Toward the start of this blog, I stated that I had an advantage with learning Spanish growing up here in Denver, where there have been lots of native Spanish speakers around me. From the start I wasn’t left totally unaccustomed to the phonemes of the language, and I already knew how to do things like … Continue reading My Dumb Mouth
There’s a saying I’ve heard a few times bandied about by some of the folks that talk about language learning, which is, “You can’t learn a new language, only get used to it.” I’m not sure who said it originally, or if it is a quote with a traceable origin at all, in contrast to … Continue reading Learning Vs. Getting Used to It
Reading 1984 over the past week has been an interesting experience. It is very difficult to read, which of course was expected, considering the jump in reading level compared to the books I’ve read before, but I’ve made myself jump up levels of difficulty before. I’d go as far to say that it is the … Continue reading Reading Out of my Comfort Zone
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are gathered here today to mourn the loss of all the poor, innocent puns, taken far too soon from this world, struck down in the act of translation from English to Spanish. Some may not mourn their loss, some may even feel the world is a better place without them, but … Continue reading Pouring One Out for the Puns
In my daily life, I am frequently brought into contact with people who speak languages other than English. It’s not always Spanish—I overhear conversations in German, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, and others that I haven’t been able to recognize—but most often it is in fact Spanish. And if there’s one surefire way to reinforce … Continue reading Listening to a Foreign Language: The Struggle is Real
I finished Harry Potter y la Cámara Secreta last Friday and had to decide what to read next. Well, not really, Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban would be next, as I’ve been saying that I wanted to stay with the series. It’s a longstanding favorite that I find myself rereading again and again, … Continue reading The Role of Repetition
There’s this thing that a lot of people do to themselves when setting goals that leads to a self-defeating cycle. They don’t actually set a goal at all and leave their plans nebulous. This causes a whole host of problems, first and foremost being that it’s difficult to come up with a plan for how … Continue reading The Starting Line Mirage
Ostensibly, one of the primary goals of this blog is to serve as an example after the fact of “What it takes to learn a language,” (if I’d done it perfectly, I would have started this back on day one, but hindsight being what it is and all, just gotta make do with the portion … Continue reading Learning a Foreign Language: How Much Time Does it Take?
I’ve always hated The Tortoise and the Hare. The allegory has a good enough message and all; don’t be lazy, don’t be conceited, hard work pays off in the end, that’s all good stuff, sure. And it all applies very neatly to language learning if you think about it. Dashing forward in heavy sprints that … Continue reading The Tortoise and the Hare
In keeping track of all these numbers, one of the figures I haven’t been posting is what this is doing to my bank account. An old saw about language learning is how incredibly expensive it is by necessity. You need to go abroad and be immersed in the language in order to learn it, you … Continue reading Learning a Foreign Language Without Going Broke
Fumbling Toward Fluent 