BoSox

Now that i am not drinking i have the time and energy to learn spanish, which i have been putting off for ages.

my soon to be fiance is from Colombia and i can barely communicate with her family (not always a bad thing hahaha) and i hate that.

how many of you learned a language with your new found free time?

Day 2 of sober living, day 1 of spanish learning...

pls give tips, i suck at learning new languages

tangningsheng

I have found being sober has really helped my chinese learning. That's a great idea. Ask your fiance to practice with you I am sure she will love it. My brother's g/f is from Puerto Rico and he has used Rosetta Stone and he has thought that was a good help. Good luck at your study it's important to embrace your significant others culture and that means learning the language.

BoSox

tangningsheng: thanks for the advice. i am downloading a Pimsleur spanish audio guide which i have heard is very good and downloaded "learn spanish with mosalingua" on my android phone...

question for you: i am wondering since you brother's gf is from Puerto Rico if learning spanish he is finding a lot of problems with the difference from Castilian (Spain) Spanish and Latin American Spanish?

tangningsheng

Good question, since I am in China and he is in the states we don't communicate as often as I would like. He has told me the biggest difference between book study and actually speaking with Native Spanish speakers is that books and Rosetta are very formal and PR uses a lot of slang, so people think he speaks quite funny. I will try and ask him about that specific question.

Johnston

Excellent hobby. I learned German years ago and enjoy staying current with it.

tangningsheng

That's great Bosox. I am excited for you. The first time I went to my wife's home I could barely speak any chinese. The second time I could communicate fairly well. This year it will be much easier, as I can do daily conversation quite well. Still have some problems with the tones and some more complexed sentence structure but the work pays off. My wife is very happy that we can use English and Chinese at home.

BoSox

This app i downloaded is wonderful, by the way. Would recommend to anyone. for words with differences between Latin American and European it lets me know which word to use for each.

Thanks for the support guys, and i will keep everyone updated on my progress.

Everyone feel free to chime in with their stories of learning a language or their desire to learn

Skye2

Well......I'd been thinking of learning Urdu and Polish for some time now, so after reading this, i'm going to see what 'beginners' lessons are available online, to get an idea of whether i'd like it or not. I can get by in French already and taught English over there for a little while. Looking forward to surprising the guys in the local shops with the other two

endlesspatience

Language study has been one of the most important things in my life since I decided to work on recovery. I used to study Japanese university and evening school and this year after getting a bit more sober I started again with private lessons. I have kept it up, almost every single day for a year. I have an exam on Sunday and judging my practice using past papers, I will score about 80 percent.

So how does this fit in with sobriety?

First of all, I have my lessons on Saturday morning and this has been a great help in discouraging me from drinking on Friday night. It also gives me a motivation to go the library, meet Japanese friends and enjoy some creative writing. My therapist told me that creativity is a really important part of recovery.

So my tip would be not to rely on websites or a lover/ fiancee. If you can, try to find a professional teacher for private lessons or join a class because you'll find that you can learn at your own pace and I am sure your fiancee will be impressed if you learn new words and grammar.

MythOfSisyphus

Back in the day I studied French through high school and for two years in college. At the time I could read a French newspaper and follow about 90% of a French radio broadcast. Sadly now I can't even count to 20 in French. I'm sure it would be a lot easier to re-learn/recover it than it was to initially learn. Maybe I'll have to try once I finish up my Bachelor's degree in Business.

I'd also really like to study Japanese and Latin.

Skye2

Myth - I bet if you spent some time in France, within 4 days it would all come back to you That's what usually happens to me Xx

Johnston

I use Declan software on the iPhone to practice vocab. Nice product.

Nightswimming

Language learning seems to be my new thing too! German and Spanish at the moment.

I took up German again at the beginning of the year when I was travelling weekly to and from Lithuania and needed something to do to kill hours in the airport and on the plane! I thought going with German rather than Lithuanian would be more use in the long term for me. I did A-Level equivalent at school just over 10 years ago been really enjoying getting back up to speed and improving. I take a lesson with a private tutor once a week and then work with the language (reading, apps, TV, Podcasts etc) between lessons. I'm not aiming for a particular qualification or exam at the moment so just having fun with it.

I've started doing Spanish as a total beginner with DuoLingo app on iPhone but I'm finding the lack of grammar explanation frustrating. I think if I wasn't already learning another language (which I think gives you a better understanding generally of how language works) I'd be totally clueless!

KateL

I learned Spanish

VitaminB6

I started Spanish last December, I could probably just about get my point across but I've been slacking recently. I'm getting back in to it. This will be a long post but basically:

• Download Michel Thomas' course for Spanish, I have used it and it is excellent, helps with sentence construction and getting a feel for how the language works
• Download Pimsleur Spanish, another course but this uses a different method and focuses on repetition
• Try and get a Spanish pen pal, there's a website for language learning/pen pals but I don't have it right now, it might be Interpals
• Listen to Spanish music (Best music for me is Soda Stereo, Juana Molina, Amparanoia & Shakira's early Pop music)
• Sign up to Twitter and follow accounts on there for Spanish learning
• You only need to learn 1,000 words to be able to communicate in Spanish, that isn't much (though you'll need to know how to use them/structure sentences, the Michel Thomas course is good for this. Here is a PDF for 1,000 key words in Spanish. I wrote them all down on paper, cut the paper up, put all the words in a bag and kept picking them out until I started memorising them
• Cat Spanish app on iTunes, it is cats teaching you Spanish, who could resist cats teaching Spanish?
• Memrise is good, uses mnemonics to help you remember the words
• If you're into sports, sign up to a Spanish forum for said sport or team, what I have learned with language learning is, use it or lose it, so being able to speak it and what you've learned, even if it's just typing, will help keep it in your head