Hello and Happy New Year to all at Fluenz and to my fellow students.
I have finished Level 4 and although I am chomping at the bit to begin 5, I am trying to be disciplined and review 4 more before moving on. I realize that I make a lot of small errors and I'm hoping that more review will help reinforce things a bit.
I really appreciated the person who provided the Destinos link and thanked them at the time. It is a good learning tool and I am going to go back and watch again now that I know more Spanish.
So I thought others might not have been to the BBC link friends told me about. One of the fun features is that there are crossword puzzles in Spanish. I believe many of us who are studying a language are probably lovers of words and puzzles. The Spanish is Spain rather than my LA version so the tutorials are with the different pronunciations but enough alike that you can hear native speakers and have translations. It seems one of our biggest problems is understanding native speakers. The link is
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanis... Also, I am thrilled that the on line version of Fluenz has a menu so that you can go to particular segments to study rather than having to scroll through the whole lesson like our discs. I am now going through each lesson in Level 4 to do the two portions that deal with finding the English to match the Spanish. But now I am reading the right hand side and thinking about the translation before looking at the Spanish on the left. I was doing that as I went through previous levels after each lesson but the material was too fresh then and I wasn't sure how well I had learned it.
And last, my personal experience is that I have a business on an English speaking island close to FL but my guests who are here to work for months at a time are all from Peru so I have folks to practice with frequently. It has taken me a long time to get up the courage to begin speaking other than the occasional word. And unfortunately I still find myself speaking more in a word or phrase rather than a sentence. This spring, I felt like I hit the wall in the middle of Level 4 with the reflexive verbs and pronouns. About the same time, I felt I was not being understood very well for all the time I had invested. The Peruvians had that sort of "deer in headlights" look sometimes when I was talking to them. However, after about a month of not working very hard, I began studying in earnest again and here is the payoff: Last week one of our Peruvian guests who has a fair amount of English heard me speaking to some of the others in Spanish and told me that he thought it was so good that I could now speak some Spanish as it would be a big help to those who knew no English. Also I tend to write a lot of notes to them and my notes are being understood. Yea! Progress! So if you too hit a bump in the road and don't think that things are going very well, just keep at it. It may take us a lot longer than we expect to get where we'd like to be, but we are making progress! And as my Peruvian friends say, Feliz año! I guess they don't use the "nuevo." Sorry for the long post--perhaps my next course should be in "succinct."