many educational experiences.

The end of the year is a transitional event for me because I am changing topics for my adventures, but it's more of a blending than a sharp change. I've been studying social sciences, but now I will turn my attention to language. Obviously, language is social.

When I visit Mi Pueblo Market, I wish I could talk to the checkout person in Spanish.

Unfortunately, the last two attempts to learn Spanish has been frustrating. I didn't have this much trouble learning German or AMSLAN. I realize that new languages are harder to pick up as a person gets older, but I can tell from my past attempts that Spanish should be an easy language, so next year will be one more (last?) attempt to learn Spanish.

The Denver Public Library offers many tools for learning new languages and I will be using it. Specific to Spanish, not only are there books, books on tape, and movies in Spanish, but they have bilingual events. Looking at their online calendar  for next year, I see weekly bilingual guitar lessons offered by the Valdez-Perry Branch and the Schlessman Family Branch offers weekly Spanish conversation groups. And there have been many single events in the past.

I will have to develop a basic conversational grasp of Spanish before I can make much use of these learning tools, but they're something to look forward to.

Does your local public library have a website? Check it out. You may be surprised about how much your library offers.