Past improved - on getting there in Spanish

In September 2007 whilst still in Beijing I penned the fateful words:

I've just started learning Spanish while keeping up with the Chinese and I so look forward to the day that I can sit in a restaurant in Santiago de Compostela and talk with those around me naturally. I'm smiling now thinking of the first time I will be able to open up a Marquez and read the words in their untouched form.

In reality my attempts to learn Spanish while in China quickly sank without trace and I only started when I arrived here.

So, yesterday, I found myself in the main bookstore in the centre of Santiago, looking for some Hemmingway or Steinbeck that I had already read, translated into Spanish. I couldn't quite decide what to go for when "Cien años de soledad" caught my eye. I laughed to myself, wondering how much longer it would be until I was allowed to open the pages of such a book, but with nobody watching I took it off the shelf and started reading the first sentence...and the second, and the third. There was something rather confusing. I had expected code, something for which I would need a key which would only be bestowed on me when I 'knew' Spanish. In fact it was written in a language which I could follow, if not fluently, then certainly with a respectable comprehension. I decided to go for it and ditched the idea of buying my favourite American authors in their bastardised form. I went straight to a cafe, placed myself in the sun and dived in.

An hour, and some thirty pages later I put it down, tired, but happy. There are many words that I don't understand, but I have plenty to build an almost complete picture of what is happening. I'm also not reading it with a dictionary because I believe what you save in comprehension you lose in fluency and I'm understanding enough that picking up the dictionary several times every page will make the whole process more painful than it should be. I'm quickly learning that there are a few unknown words which recurr frequently and these can be looked up after the fact.

Today I plugged away for another hour and I'm enjoying it a great deal. It's going to take me a few weeks at this rate given that I only have time to read at the weekends (I usually read before sleeping but Marquez in Spanish requires my complete attention) but this has already given me a good confidence boost (which as a trend I find is usually followed by a big kick in the linguistic privates).

In addition to the Marquez, I've spent this evening with a couple of Spaniards who are friends of my current Portuguese couchsurfer. During our dinner we discussed string theory, the anthropic principle, our respective views on God and religion (I discover post facto that they are Jehovah's witnesses, though they absolutely didn't fit my stereotype), evolution and intelligent design, not to mention a brief foray into the unusual world of composting toilets, almost entirely in Spanish. This isn't to say that it was a perfectly fluent conversation but I'd like to think that they didn't leave more confused about the world due to my linguistic inabilities, but rather that they discovered a side of things which perhaps they hadn't considered before.

Anyway, so, this is where I am after learning Spanish for a year and a half. In the last year I've probably averaged about a lesson every three weeks as I'm usually too busy to organise or go to a class, but the amount of time I'm spending speaking Spanish has gone up considerably. I have a long, long way to go to get comfortable, and in particular I find that speaking in Spanish around my colleagues, with whom I've been speaking solely English for the time I've been here, is proving harder than I'd like.

----

Tomorrow I'm off to Barcelona for a meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday and will be back online in Santiago some time on Thursday. Until then...

Saturday loose ends

Santiago is still standing after the storm yesterday which caused a couple of blackouts through the night (link from here).

I fear that this means that my code which was running overnight will not have been saved, so I'll have to go back and restart that some time this weekend.

In the meantime I've been trying out a new piece of software: Mnemosyne, which is similar to the interval learning software, Genius, which I wrote about some time back. The benefit of Mnemosyne is mostly that there are plenty of ready made word lists in Spanish and Chinese (amongst many other languages). The interface takes a little more time to get comfortable with, mostly due to its simplicity, but it seems like another good system for interval learning. (NB. See also Kevin's page with some great links to more Chinese files for Genius)

This morning I also found a series of lectures at the Perimeter Institute (as I followed a link from Bee's blog) which look excellent. In particular, this course from Alex Buchel which is an ongoing course on String theory promises to be a valuable resource for those starting off in this subject without any other directed learning. Also check out the extensive course on Quantum field theory.

(Random, no context link to a multigigapixel panorama from the Online Photographer. I shan't be processing anything like this any time soon!)

Anyway, another busy weekend beckons including the promise of plenty of good Chinese and Korean food tonight with a Korean birthday to go to. Kimchi supplied by yours truly.

Outerlude

Sorry, things have been really busy recently. Two papers seem to be coming to an end and we hope to get them out pretty soon - but you never can tell.

On top of this, everything has else has been non-stop with a fair few couchsurfers bringing more dimensions than ever to my otherwise stringy world. Discussions on a plethora of subjects as always, and it feels rather like my house opens itself up as a new chapter in an encylcopedia every time a new guest from a new country comes to stay. This week was mostly comparative linguistics and an indepth look into Armenian history, perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, but when it comes from the mouths of experts, I can't help but be enthralled. Indeed, this is most pleasing for me because at school I simply couldn't get interested in history, sitting in class being made to remember the details of tax laws and lists of monarchs. However, when speaking with people with real links to a fascinating past it's a different story altogether.

I also now have a couple of friends from England here for a few days and I've sent them off to the town today while I was in the office. I shall shortly go to see what trouble they have wreaked in the few hours sent off alone.

On a strange and unusually sensible note, I decided last night to postpone the Spanish course which I was due to start today. The actual hours aren't that much, but time taken out of the middle of the day is disrupting and ultimately very tiring and so I'm going to try and get a few more interlanguage exchanges set up for the evenings as soon as possible. My colleagues have also agreed to speak more Spanish with me in work which should help things along too.

Anyway, I'd better go and see what remains of Santiago...

Spanish in perspective and Stephen Hawking in Santiago de Compostela

My schedule is again back to something approximating sanity, with the Spanish course having finished today. We managed to fit a three month course into two and a half weeks of lessons. During this time I felt frustrated at the lack of practice I was getting while in the classroom, but as it comes to an end I see that I have actually got something valuable out of these three weeks.

We 'learned' a great deal of grammar in the class, a lot of structures and syntactical constructions. My frustration came about because it was just too much and I can't don't remember to use very much of this in my conversation. However, what I have gained is a set of points which I can look out for in other people's conversations and gradually, through immersion can start to put in my own speech. It's going to take time and effort on my part, but I think this awareness of what to look for in conversation is key. I now have some ideas for exercises that I can try out with the television, a rich resource which I rarely use. I'm going to attempt to watch the TV for around 20 minutes a day and, with paper and pen in front of me, look out for specific constructions, jotting them down when I hear them. This will give me a good familiarity with them and also should help me understand the frequency with which they are used in everyday life. Anyway, I'll let you know how that goes.

In other news...Stephen Hawking is in town and this is huge. It's especially important for a relatively small city which has gone crazy over his visit. Saturday will be the big day, but he has so far taken part in many events, including the last 150 or so meters of the Camino, a major press conference, and a talk in our department on inflation in the early universe.

The talk (based on this paper with Hartle and Hertog) focused on the reason that we started at the top of a potential, which has been conjectured to give rise to slow roll inflation, and not in a minimum. The claim is that using the appropriate weighting for calculating the probability of starting at a maximum, using the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction of the universe, you are led to a high probability for such a 'boundary condition'.

Anyway, the talk was just 20 minutes and the room was absolutely rammed. I've seen Hawking give a couple of talks now, and the media circus which follows him around is fairly crazy. He seems to have pretty good control over what he will and won't allow, and when enough was enough, with the cameras and film crews, he asked them to leave at which point they shut up shop. The audience was warned that it was indeed going to be a technical talk but almost none of the members (mostly made up of non-physicists) budged, leaving many of those who were actually there to hear what he had to say, without a seat. Still, it was an interesting talk, on a subject I haven't studied myself, but was pretty understandable in the short seminar.

For a video of some of the things he's been up to here in Santiago, I've embedded this short video:


On a Hawking related note, I'll also add this video of the chronophage, which has recently been inaugurated in Corpus Cristi, in Cambridge, and is a wonderful time keeping device/steam punk engineering

Maybe it's not so bad after all...

I spent a pretty crazy number of hours studying this weekend, hence the slightly snotty last post - I tend to do that when I'm overdoing it! Anyway, somehow it doesn't feel quite so hard when you get to study in wonderful parks in a medieval city. Of course I took my camera along too and to give you an idea of my surroundings as I sat there struggling with the past subjunctive I took this shot in the grounds of Parque de Bonaval

Click for more details as ever

Frustrations in the classroom

The intensive Spanish course which I'm currently taking for two hours a day is proving useful, frustrating and difficult in somewhat unequal measures. My classmates are mostly Brazilians and Italians who have been studying Spanish for several years, so already I'm out of my depth. However, the time that I spend after the class talking with them is great practice, and likely more useful than the class itself.

It's been some 12 years since I was last sat in a traditional language class room. I didn't much enjoy it back then and I feel ever more frustrated now. This is not to say that my teacher is not good. She's actually an excellent teacher who explains grammatical points well and keeps the momentum of the classroom going. By any normal measure of language teachers, she's truly first grade. However, I have some deep hangups about teaching languages in the 'traditional' manner.

Most of this stems from the audio courses I've been using for Chinese and Spanish for the last couple of years, and is what, I believe, I can put a lot of my 'success' down to (the playing down of success is not modesty but simple fact - there are many people who do a great deal better than I do in a shorter time).

With the audio courses I've been using it is almost like having a teacher one-on-one, and feels wonderfully effortless. You spend around half the time talking and the other half listening, and none of that time is spent trying to work out the logic of the grammatical constructions, but is somehow like being immersed. In a classroom of 20 pupils however I guess I say less than 50 words in two hours - that's seriously inefficient if you believe, as I do, that physically saying the words is the best way to memorise them - the mouth and ears, and not the eyes and hand are the gateway from the teacher's wealth of information to the brain. I have a bunch of ideas on how I believe we can 'revolutionise' language learning in the classroom, but of course having little experience of language teaching I have little authority on the subject. (Actually this isn't quite correct - we spend some time talking in pairs, but I probably spend a lot of that time talking bad Spanish and I can do that in my own time :-)

One thing which surprises and frustrates me on this course is that although we have a large number of exercises to work through, I find that having done them, I haven't actually used the parts of my brain which allow me to remember how to use the grammatical details in a real context. I'm too busy working out the answers, to let myself relax and simply become familiar with the natural use. As kids, clearly we don't spend time filling in the blanks, or changing the present subjunctive into the imperfect subjunctive. Somehow it all feels too artificial and I immediately put up a mental block with such methods. It may sound very old fashioned, but I'd rather just listen to and repeat phrases until they feel natural than work out the logic of grammatical constructions. I still believe that it's a loss that we are no longer taught grammar in schools, but I think that when learning a foreign language, there are better ways than most of the methods we use currently.

Anyway, I'm keeping on with the course because I am at least spending some time actively working on the Spanish, and that is certainly a good thing, however time spent in the classroom takes me right back to the years I spent in classrooms at school, not very efficiently learning French, Russian or Latin.

In at the deep end

Tired of not having as much Spanish as I should have after almost a year here, I signed up to a free course that the university offers to Erasmus students. Last Friday I took an exam (the first exam in many years) to see which class was appropriate for my level. Most of the test was multiple choice, and, using logic rather than knowledge I seemed to do much better than I should have done and ended up in the top class.

Today I turned up to my first lesson, with 20 other students many of whom are here for six months, only to discover that most of my other class mates are Brazilians or Italians who have been learning Spanish for several years. They seem, to me at least, to be virtually fluent and it seems that this class is going to be hard going, but I hope very useful.

Today, amongst other things we were given three novelas to read by the end of the course (the course is less than three weeks) and answer questions on them. I started tonight and am a good way through the first one, though it's pretty hard going for me and I spend as much time with my nose in the dictionary, as reading the text.

Anyway, for the next three weeks I'll be taking these lessons for a couple of hours every day and I'm really hoping that it's going to give me some more confidence, which I believe is the main thing holding me back at the moment. This is clear to me because at times I can converse with people quite happily in Spanish, while at others I close up completely and look like I know nothing.

Anyway, will try and keep you up to date with progress.

Depending on how work and study goes tomorrow I'll be giving some information on the LHC startup which I'll certainly be watching on Wednesday morning.

See here for a very good summary of the coverage which you can keep up to date with.

Leaving Incheon

I have an intensely busy month coming up, with a Spanish course about to take over my lunchtimes and the usual number of projects on the go. Couchsurfing is on hold for a little bit too, though I did meet up with a Norwegian couchsurfer last week who contacted me wanted to know all about string theory. We spent an enjoyable couple of hours over a coffee chatting about all things high-energy.

Anyway, I'll post the last of my Korea photos for now, which aptly is the photo taken as I was waiting in Incheon airport for this summer's travel adventures to draw to a close.

Packing it all in

I'm currently trying to balance a few too many things in my life. It seems to be settling however and I'm not feeling too rushed any more. While putting most of my effort into my research I still want time to learn two languages, get to the gym and keep a reasonably active social life (frequently focused on Couch-hosting these days). I've found a few things recently which are helping me to manage this all of the above in a reasonably sane manner.

The first tip is that I'm taking full advantage of new technologies for my language learning. Having listened to the 90 half hour Pimsleur lessons for Chinese while I was in Beijing I now need something a little more advanced and Chinesepod is proving extremely useful. They have around 800 lessons, with around a hundred lessons each of six different grades, from Newbie to really very advanced. I'm still only on the second grade and listen to these while I walk to and from work. This gives me around 40 minutes of Chinese language practice every day and while it's not truly interactive, it is helping me to improve. One face to face lesson of Chinese per week on top of this means that I can actually practice what I learn.

(For a great blog on Mandarin, especially the Beijing dialect, check out Beijing sounds. Have a read of this post for the best explanation for the importance of the Beijing-R I've ever heard - from a 6 year old. The recordings on this site are very good and there's plenty of decent feedback after each of his posts - found on Laowai Chinese.)

For Spanish I went through the first 30 lessons of Pimsleur Spanish and found that they weren't quite as good, for me, as the Mandarin lessons had been. So, I've switched to the Michel Thomas method. In this method you and two other students (on the recordings) are taken by Michel Thomas himself from the very basics, quickly building up sentences and discussing some of the rules of the language. The male and female students on the recordings start from zero knowledge and spend about as much time messing up as you do (well, the guy is purposefully, I believe not a great student). With half an hour of this in the evenings I can become a little more familiar with Spanish every day. In particular Michel Thomas is all about relaxation and not about stressful rote learning.

I've also started a regular language exchange after lunch with a physics masters student who is looking to improve his English. It's probably pretty painful for him to hear me murder the language but I'm convinced that there's a barrier in terms of confidence, and not knowledge, which needs to be overcome to really see improvements in speaking. On top of all this is half an hour of more tedious rote learning and three hours of lessons per week.

In terms of not turning into a bag of potatoes as I sit at my desk most of the day I've been following Tim Ferris's advice and getting to the gym twice a week for half an hour each time. That half an hour is murder but I'm finding it just as effective as trying to pack in more time and more sessions. I don't agree with everything on his site by any means but he has a lot of great tips for cutting down wasted time.

Anyway, on this slightly drizzly Saturday evening on which I'm not attempting to expand my social life I thought I'd note down my current pointers for not having a nervous breakdown - Any other tips would be gratefully received!

Spanish update - three months in

I've just come back from my first Spanish language exchange so I thought I'd give a bit of an update on how things are coming on with the language.

After what felt like a blistering start, working very hard and late into the evenings on learning Spanish vocab, things felt like they've hit a bit of a brick wall. I learnt around 1000 words in my first month but I'm not sure that that has increased much in the following two. With such a gradual process it's rather hard to monitor my own progress, but certainly with recent conferences and winter schools, there have been some big breaks in getting into the language.

Things look relatively clear ahead and I'm managing around 4 hours a week of lessons in the evenings, one-on-one. My teacher speaks no English during the lessons and I use almost none. With my work currently moving along reasonably well I'm working solidly in the day and then usually for a while after dinner. The idea of then going through flash cards of vocab and drilling myself on the grammar seems to become less and less appealing.

So, as an incentive to get another mode of language input I went along tonight to a bar in the old town which hosts a weekly language exchange. I turned up late but was still able to find a Spaniard to torture for a while and language was indeed exchanged. I'll certainly be going back as I'm finding the biggest hurdle at the moment is actually using what I know.

As with Chinese I'm going through the Pimsleur course which is a great addition. In the case of Chinese it was the best method I found for picking up the correct sounds, whereas for Spanish, the sounds are less of a problem and the grammar (which is in some senses non-existent in Chinese) is much trickier.

In fact I find it much more relaxing to listen to Chinese podcasts (Chinesepod) these days and am probably picking up more Chinese than I reasonably should be - they have hundreds of lessons at all different levels, highly recommended. As I've said before, having put a modicum of effort into the Mandarin before, I really don't want to lose it.

I thought that watching Spanish television would help but the programs seem to be so mindless that I simply turn my brain off and let it wash over me - not a terribly good solution. Radio is slightly better but harder to understand due to lack of context

Anyway, three months into Spain and I can converse on a pretty basic level. Not quite where I wanted to be by now, but definitely heading in the right direction.

I'm a Cyborg, but that's ok

The fact that there has been a month of great cinema on (10 films a night) in Santiago and I have made it to just one of them is testament to my current state of chaos. I've been getting ready to go to Cambridge and Dublin, with stops in London and Oxford, starting tomorrow and have had a great deal of work to get done in the meantime. All good though...

Spanish has also been coming along reasonably, though I will have to take a new direction for it next month. I've learnt around 1000 words of Spanish vocab this month (not that difficult as many are very close to English and/or French) though knowing vocab is vastly different from being able to speak a language. Next month I will cool it on the vocab and attempt to learn 10 or so new, useful phrases a day.

A test of my Spanish vocab came when I took a late evening out to see the film mentioned in the title. I'm a Cyborg, but that's ok, is a Korean film by director Chan Wook-Park (director of the revenge trilogy starting with Old Boy) is a strange but rather beautiful film. Telling the story of a young woman who believes she is a cyborg and is sent to a psychiatric home, the story revolves around her relationshop with another of the patients who believes that he can steal people's souls. This second patient is played by the Korean singer Rain. Anyone who has lived in Asia will probably have seen pictures of Rain showing off his six-pack and prancing around onstage, his voice drowned out by that of his screaming fans. So, I was a little worried that he was going to be a rather hollow actor.

Quite the contrary however, he really is a superb actor and a rather fine yodeler, and moreover, never uses his looks to cover any lack of skill on screen. The performances of the patients are knowingly over the top and play up the various behavioural eccentricities that they display. These eccentricities are in general suitably caricatured for this not to feel exploitative.

As is usual in his films, Wook leaves some loose ends but more for effect than out of carelessness. He wants you to leave the film feeling puzzled as well as satisfied. He also can't help but put in a bit of relatively needless violence for his personal touch and the balletic scenes of the 'cyborg' getting revenge are typically Wook with tongue firmly set in cheek.

The love story which develops is touching and as the film finished the audience was impressed enough to give a round of applause. This is my first time in a Spanish cinema so I don't know how unusual this is, but it felt well deserved on this occasion.

Luckily, the month of solid vocab learning I've put myself through seems to have paid off as I could understand perhaps 80% of the subtitles - not the grammatical subtleties, but at least the general meaning. Having the beautiful tones of the Korean language (which I like a lot) with the Spanish subtitles was rather confusing for the first few minutes, but became decipherable after that.

This success with reading spurs me on to continue the rather tiring effort that I've been trying to keep up so far.

Anyway, if you're a fan of love stories set in psychiatric hospitals then your sure to enjoy this rather curious film from Wook.