Last post we talked about the French accent used in a popular language learning course. This time we look at why it is important to try and get the accent right! Often when you speak English to a person that speaks English with a different accent it is easy to miscommunicate with each other.
There are several families of words that can be switched from English into French or Spanish and in 90% of the cases you have the same word, easily translated. There are of course exceptions to these rules and words like this are called ‘false friends’.
An easy family to translate into Spanish or French from English is the family of words ending in the letters -ion. Like organization, termination, etc. To make it a French word it you just say it with a French accent.
Easy.
To make it a Spanish word, change the letter ‘t’ to the letter ‘c’ and pronounce it accordingly. The letter ‘i’ also takes an accent so that organization becomes organizacíon.
At some point in your language learning quest you should get involved in some form of ‘total immersion. This is where you become totally immersed in the language. The immersion situation is usually of greatest benefit when you have reached a certain level of competence in your studies, where you can put together a great number of sentences and can understand and make a load of verbs in the different times or tenses.
Immersion is where you go to a country or community where your target language is being spoken, and you become surrounded by the language in its native environment. This way you see and hear and feel the words, phrases, expressions and culture in context. The best time to go varies with most people, but most adults may find it best to go when they have mastered a certain level of the language learning.
Going to a new country may not be too practical for your lanuage learning situation, but there are things that you can do to ‘imitate’ this.
You can actually ’simulate’ this immersion by surrounding yourself at home with the sounds of the target language by listening to the radio, TV, films etc in the target language.
So as an example of this simulated immersion, if you are learning Spanish, a very powerful technique is to watch a Spanish movie. But watch it first to get the feel of it, then watch it with your dictionary and a pen and paper, so that you write down all the words and phrases. You may get a friend along who knows the language to help you as you transcribe this movie, and a few other movies.
Now, as you go about your daily life you can have this movie, or this group of movies, playing repeatedly in the background. Repeat the words of the actors. Act them out. Copy them. Exaggerate their actions, phrases and expressions. Soon you will have lots of the Spanish phrases down pat.
Repeat the movies ten to fifteen times each! This repetition will reinforce the Spanish things that you have learned whilst transcribing. Allow a day or more between viewings as the brain likes to ‘process’ any new material and allow it to bed in. You can do the same procedure with Spanish radio shows etc.
You can listen to radio shows, but do record them, translate them, then play them again and again as you go about your daily routine. You will absorb loads of the structure of the language.
Exactly.
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Here’s a little idiom for Spanish learners.
To drink too much is alzar de codo.
Juan alzaba de codo cuando era joven!
Juan drank too much when he was young.
Alzar means to raise, and el codo is the elbow, so literally it means one raises one’s elbow.
Learning Spanish proverbs and idioms is a great way to expand you vocab and get to know the thinking and customs of a nation.