Conference turris::womannotes-v2

    Re: .0
    
    >First: I would like to know if non-Spanish speaking noters who have 
    >taken Spanish found it exceptionally difficult.  Or if you found it 
    >fairly easy.
    
    I found it easy, but different people have different aptitudes.  It's a
    Latin-based language, so many of the words are similar.  The hardest
    thing for me is masculine/feminine articles.  There are some guidelines
    but you end up just having to memorize them.  If you have a solid
    understanding of English grammar, that can help.  Verbs are usually
    pretty easy.  There are some irregular verbs; again, there are a few
    guidelines but memorization is what it takes.  Use flash cards or do a
    lot of reading in Spanish (read Gabriel Garcia Marques in the original)
    to build your familiarity.

    Spanish is reputedly one of the (if not the) easiest languages to
    learn. I hated Latin and French in school, but loved Spanish.
    Unfortunately, I haven't used it in 15 years, and my vocabulary
    has deteriorated abysmally. I have to do something about that...
    
    After three years of high school Spanish, I was in Spain for a week
    and found absolutely no problem in making myself understood by the
    natives. I had a harder time understanding them, but that was only
    because they speak incredibly fast (I'd have as hard a time
    understanding English-speakers who spoke that fast).
    
    --- jerry

    
    I don't know if this works for everybody, but it did for me: I have
    always been a fan of crime stories. The first mysteries I read in
    French (my mother tongue) when I was about 10 years old, were Agatha 
    Christie's books, I then started reading them in English, Spanish,
    Italian and German. For each language I'd first start by reading in
    the language I was learning a few stories I had previously read in 
    French, and then graduate to "new" stories by the same author. When
    I had run through an author (Agatha was very prolific!), I'd start
    with another one, like Rex Stout, or Carter Brown. Certainly not
    great litterature, but lot's of fun - if you like that sort of book
    - and gives a you a good feeling for the language.
    
    Reading Gabriel Garcia Marques in the text to start with would probably
    have discouraged me very quickly. A translated text is basically
    always easier to read than the original, as the translator tends
    to simplify a complex text as he goes. I sort of "graduated" to
    reading authors in the original, though I don't mind reading Huxley
    in Spanish, Marquez in French, or Stendhal in English!
    
    Newspapers in foreign languages are also a nice way to involve yourself
    in both the language and the culture you want to learn about.
    
    Hope your studies prosper, and you can plan your next vacation in
    a Spanish speaking area without having to eat tortilla everyday
    for lack of any other food you can name!
    
    Best wishes,
    Joana

    
    
    WEll, as was said before, different folks have different aptitudes, but
    I think *in general*  Spanish IS easy to learn.  It is a fully
    phonetic language ... if you can say it you can spell it, and vice
    versa (so long as you have first learned the sounds of the alphabet!)
    
    I took it in high school and college, and found it very easy to get
    to a point where i could be understood by 'natives' and where I could
    more or less understand them (if I kept telling them to slow down...
    mas despacio por favor!  ???? been a LLLLOOnnng time...)
    
    Reading some papers might be a good idea, or, as suggested some
    books you already have some familiarity with...Don Quixote, etc.
    just be sure to learn the alphabet, and memorize the verb conjugations.
    Funny, once you learn it, you may find yourself thinking in Spanish.
    When I was taking it in high school, i happened to re-read an English
    paper i was writing, and found several of the words in Spanish!!
    
    Good luck, and have fun!
    
    deb
    

    I'll add another vote for the relative ease of learning Spanish.
    As already mentioned, the phonetic aspect of the language makes
    it much easier to learn and write than many languages, and a good
    English background (re. sentence structure, ability to recognize
    the objective case, etc.) is helpful.
    
    Getting even more basic than any of the previous suggestions, and
    perhaps very important if you've never studied another language
    before, is to _stay current_ with the vocabulary you're learning
    in class.  Maybe this reflects my attitude when I studied Spanish
    in high school (you know, cram before the exams rather than study 
    the vocabulary daily).  Well, that was a sure-fire way to forget 
    the vocabulary almost immediately.
    
    Good luck,
    Karen 
                             

    Marilyn, you can do it!!  I started Spanish lessons about
    5 years ago to help me on the job, and in 2 years had mastered
    enough to survive working on my MBA in Mexican/Puerto Rican
    universities.
    
    Is the focus of the course conversation or standard grammar?
    If it's conversation, be sure you jump right in and don't
    worry about making mistakes.  If it's a standard academic
    class, the focus will be more on grammar and reading/writing - 
    you probably won't get the speaking practice you need.  In 
    either event, look for *any* opportunity to talk with other 
    Spanish speakers - actually talking is the key point in feeling
    comfortable with the language.
    
    Regarding grammar to start off right with:  my Spanish teacher
    once told us that mastering the subjunctive was the key to
    managing Spanish (terrific, since English doesn't do much
    with it).  You probably won't hit it until halfway into the
    course, but take the time to understand it when you do.
    Aside from that, I found Spanish to be very regular in how it
    does things:  set up little tables for yourself to see how the
    verbs all conjugate, etc.
    
    Might also suggest you add one or two Spanish-related Notes
    conferences  - there's one on the Spanish language and 
    another on Mexico (VAXWRK::MEXICO - can't remember the other)
    which have some of their notes in Spanish.  They're both
    active with learning_the_language Noters.
    
    If you have some specific interests, develop your vocabulary
    around them (I pasted little Spanish labels on all my spice
    jars & kitchen stuff, and could talk semi-intelligently
    about cooking in Spanish long before everything else caught up!).
    
    
    !te deseo mucho exito!
    (wishing you lots of success - and I have a great statistics
    text [in English] to recommend when you get there),
    Kathy

    re:.3
    
    Actually, from what I've heard, Garcia Marquez works with his
    translators (at least in some languages) so that the translation
    is quite faithful to his original. Borges allegedly does the
    same. On the other hand, Garcia Marquez's language is a bit too
    rich to start off with if you're just learning the language.
    Having just finished LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA in English,
    though, I've been thinking about seeing if Shoenhoff's in Harvard
    Square has the original Spanish-language edition so that I can
    use it to get back into reading Spanish.
    
    re:.6
    
    About the subjunctive. I had very little idea of what the hell it
    even *was* until I learned Spanish.
    
    --- jerry

    Having been at one time very fluent in Spanish, I too think it is much
    easier than French. Similar but easier, because basically every letter
    is pronounced in a Spanish word.
    
    Find people to speak with and practice -- talk to yourself in your car,
    or shower or wherever. The more you speak, the more you will begin to
    think in the language, which is key. They say that when you dream in a
    language, you're halfway to mastering it.
    
    PS. What's HUES?
    
    Muy buena suerte; espagnol es una lengua muy bella y musica...
    
    --Lynn
    

    Okay, so read Neruda or Garcia Lorca or whomever (maybe poetry would be
    easier than novels, if only because it's shorter). My familiarity with 
    Spanish literature is limited to what I read in college.
    
    I do think that speaking practice is important, especially if you ever
    hope to understand people speaking to you.  Reading is not so hard; you
    can look up words you don't understand and spend time over it.

    One way to practice your listening skills is to use a short wave radio
    receiver.  Radio Habana and Spanish Foreign Radio are both fairly
    easily accessible in the evenings.  Also, if you don't care whether or
    not you listen to a native speaker, Voice of America, Radio Moscow,
    BBC, and others also have Spanish language broadcasts; but I think it
    is preferable to listen to natives from Spanish speaking nations, if
    possible.  Tape recording news broadcasts, for example,then trying to
    transcribe what you hear can be a worthwhile exercise, although the
    kind of vocabulary you tend to learn in news broadcasts includes words
    like "hijacking", "strike", and "hostage", which may not be overly
    useful in ordinary speech.  Nevertheless, that and listening to other
    sorts of radio programs can definitely improve your listening
    comprehension skills.  This can be useful because native Spanish
    speakers inflect their sentences differently from what native English
    speakers are used to hearing.

    I studied Spanish for four years in high school, and in college I
    studied some French and some Russian; I found Spanish to be the easiest
    of the three languages to learn, at least initially.

    For one thing, a native English speaker can deal with Spanish nouns
    very easily.  Like most modern Romance languages, Spanish has
    completely eliminated noun cases, so you don't have to worry about
    mastering all those nasty declensions.  In this sense, Spanish is much
    more like English, with the exception that Spanish has taken the matter
    even farther by eliminating even the genitive case, which English still
    retains (you would say "el libro de Juanita", which translates to
    "the book of Juanita", instead of the English "Juanita's book").
    Spanish still has cases for its pronouns, but then so does English, so
    that is not an alien concept either.

    You do have to deal with the fact that Spanish nouns do have gender,
    but what is easy about Spanish is that, as a general rule, the ending
    of the noun identifies its gender.  There are exceptions to this, of
    course, but it is usually true.  In French, you have no such luck, and
    as a result you have to memorize the definite article with each noun
    you learn.  So in general noun gender is not a difficult concept to
    learn.

    Probably the hardest part about learning Spanish is dealing with the
    verbs.  You do have to learn conjugations, and as you get into more
    advanced Spanish, some of the tenses, like subjunctive (mentioned in
    earlier replies) and the two basic kinds of past tenses are somewhat
    difficult for native English speakers to deal with.  If you learn
    Mexican Spanish, rather than Castillian Spanish, the second person
    plural is conjugated the same way as the third person plural, which
    eliminates one of the conjugations to have to learn, and making it a
    bit easier.

    Pronunciation and accentuation is phonetic, and follows strict rules,
    with no exceptions.  There are a few quirky differences from English. 
    B and V, for example, are pronounced the same way, and not generally
    like we do in English.  In fact, both B and V are pronounced
    differently depending on their position in a word.  Other pronunciation
    differences are minor and generally insignificant for purposes of
    learning the language.

    Most of the other issues involve specific rules here and there that you
    have to deal with when learning any language.  In general, I think
    you'll find that Spanish is a fairly easy language to learn, as
    languages go.

    -- Mike

    	Although I've never studied Spanish, I took four years of French
    	(and was delighted to find out how quickly my French improved when
    	I spent 5 weeks in Paris speaking only French for weeks on end!)
    
    	By the time we left, even my 9 month old baby's gurgling sounded
    	*very* distinctly French.
    
    	I've forgotten most of my French since then, but I hope to re-study
    	it (just for the enjoyment of it) after seeing the various points
    	of advice in this topic on how to get effective practice in a 
    	different language. 
    
    	I especially like the idea of developing listening skills through
    	radio broadcasts.  I'll have to give that a try!
    
    	Good luck with your Spanish class, Marilyn!!  Let us know how it
    	goes!