Sonrío cuando te veo, pero secretamente ;)

[janajee]

Thought I'd write a cheesy Spanish sentence that I made on my own as a title, jajajajaja.

Um, the name is Jana.

I'm learning Spanish on my own, while staying in Korea. I have a Korean tutor who teaches me in Spanish and I actually have my own book. My listening skills are pretty good and I think I can understand about 40-50% of what my Spanish speaking friends are talking about.

But I have a hard time speaking cause I am reaaaally slow in translating what I want to say in my head and most of the time, I just answer back in English.

I hope I can become better.

Gracias!

[chileno]

Welcome to the forums. Read my blog and if you have any questions, ask here, or you could also contact me on Skype.

[BrianDeBama]

Jana, something that I believe helps me with language recall is that I practice reading Spanish out loud. I believe you use different parts of your brain for reading and speaking and the Spanish vocabulary would be easier to remember if it was available in more than one place in your brain.

[chileno]

Originally Posted by BrianDeBama

Jana, something that I believe helps me with language recall is that I practice reading Spanish out loud. I believe you use different parts of your brain for reading and speaking and the Spanish vocabulary would be easier to remember if it was available in more than one place in your brain.

Correct, and even better record yourself and listen to yourself. Boy, aren't you for a surprise!

EDIT:

Funny! I hadn't read completely what you said, but upon reading jana's reply #5, I noticed what I highlighted in red. I said, funny because I suspect you are right, the brain does keep different places to store different but related stuff and connects to them when needed or something like that. Of course this is pure speculation but it does ring like true. It is like a computer that reserves buffers which might be temporary or permanent for data etc...

In my way of learning English I went gradually doing certain things that I considered necessary to do in order to do them automatically. Necessary to fool my mind, which kept on stating that I needed grammar to learn English but I also arrived to the conclusion that I didn't need grammar because I knew how to read, write and express myself in my own language, so I didn't need to do that again in English.

What I am trying to say here is that I, instinctively, did what you are proposing but in a bigger scale .

That was over 30 years ago and I stopped pretty much all of my "conscious" efforts to learn more English and get rid of my accent, at around the 12 or 14 months after arriving to the country.

[janajee]

Originally Posted by chileno

Welcome to the forums. Read my blog and if you have any questions, ask here, or you could also contact me on Skype.

I've visited your blog! It's awesome! I look forward to learning more!

Originally Posted by BrianDeBama

Jana, something that I believe helps me with language recall is that I practice reading Spanish out loud. I believe you use different parts of your brain for reading and speaking and the Spanish vocabulary would be easier to remember if it was available in more than one place in your brain.

Oh wow! Cool! One of my tutors say my accent is very Madrid, Spain when I try to speak. He learned his Spanish from Argentina. Another one learned his from Mexico. I got really desperate cause they're both leaving the country soon and I would have no one to tutor me anymore

So I'm glad I found this place!

[chileno]

Originally Posted by janajee

I've visited your blog! It's awesome! I look forward to learning more!

Thank you. Remember you can also contact me on Skype.

Originally Posted by janajee

Oh wow! Cool! One of my tutors say my accent is very Madrid, Spain when I try to speak. He learned his Spanish from Argentina. Another one learned his from Mexico. I got really desperate cause they're both leaving the country soon and I would have no one to tutor me anymore

So I'm glad I found this place!

Do not worry. You can do it by yourself, you've got enough education to do so. That is, you read, write and express yourself in your own language.

I see that you are in Korea. Are you learning Korean?

If so, if I were you, I would try to acquire the knowledge of how to write their characters and how to recognize which character comes before or after another one. That is to say the hierarchy of the characters. This will give access to their dictionary, hence a bilingual dictionary. Once I get that, that language is mine within a year.

[janajee]

Originally Posted by chileno

Thank you. Remember you can also contact me on Skype.




Do not worry. You can do it by yourself, you've got enough education to do so. That is, you read, write and express yourself in your own language.

I see that you are in Korea. Are you learning Korean?

If so, if I were you, I would try to acquire the knowledge of how to write their characters and how to recognize which character comes before or after another one. That is to say the hierarchy of the characters. This will give access to their dictionary, hence a bilingual dictionary. Once I get that, that language is mine within a year.

I've been studying Korean on and off while I'm here, but not really focused. I can read and write in Korean very well. Again my listening skill is better, being able to differentiate words when listening to them. However, my speaking skill is very low, as I don't really have much of a background in oriental languages.

It's different from Spanish because having English as my first language, and Tagalog as my second, I have a lot of background in it, but with Korean, I'm starting from scratch.

[chileno]

Follow my system, you will be OK in a short period of time, especially if you can read and write.... so start reading out loud while recording yourself and listen to yourself and start whipping yourself like mad, soon you'll start to make improvements on all fronts.