| Product: |
BBC Get by in... |
| Date: |
22/08/03 (219 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: User friendly, Cheap but comprehensive.
Disadvantages: Only for beginners., No colour or glossy pages for all you aesthetes.
Learning Spanish was just another in my long, long list of good intentions that end up trapped somewhere between decision and commencement, like throwing out the old magazines and university essays at the bottom of my wardrobe or finally getting around to buying a digital camera of my own. Then I went to Barcelona and discovered to my horror that the only phrase I could remember was dos cervezas, por favor (the shame, the shame). Cue one trip to a bookshop and a month of afternoons spent intermittently crouched over the play and rewind buttons on a tape recorder.
I chose the BBC's Get By In Spanish on typically spurious grounds - a decade old edition was on sale for a bargain £1.99 at an outlet book depot (I won't tell you where because it was strictly one-off availability). Forget all considerations of quality, structure or ease of use, I could put the savings towards beer and my brother had already invested £25 in a Linguaphone course, the cellophane cover of which had since obtained a couple of fingerprints and a nice layer of dust. Aha, but was it money well spent?
Well, yes, yes, yes in the case of my two pounds and hmm, maybe when it comes to my brother's year old purchase. The Linguaphone course - nice cardboard box, glossy paper and lovely colour photographs - was a bit too earnest for me and seemed to take an age to get going (unit one of eight covers very basic introductions, ordering a coffee, asking a taxi driver for a hotel and not very much else at all). With no pronunciation guide to get me started, and too much rote learning repetitiveness at the beginning, the tapes went back in their boxes to be used for later revision.
In contrast, Get By In Spanish starts exactly where any good language course should - with the sounds of the alphabet. Only once you've mastered these can you begin to work independently of the cassettes, using your eyes and intellect instead of just your ears and short term memory. Luckil
y, Spanish is far, far easier to pronounce than, say, our own mongrel mix of arbitrary spelling and constant exceptions, and the only thing you're really likely to have any trouble is the guttural 'j' (think of the 'ch' in the Scottish 'loch'). Once you've listened to the examples of correct pronunciation and read the accompanying notes, you're ready to move on to the kind of things that can be learnt more intuitively as you go through the rest of the course - days of the week, numbers, colours and such like. I wouldn't worry too much about memorising this kind of language just yet - remember as much as you can, try to pick out any helpful patterns or similarities you can find (mayo, junio, julio (May, June, July) for example), and then just review as and when you feel you need to.
The most recent edition of Get By in Spanish costs £9.99, for which you get a 124-page travel and language book, a 75-minute audio cassette and a transcript booklet. Along with the size, which is genuinely small enough to fit into a jacket pocket, the most impressive thing about this particular course is the way it breaks up the mass of vocabulary and functional language into manageable, easily achievable chunks. It's vitally important that learners are challenged without being put off by too high a degree of difficulty; something this book achieves effortlessly from the very first unit.
LIST OF UNITS
1. Hello
2. Shopping
3. Out and about
4. Getting to your destination
5. Living in Spain
A clear pattern is established from the beginning: a page of thirty or so key words and phrases (listed side-by-side in both languages) followed by between five and ten short conversations (in Spanish only), for example 'Greetings and Goodbyes', 'At The Chemist's', 'Checking In At A Hotel' and 'What Trains Are There To Barcelona?' The longest of the
dialogues is no more than ten sentences long, and all are fully explained on the cassette by the two presenters, Isabel del Río-Sukan and Miguel Peñaranda, with good humour, helpful further examples and section-by-section (and often word-by-word) explanations. All in great contrast to the Linguaphone course, where sentences are hardly ever slowed down or repeated enough to save you a trip to the rewind button, and the tapescripts are 'helpfully' listed side by side in both languages, thus making it far too tempting to take the easy option every time you get stuck.
After the dialogues come more word lists, containing the vocabulary you've just encountered on the tapes with its English equivalent. Then, and this is the really good bit, come four or five pages explaining any basic grammar you need, extended vocabulary (usually read out on the tape), and lots of further examples of points introduced in the earlier dialogues. In the first unit, for example, we're introduced to the concept of masculine and feminine nouns, articles (a, an, the and some) and simple plurals and adjectives. Fortunately, at least for those of us who didn't even study our own grammar at school, I really think that useful functional language (Two beers, please) should be learnt before you begin to get into the never ending grammatical maze. On the other hand, trying to learn a language without the most basic foundations of grammar is a bit like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle without having a picture to help you. Get By In Spanish manages to judge this balance pretty much perfectly.
Exercises follow the explanations, short 'speak after the tone then listen to the correct answer' drills on the tape well reinforced by gap fills and translation exercises in the book itself. There's a full key at the back if you really want to cheat, though, as with the rest of the course, success is relatively easy to achieve as long as you've been paying att
ention. There is also a three-page test at the end of the course immediately before the reference section and complete word list.
Finally, we have the cultural notes, covering topics like Spanish wine, opening and closing times, public transport and eating habits, and all explained in clear, concise English paragraphs embellished with extra Spanish vocabulary and advice on avoiding those tricky international misunderstandings.
All things considered, I'd highly recommend Get By In Spanish to anyone wanting to begin learning the language, both as a user of the book and as a language teacher myself. The course is extremely well presented, challenging without ever being off-putting, has clearly defined aims and explanations, gives you all the language you'll need for a brief stay in the country and a very firm foundation for continuing your studies, is compact enough to carry on your person and, best of all, only costs a tenner full price. And for those of you who are already thinking "But I'm terrible at languages"..........
TIPS FROM THE TOP
Invest in a cheap notebook and write down (brief) sentences, notes and examples as you encounter new language and grammar. Aside from the act of writing itself, which helps to fix new knowledge as long as it's not overdone, you can also customise the learning process, missing out anything you don't need (I don't drive so I'm not likely to be hiring a car) and expanding on topics you find more interesting.
If at all possible arrange to study with one or two others. Aside from the benefits of being able to learn from and practise with each other, you'll also find it far less easy to find excuses not to do any work for a week.
Learning is best done in short, regular lessons. Set aside about 15 - 20 minutes a day and try not to skip a few days here and there. Try to understand the grammatical patterns behind what you're learn
ing rather than just memorising individual sentence after sentence - it might take a few extra minutes to study new concepts but Spanish really is easy enough once you give it a try.
If you do have miss more than a couple of days of study then recap some of your previous work before going on with the course. The key point is to learn not just to finish.
Listen, listen, then listen some more - and I don't mean when you're asleep or concentrating on the TV with the sound turned down. Put the tape on when you're doing your ironing or washing up and try to speak along with the tape as well as just repeating everything.
Cut up some paper into credit card sized slips, writing Spanish words and sentences on one side and the English equivalent on the other. Try to translate from one to the other, making one pile for correct answers and another for incorrect ones. If you get anything wrong go back and try again.
It's important to feel your own way into the language rather than just being spoon fed little bites of text. Adapt what you learn to make new sentences. And remember to practise your speaking, even if you are only voicing words in your own head.
It's widely thought that you need to encounter new words around seven times at spaced intervals before they can be properly remembered. Replaying the tape a few times and then writing some notes might be perfect for your short term memory but you'll be left groping around the tip of your tongue a few weeks later. Try these in addition to the slips of paper and adaption techniques mentioned above:
Select a word from a random pile and try to construct a sentence using it. Then read it aloud as well as silently.
Connect new words to pictures or sounds that you already know. For example, it's far easier for me to recall a word like mal (bad, badly) by matching it to the name Malcolm or Draco Malfoy.
Find more examples of authentic
Spanish. There
are plenty of listening exercises and texts on the internet (online newspapers, exercises, etc) as well as some excellent subtitled films.
Remember that Latin American Spanish is by no means the same as the standard Castilian spoken around Madrid, and Galician, Basque and Catalan are very different indeed. However, for the purposes of basic communication, I'm sure that the language you'll learn through any course will be more than sufficient unless you're planning to spend time in remote hill villages.
Buy a brief grammar guide to accompany the course. The Rough Guide phrasebook is cheap, has phonetic pronunciation guides - there's not much point in knowing that hasta luego means see you later unless you also know that you it's pronounced as-ta l-way-go - and concise explanations of as much grammar as a beginner is likely to need at such an early stage. You can always buy an extended grammar guide later, and most Brits will only get confused by terms such as definite articles and reflexive pronouns anyway. Get a good dictionary while you're at it.
Don't be lulled too much by all those helpful words like un hotel. While this familiarity is helpful in building up an initial store of vocabulary there are also plenty of 'false friends' waiting to trip you up - the Spanish word sensible, for example, translates as sensitive in English.
AVAILABILITY
Aside from the languages section at Waterstone's and amazon.co.uk, which currently has only used copies in stock, the best place to buy Get By In Spanish is from the BBC itself at www.bbcshop.com. There are lots of other courses available and some great grammar guides.
For a taster of Spanish try the links at www.ilovelanguages.com or www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/index.shtml.
"To have another language is to have another soul" Goethe.
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kingseany - 11/09/03 My Swedish girlfriend, is currently trying to learn Spanish, so perhaps I'll check this one out. |
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