Peter Ex Texia

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I’ve been trying to improve my listening skills in Spanish. So far I’m terrible at it but I’m picking up more words the longer I listen. I’ve discovered part of the reason I have difficulty understanding words is because Spanish speakers like to compress their words together when consecutive words end and begin with a vowel sound.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Photo by [nati]

One of the great challenges of learning a new language is immersing yourself in the new language enough so that you can almost absorb it through osmosis . In addition to putting index cards up around your house, setting up your mobile phone and your computer in your target language, watching movies in your new language, or installing a new shower curtain, you can also listen to music in the language you are learning.

I’m definitely a creature of habit. I often tell myself I need to read the bible more, so I could actually know something about my faith. I haven’t been doing this because it has been difficult I never bothered to put it into my routine. I figure if I can integrate the bible with something I read everyday, like Google Reader, I may actually accomplish something instead of just setting up yet another abstract desire in my mind without a plan of action.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

It is said that the best way to learn a foreign language is through total immersion. So why should your shower be any different? Someone who was Christmas shopping for me found this wonderful shower curtain, which contains 250 Spanish words and their English definitions. It’s also available in French.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

While celebrating my youngest son’s birthday earlier this week, I was enjoying a can of my favorite drink from México: Del Valle Néctar de Guayaba de concentrado (guava juice nectar from concentrate) when I realized I had just found the source for my next Frases en Español post! Conveniently the text on the can is bilingual so I did not need to do the translation myself, although I try not to look at the English text normally.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I need to make a confession. Over the past month or two, I’ve not been studying Spanish or any other language as I should. I found myself neglecting my SRS for up to a couple of weeks at a time. I was not studying any new material. I was not playing My Spanish Coach on my Nintendo DS and I was not listening to any of the Spanish podcasts that I had subscribed to. I was not watching Spanish television and I was not practicing speaking and listening with my Spanish-speaking friends.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

As I mentioned at the end of my article, Setting up a Spanish keyboard in Windows Vista , I am primarily a user of Linux and the KDE desktop environment. In an small effort to immerse myself in a little more Spanish, I changed my desktop from English to Spanish. To do this, I opened the KDE Control Center. Under “Regional & Accessibility” I selected “Country/Region & Language.” I added Spanish to the list of languages, and made sure it was at the top of the list. After clicking on “Apply,” the new settings only apply to programs that start after the change. So in order to make the whole desktop in Spanish, I had to logoff and log back in.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Babelhut was recently named one of the top 21 language bloggers on the web by eduFire. EduFire is a site that matches up language tutors with language students, and that tutoring takes place via video chat on eduFire. I’ve yet to try it out, but I certainly intend to do so. But there’s more than just the video tutoring on eduFire. They have an excellent flashcard section which plays as a multiple choice game that gives you more points the faster that you answer correctly. Some of these flashcards are good to put in your SRS. They also have a resource section with lots of embedded language learning videos.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Can’t figure out how to type “¿Dónde está el baño?” on your keyboard? If you use Windows Vista, this article will tell you how to setup a Spanish keyboard so that you can type all those characters that aren’t standard on your keyboard. Users of older versions of Windows (XP, 2000, etc) won’t be able to use the directions exactly, but you should be able to get a general idea of how to setup a Spanish keyboard.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I was on the phone with my friend Patrick, who has been my friend for about 12 years, and one of the things we discussed was our study of Spanish. Patrick has gone a little further than I have and I found his description of his study habits interesting. He doesn’t use an SRS program like myself or Thomas, but through his use of Rosetta Stone he has had some similar results to what users of SRS programs have seen. I asked him to write a brief description of his study methods so that I can post them here: