[Athen] OT: For people struggling with Spanish

[Deborah Armstrong]

I was looking for a way to practice understanding more Spanish over the Xmas vacation while sheltering in place and without spending more money!

Spanish 4 has been so heavy on grammar I still only understand about 20% of ordinary conversation, 50% of the news and 70% of commercials. I am really eager to be good enough to read children's books and I'm still not there yet!

Due to Covid, I'm not riding the bus with Spanish speakers. My sighted friends suggest I watch movies, but I can't read subtitles and there's still too much vocabulary I don't understand. I'm plateaued at this uncomfortable place where beginner material is too basic and regular Spanish is too fast and contains too many unfamiliar words.

I remember when I lived in Germany being stuck on this plateau for about two months but I was surrounded by people chatting at me and insisting I interact. Then one day I was standing in a line at a grocery store and suddenly realized without any conscious effort I was following the conversation of the housewives behind me as they complained about husbands and children, discussed meal plans and gossiped about neighbors. It was the most amazing moment of my life how the ability to think in German had crept unnoticed in to my mind! That's what I want to have happen with Spanish!

I ran across Destinos, the 1990's Spanish telenovela (soap opera) produced by PBS specifically for learning Spanish and it's a gold mine of ordinary conversation and very easy to follow. Plus it's now free to watch online; previously you had to buy the tapes or wait for it to air on your local station.

What makes it particularly useful for someone with a visual or learning disability is that the points of the story line are repeated and summarized multiple times. Also useful for a hearing-impaired person since it is captioned and transcripts are available. There are no English subtitles, but that doesn't matter as the repetition makes it easy to follow. At my level I'm understanding  99%, and I'm guessing a complete beginner would need to watch each episode several times. Even with a little Spanish, watching the action makes it completely understandable.

All the educational materials accompanying it though were out of print, but some enterprising person has posted those resources on google drive. This includes transcripts, vocabulary lists, textbook, workbook, answers to exercises, plus all the audiotapes. There are 52 episodes.

I recommend this for anyone who is in my situation!

The resources are here:
                https://destinostelenovela.wordpress.com/
and the actual videos (copyrighted free for classroom and personal use) are here:
https://www.learner.org/series/destinos-an-introduction-to-spanish/

Wikipedia's entry is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destinos

There are numerous other resources on the web for example flash cards. Some are paid resources, as is much of the online Spanish learning material. But there is a lot of free stuff out there; however, this in my opinion is the most useful one I've found so far.

Please share with anyone who wants to practice beginner Spanish over the holidays.

--Debee
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