In a previous thread, Fu Da Wei made an observation about how he could readily understand Spanish simply on reading it. There’s no question that, for an English speaker, learning Spanish is much easier than Chinese. (Fu Da Wei is a newcomer to Spanish, and he’s also studying Chinese with us.) With Chinese, reading doesn’t offer the same learning potential to the novice as Spanish does. With Spanish, there are so many cognates and basic similarities (to English) that you can guess meanings and get through simple texts, even at a newbie stage. (Reading is a really good way to receive input valuable.) With Chinese, however, you need to memorize a fairly wide knowledge of the characters before reading becomes viable. (We’ve relied more on audio with ChinesePod to get to that point.)
I’d like to develop a discussion here on what you, the learners, see as the ‘pain points’ in learning Spanish. What are the most difficult things about learning Spanish? Whether or not you’ve ever studied Chinese or any other language, I’m keen to hear your views. The more we know about your needs, the more we can do to help.
Ken Carroll
I anticipate that verb tenses are going to be crazy. And, of course, it is a cruel universe that ensures virtually all of the most common verbs (of any inflected language) will be irregular. One would think that these heavy-lifters would be somewhat fixed. Not so! And frankly, it’s no great secret that Ken’s tendency is to shy away from explicit grammar-based explanations(*), so I’m curious how you’ll contrast and elucidate these nuances between tenses. Add to that the quaint way — as we have already seen at the Newbie level — that Spanish slaps pronouns onto the end of verbs in certain circumstances (ie: ver/verlo, conocer/conocerte, llamar/llamarse) and you’ll understand why I keep a small bottle of aspirin near my computer labeled: “Spanish”.
Oh, by the way … though the number of cognates and similarities are (doubtless) an advantage, they can give you a false sense of security as well. You start wanting to slap an “o” onto everything (”Waiter! Yo quiero uno glasso de beero, por favor!”) And you you have any grounding in another Romance language, it’s easy to mix’em up. A Spanish friend of mine was late to work. I wanted to say “You’re late!” and must have been thinking of the French (”Vous êtes en retard!”) when I said: “Usted es retard!” On the bright side, I learned my first Spanish swear words soon thereafter.
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(*) Not that I particularly blame him. In order to use the jargon you have to make sure that everyone knows the jargon (show of hands … what’s a past passive gerund?) and outside of starting GrammarPod, he’s kind of limited in his approach.
I think the challenge with Spanish is going to be SPEED: While I can read it pretty well, and speak in a halting manner, when I converse with a native speaker, keeping up with their speaking pace is like getting a sip of water from a firehose.
To that end, I’d recommend that even at the Newbie level, you give examples of how the dialog will sound at full speed. Maria does that to a point near the end of the lesson in review.
The Pimsleur CDs are generally pretty good with this: Start with a full speed conversation, then break it down into slower components.
JimmyB
For me it is also speed in listening, though not as much as this challenges me in French, because Spanish is less ligated.
A second point is that even you have studied Spanish for a while you experience great disappointment how little you get e.g. listening on Madrid’s streets: there is such a huge gap between formal and everyday language.
Grammar is not so much of a challenge to me (native German) apart from elements that my native language does not know, such as subjunctive (but I lived through this pain in French before, so it’s kind of déjà vu now ;-)) or the extra past tense.
Or the 2 forms for “to be”: ser / estar
Reading is rather easy for me with a base of Latin, French and some Italian. I had to stop all Italian though when I started with Spanish as I kept mixing up everything… too similar for parallel learning for my mind.
Ken,
Instead of just slowing down the release of new material, I strongly recommend that you halt all such activity on both Chinesepod and SpanishSense for the immediate future, and put all hands on deck towards fixing the bugs, typos, usability issues, and other errors in the Premium content on both sites. These issues are diminishing the customer experience and perceived value of this content and your reputation much more than you realize.
The great work you did in launching, developing, and enhancing Chinesepod bought you a lot of goodwill and faith with your paying user base. You are throwing that away. The perception is that you are spitting in the face of the customers that use and pay for the content that is key to the viability of your business.
The podcasts continue to be great. I know I will continue to use them if I am forced to cancel my pay subscription. I will probably hire a teacher as a replacement for the premium content.
One of an endless supply of examples: Newbie Lesson - Starting A Phone Call - Word Match Exercise: What the heck is the spanish translation of “VMIP3SM”? And why does “habla” show up twice in the list? How can such basic errors continue to persist?
The new errors, mistakes, bugs, and usability issues are perceptually 10 times more powerful than the new enhancements. They overshadow them. This is a shame, but that is the nature of human perception.
My personal “pain point” in Spanish isn’t speed in understanding, for I can generally don’t have to conjugate (or de-conjugate, if that makes any sense) the verbs that the speaker uses. However, when I speak, I find it difficult to conjugate in real time, especially outside of the present tense. I am hoping that this will get better with more and more listening, that is where I struggle the most, conjugating verbs in real time (especially the irregulars!). I’ll be interested to see how verb conjugation gets taught here, and if I may suggest this, do you think a verb conjugating tool of some sort could be made? Maybe a link to the full conjugation of each verb used in a dialog? Or a verb conjugating activity? I would personally love any one of those!
You know what - I love an idea that Henry’s talking about: The “floatover model” that works so well for Chinesepod could be modified to bring up a full conjugation table when you hover over a verb… It would make the immediate meaning clear, but also offer the full depth of that word.
In fact, that’s maybe the “aha” that I was missing: Chinese doesn’t deal with noun/adjective gender, nor with verb conjugation to the same level as the latins… so there’s an unavoidable EXTRA level of info that NEEDS to be conveyed.
Alas, this does feel a bit like textbook learning, but anytime you learn a verb, you’ll want to know how you could repurpose it, so having all of the uses immediately available would be very useful.
You know as I’m typing this, it occurs to me that the “old school” way to teach these verbs is to focus on one tense at a time… perhaps the NEW model could be to teach a verb and teach it’s uses VERTICALLY - to introduce ESTAR, in the present form, but immediately offer the future, past, imperfect tenses, so that you can truly own the verb across time tenses, rather than saying “for introductory level, you start with present tense across the board, then as you get smarter, you learn past and simple future, then as you advance you learn the past infinitive and future imperfect, and when you’re REALLY smart, welcome to the conditional and subjunctive”.
(and I’m using verbage from French here, which is what I’m most comfortable with as a second language, but I’m sure Spanish has equivalents)
I think that CPod’s excellent Web2.0 toolkits could easily be modified to deliver this.
Ok, crazy rant done. JimmyB
Buenas tardes, Henry
I understand your point about ‘not being able to conjugate in real time’ and mainly out of the present tense. This seems to be because the present tenses are the first we learned, thus our minds are very used to them already, so as speech is let’s say ‘live’ and we still need to say a lot, to start planning what to say!, (it will take to much time, wouldn’t it? and we have thousands of thoughts and ideas to communicate!) so we take the first structures that come to our minds which seems to be always the simplest or the first we learned. we are still discussing how can we have a nice way to present conjugation meanwhile I’ll suggest a conjugation trainer I found in internet, which might be useful for you… http://www.vocabulix.com/
Prez Life,
I respect your feedback, and you are right to point out that there are unresolved issues with the site. All I can say is that we have already solved a tremendous amount of issues, and that we will continue to work as fast as we can on the site until all the issues are resolved.
That said, I’m afraid I disagree with you when you suggest we don’t value premium users. Actually, the new architecture represents thousands of hours of effort and thought, trying to improve the service for all subscribers. We are ambitious in wanting to solve learners problems, and the new site was necessary to keep improving.
Also, on the reputation issue, I think we have been regarded positively by the community so far precisely because we were creative and ambitious, and very responsive to feedback. I take your point that the new site has had it’s problems, but I don’t think we’ve been less responsive or ambitious, so I’m hoping that once the teething issues are settled we will still be recognized as a team that works hard on behalf of it’s customers.
I hope these opinions don’t come across as defensive. We actually really value criticism as it keeps us motivated and focused, and your opinion is valuable. Stick with us Prez Life, and I assure you you will see progress and responsiveness and commitment to helping students.
Steve
The main point here seems to be fluency. Whern I hear the word ’speed’ I take that to refer to acquiring items in a way that becomes automatic, second nature. Exposure to the items in questions is obviously necessary, but I believe that true acquisition (at the reception level) is inductive and therefore not conscious. Patterns, rather than abstract rules, I think, are the way to go. I guess I have to try to prove this point in the context of SpanishSense. I think we can. (Developing the skill of speaking is another matter.)
Ken
Thank you for your response, Steve. I know the intentions are good.