Why on earth do you still need to attend language courses once you have been in the country for more than a year? Well, I had to. Even though I had just came back from Spain, having been there for the third time for a total of over nine months, I had to go back…
Some of us are talkers; speaking comes naturally, and we almost always have something to say. Others of us, however, are much more comfortable listening, and marvel at how some people can seem to talk endlessly without ever coming up for air. Whether or not you have the gift of loquaciousness will no doubt affect…
A year earlier I had tried to get a scholarship in California. Somehow I thought it would be fun to study my languages in the United States – an opinion the committee that granted these did not share. They asked a lot of questions about my motivation and also about California. As I hadn’t studied…
In the first part of this article I wrote that the EuroCom method – also know as “Seven Sieves” – draws primarily on common elements in vocabulary and our understanding of language structure, in order to acquire in just a few hours the ability to read a foreign language. Now I want to take you…
I had said about the second semester: „Our teacher came into class the first day and we had a hard time understanding her. She had decided to speed up a tiny bit. Everything was a bit tougher.” Well, this time again: She came in and was even faster. We had to work a lot more…
submarine, président, acção, problemă – we can understand lots of English and French words, even Portuguese and Romanian ones, without having actually studied those languages properly. The examples above all belong to the vocabulary of the Romance family of languages, although there are equivalents in the Germanic and Slavic languages. Look at the example below,…
Valencia is the third biggest city in Spain. I talked to several friends with contacts in Spain and finally a men’s home in Valencia invited me to come over. The house was a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. A lot of men with strange backgrounds, complicated family histories and bad experiences in life waited for me.…
I had totally different plans as a student in high school, but then I chose to study Spanish and German at university to become a teacher. I had found out that my heart was more into languages and cultures and learning about people than any other thing. The first choice I had to make was…
I wanted to join a youth group that was traveling to Spain. As I didn’t know a lot of Spanish I prepared myself by learning phrases by heart. It helped a lot, and I had the impression that I was making progress. But then, something terrible happened: I met a Spaniard in a train. He…
My parents gave me a gift after college: a journey to my country of birth, Chile. Unfortunately, I left Chile when I was four years old and had forgotten all my Spanish. It would have been quite hard and complicated for my parents to organize a Spanish-speaking setting for me to keep the language. It…