THERES NO BETTER WAY TO LEARN a new language than to be immersed in a situation where it is the only language being spoken. It is almost the equivalent of being dropped in a swimming pool and given the sink or swim choice. That was my thinking, when I bought the Rosetta Stone Spanish software (local product from Harrisonburg), some time back. It immediately went into Spanish and you had to figure out what was being said by analyzing the context. Well, this week, I had the real-life version of that situation, when I was working on a contract in Harrisonburg, at a store where Spanish is spoken about 80 percent of the time. I focused on my work, as the three young ladies in the store conversed with customers in Spanish, but I realized that I was understanding about a third of what they were saying It turns out that part of my trouble was the different dialects that they were using. One of the women was from Puerto Rico, while the other two were from different regions of Mexico. What little of the standard Spanish vocabulary that I had learned was not enough to cover the range of words that were being used by the trio. They dropped out of the high-speed Spanish, every once in a while, to say something that they wanted me to hear, but their customers were entirely Spanish-speaking. I must have learned four or five new phrases each day, and I learned the casual way that real people speak their language, rather than the formal wording of academia. If I can focus on the Rosetta Stone software and then spend time around native speakers, like these folks, then I might actually learn this language..Trying to learn it without both parts of that equation is a slow and clunky process.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 12:14:50 +0000
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