Posts Tagged ‘learnaing’

All done without mirrors Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

I’ve been good. I’ve been limiting the amount of English I use in a day (with the exception of work). That means not too much Radio 4 and, not much in the way of English books (even though I’ve got a few hundred on my Palm) and I’ve restricted my TV piracy to Dr Who and nothing else (Arrrrr, pieces of eight and all that). I love to read though, which is a great impetus to keep working at the Spanish. At the moment I’m reading a crime thriller called La Reina sin espejo (literally the queen without mirror, although I suspect it means something slightly different). I’ll read a page or two, and underline any words or phrases I don’t get, then go back and reread it and try and work it out from the context. Sometimes that works, other times it doesn’t which is when I use the dictionary. All the words I’ve had to work out I make a note of in a little notebook and every day I review that list and test myself (okay, I say every day but I’m not puritanical about it, I have days off). The only problem is that the book opens with an autopsy scene and I’m not sure I’m going to need to say sierra circular (circular saw), lóbrego (gloomy) and lúgubre (dismal) or la puñalada (the stab wound) too much, but in every page there have been at least a dozen new words, or new meanings for old words. My favourite so far is profano as an adjective meaning layperson or ignorant.

The other attraction of this approach is that any form of Spanish is fair game, radio 5 (all news), Los Simpsons, Futurama, trash TV and chat shows. I quite like buying translations of comics (The Authority is a current favourite, it was created by a British writer called Warren Ellis and the last ones I read were the adventures of Kev, an ex paratrooper who swears a lot and takes on some very neatly written superheroes (including a different version of Batman and Superman who are a gay couple, which, well, was unexpected to say the least)).

I still have some way to go, because I was watching a gameshow called pasapalabra (pass the word) in which the host speaks with the pace of a racing commentator on the final furlong and I couldn’t follow him at all. It sounded like blablabienblablablablablapreparadoblablablabla. Understanding that is my goal, then I can move on to understanding Andalucians, who apparently have an accent as impenetrable as Glaswegians.