First Two Spanish Lessons

Sunday, February 3. 2008

Our first two Spanish lessons have been really exciting, getting an understanding of pronunciation being the highlight. So many times in the last few weeks we've tried to get other people to understand us in supermarkets, at the post office, with neighbours etc and now we understand it's our pronunciation that was probably the biggest obstacle.

Our first lesson introduced us to some familiar vocabulary, transport, animals, furniture, and sport, and touched on some basic phrases.
In our second lesson we built on the vocab with counting and using the plural form to practice how saying how many things, oh I'll stop and give you an example, vaca which is a cow, vacas is the plural, now let's say we want to say 11 cows, that would be "once vacas".

We also discussed the definite and indefinite articles along with learning a basic rule (but obviously with loads of exceptions) for determining gender. So any word that ends with 'o' is masculine, for example 'el barco' which is a ship, and words that end with 'a', for example 'la vaca'.

Getting to an understanding of this after only two lessons is a significant step for us and means we can start to practice correct gender straight away. I might create a cheat sheet of everything we've learned and post it here for anyone who's interested.
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  1. JIllian said,

    Sunday, February 3. 2008 at 03:08 (Reply)

    LOL... glad to see the lessons are going well. I remember taking Spanish in High School. I took 4 years! I won't say I can speak it, but I can at least ask how much something is and tell whoever I'm talking to my mom wears a red dress.

    My biggest obstacle was understanding the person I was talking to. They usually speak very fast and I only catch a few words here and there... so yeah, NOT fun. I can only imagine what English speakers sound like to them.

    Anyways, good luck. And I'd be interested in seeing this "cheat sheet".

  2. Carl said,

    Sunday, February 3. 2008 at 04:16 (Reply)

    You can say 'my mom wears a red dress', that's an incredibly useful phrase and I could imagine so many social occasions where it could be used - not!

    Thanks for the luck, I might need it, next question, do I embarrass myself with a podcast of the cheat sheet or do I just pretend I'm mute.

  3. JIllian said,

    Sunday, February 3. 2008 at 04:30 (Reply)

    LOL... PODCAST!

    And "my mom wears a red dress" is extremely useful!!! :-P

  4. Paul Dillinger said,

    Sunday, February 3. 2008 at 11:58 (Reply)

    Let me know when you're ready for the dirty words ;-)

  5. Carl said,

    Sunday, February 3. 2008 at 12:03 (Reply)

    I'm so ready, let me have them...

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