Miscellaneous Thread V

How the hell does that work? You getting dollar?

Manamans taking active responsibility for dat dere personal statement so he can get look prestige

Manamans taking active responsibility for dat dere personal statement so he can get look prestige

miley cyrus is still a beaut

Rachel Riley doing MNF though ❤️

Miley Cyrus would do a porno based on Clinton.

How the hell does that work? You getting dollar?

There are no other modern language staff members who can actually speak Spanish, so they asked me to go through the work with the students while there's another teacher in the room at the same time to just make sure they behave and stuff. Been told to make a note of my teaching hours and they'll be able to sort me out cash wise.

What level would you say you're at with Spanish? I'm assuming pretty good, are you fluent?

I'm at a level where I understand how the language works, and how to structure most sentences but my vocabulary lets me down. Memorising the words is a ball ache. Apparently you only need around 500 words to be able to speak conversational Spanish (guessing this depends on the words as many are the same as in English) so it shouldn't be too difficult.

I can have conversations with people online using Vocaroo and be able to articulate myself most of the time, but I end up having to look for odd words in Spanish. Often I end up guessing by thinking of a different word in English that means the same thing as the word I don't know the Spanish for, then assuming I'll know what the Spanish is based on how the language is. Example: I was talking with somebody from Chile and didn't know the word for clean, so thought of sanitary and guessed at sanitario, which ended up being correct.

I think once you've clocked how it works then it's just a matter of vocab.

Also I am lost 90% of the time when a Spanish speaker talks at full speed.

I can speak it well, wouldn't really say fluent though. In any case, the year 10 stuff is pretty basic. Simple vocabulary for things like family members, holidays and things like tenses, agreements (making an adjective the same gender as the subject and so on).

The best way to learn Spanish is just by speaking it as much as possible. If you don't know a word while you're speaking and look it up, you'll remember it eventually; even if you forget it again 3 or 4 times. This way your vocabulary gradually builds up. I get your point about not understanding native speakers haha. Especially in Spain, they speak so fast it's impossible to understand them. In other Spanish speaking countries people tend to speak a lot slower and more clearly eg. Mexico, Colombia.

hearing you say that reminds me how poor language learnign in english schools really is.. I mean compare that to here, my year 10(equivilant) that I teach here can have full conversations, cope with pretty advanced writing in english, and a normal lesson is to push their use of language and teach them specialist vocab to build on their solid foundations.. today we put them through a pretty tough debate about politics/ethical issuses only using their english, and they came through pretty well.

Why do you think in general the english suck at languages?

Probably because they don't need to know any others. You can get by pretty much anywhere in the world if English is your first language. Even in countries which have their own language, English has a high status and a lot of people speak it as a second language.

hearing you say that reminds me how poor language learnign in english schools really is.. I mean compare that to here, my year 10(equivilant) that I teach here can have full conversations, cope with pretty advanced writing in english, and a normal lesson is to push their use of language and teach them specialist vocab to build on their solid foundations.. today we put them through a pretty tough debate about politics/ethical issuses only using their english, and they came through pretty well.

Why do you think in general the english suck at languages?

I think we start too late and the only other culture that has a decent presence over here in terms of the TV, music and so on, is American so we have no desire to learn say Spanish because of Latin American culture. I speak with an Argentinian and she was speaking English from the age of four in terms of learning words and when the Backstreet Boys came out she wanted to know what they were saying so learned a lot more.

When I started German at 11 it already felt like a chore but I learned more on my own doing Spanish in my 20s so maybe the teaching has to do something with it too.

So I think starting earlier when we have a greater capacity for learning and a greater presence of non English speaking cultures in our TV, music etc (I'm seeing this at the moment with K Pop and English wanting to learn Korean) would give people more desire to learn a language. Don't forget most English sinply don't give a ****.