Carl discovers the world

My Spanish teacher has given me some homework for the next lesson, basically a bunch of questions I should ask our next door neighbour, except she lives in another city and only comes down for weekends, so I'm running out of time to get the answers hence my plea for help from any Spanish speaker. If any of my readers would be willing to answer the questions, or get a Spanish friend, wife, mother-in-law, man down the street etc to help me out it would be really appreciated. Here's the questions;

¿Tienes cuantos hijos?
¿Vives aqui hace cuanto años?
¿Tienes hermanos?
¿Tus padres estan vivos?
¿Tienes mascotos?
¿A ti te gusta Sevilla?

I know the last question might be difficult, so substitute where you live. Also I need the answers in Spanish not English, and I'll use the trusty dictionary and the free Spanish ebook course to help me work out what you're saying. Oh, one more thing, if someone else has already replied, please still answer, the more practice I get the better.

I just paid a few dollars for a pack of ebooks that come with resell rights, one of which is Spanish. Now I can't be bothered trying to sell this since I doubt I'd make any money out of it (retail price is US$9.95), so I'll just make it available for free to my readers, all I ask is you make a comment below or link to this entry from your own blog if you do download it.

So, what do you get? The Free Learn Spanish Ebook is about 450kb and has the title "Spanish, Romance Language of 417 Million", but within it there are three .pdf documents, covering too many topics to list here, except to say it's a complete course that will take an absolute beginner upto reasonably advanced level once you've learned it all.

I can't say how long it will take to get to fluent stage but it saves the cost of buying phrase books and if you've already forgotten Spanish that you learned at school then this might be a really great refresher course. Personally I'm more interested in it because I'm already learning Spanish with a language teacher and I want the ebook for extra reading material. Yup, you guessed it, I'm a sucker for extra work.

We had our third Spanish lesson today, I still mean to write up the notes and make theme available to download but it's finding the time nah I'm just too lazy, but anyway it's going well, we learned the verbs xyz today and of course consolidated what we've learned with counting and some vocab we learned in the first lesson.

Here's the vocab we do know;
Animals: pescado (fish), vaca (cow), cerdo (pork), cochino (pig), oveja (sheep), cordero (lamb), perro (dog), cabra (goat), leon (lion), caballo (horse), pajaro (bird).
Sport: baloncesto (basketball), futbol (soccer), tenis (tennis), rugby (rugby), formula uno (formula one), carrera de coches (motor racing), natacion (swimming), golf (golf), beisbol (baseball), volley (volleyball), boxeo (boxing).
Transport: autobus (bus), camion (truck), ferocarril (railway), tren (train), avion (airplane), coche (car), furgoneta (van), moto (motorbike), bicicleta (bike), barco (ship), globo (hot air balloon).
Around the House: sofa (couch), alfombra (rug), televisor (TV), cajon (draw), caja (box), caja de carton (cardboard box), caja de madera (wooden box), caja plastica (plastic box), armorio (dresser/commode), guardaropa (wardrobe), butaca (arm chair), cama (bed), silla (chair), mesa (table).

It's not a very useful list of vocab but it does let us practice using singular and plural, counting items, and using some of the verb forms we have learned we can put together short sentences. After only our third lesson it feels good to be able to do this.

The verbs we've learned so far are ser (to be), estor (to be), tener (to have), querir (to want), and faltar (to lack). Ser and estor whilst appearing to bhe the same in fact different, apparently ser is a more or less permanent state whereas estor is the present tense of to be. I've figured out how I'm going to do my podcasts now so as soon as I can get A-into-G I'll make them available.

One of our neighbours here in Spain has been very kind and spoke to his Spanish teacher about taking on a couple of novices with the result being that next weekend we hopefully get our first lesson.

Spanish like any other language is best learned in a total immersion manner, we have proof of this, for a couple of years now we've been trying to learn Italian with a book and CD, and honestly if I was speak to an Italian they'd probably ask me to revert to English since they might understand me better.

Before we arrived in Germany we had done the same thing, try to learn from a book and CD, problem is, the dialect spoken by the older people in Düsseldorf is nothing like the standard German being taught, and the same thing when we were in Berlin. Basically what ended up happening is family and friends had to try hard to understand us, but after a while things got a lot easier because we were exposed to the language and could emulate local pronunciation, we can even understand Bavarians when we see them on TV, but we had to be there to really learn the language. Read More