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La vida bonita – the beautiful life.
I’ve been studying Spanish this past year and am more than halfway through the Duolingo course for it.
While I’m not fluent in it yet, I can have simple conversations in it and often understand the gist of what someone is saying in it if they’re not speaking too fast.
On average, I spend about thirty minutes a day practicing Spanish, but I’m hoping to do even more this year now that I have some of the basics down and don’t have to look up every single word.
Listening to music and watching tv shows and films from this language seem to be a logical next step for me.
Once I do become fluent in it, I’m hoping to learn French next. It’s one of the two official languages here in Canada, so being trilingual would open up a lot of doors for me both professionally and personally.
Took Spanish in college, could read it after two years. Never go to the conversational part.
The conversational part is much more difficult in my experience!
Spanish is fun and familiar, yet still foreign, to me despite being exposed to as much of it as possible as a child.
French was still the international language of diplomacy when I was born. I enjoy reading it without a dictionary in hand. I probably never will be able to speak it in a way that doesn’t cause native speakers pain.
In a way this post is disappointing…My parents never liked the way most Anglo-Californians used to refuse to speak Spanish or even say place names properly. People in the state capital said something closer to “sack of minnows” than to “sacramento.” We thought mandatory language study at school would help. You’re saying that, despite mandatory language study at school, Anglo-Canadians don’t learn *much* more French than Anglo-Californians do Spanish.
There is mandatory language study in Canada (I believe?), but I didn’t grow up here and so never learned French.
Depending on the school district, the required amount of language study might only be a couple of years as well unless your parents sent you to a French immersion school. So a lot of people can understand a little French (or whatever language they took if they happened to pick Latin or something instead), but bilingualism or being fluent in French is not at all assumed here unless you live in Quebec.
I completely agree that there should be more years of foreign language study required to graduate, though. Knowing 2+ languages is so valuable, and it’s good for your brain, too.
I spend about 30 minutes on Duolingo these day, too. It’s so easy to fit in when you have little bit of free time
Nice! And, yeah, that’s one of the big benefits of it for sure. Five to ten minutes here and there can really add up.
Spanish is such a fun language, too. It ought to be easier to pick up French once you’ve gotten a good grasp on Spanish since they’re both Latin-based languages. Have fun with it!
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Ooh, that’s a good point! Thanks, Aymee.
Watching TV and films is a great way to work on the language. There are a couple of ways to do training wheels as you work on your Spanish comprehension. One way is to turn on the English subtitles as a sort of crutch. But another way to go is to put a Spanish dub on an English movie you already know so that you’re still working on the comprehension, but have the aid of knowing what should be generally going on or said
That makes a lot of sense!
30 minutes a day? Props! With DuoLingo I begin finding it tedious after five minutes. I think my record was 20 in one day.
Thank you. 🙂