Job Discussion Forums

[jebedu]

I have been teaching English in Bogot� since November, hence not speaking enough Spanish, and would love to have a consistent guide to polish up my bad habits and work on my pronunciation. I looked into Institutes and they seem very expensive. Does anyone have any recommendations? I am practically looking for a cheap conversational class, but I prefer to have someone that knows what they are doing. One idea was to find a grad or student from a university that studied to be a Spanish teacher. I'm sure they would love the experience and the extra cash.

Any comments are appreciated

thanks,
justin

[spanglish]

Go to La Nacional - best quality, lowest prices, coolest students, best experience.

[JacobTM]

Go to a bar, mercado de las pulgas, or any social event and just start talking to people.

If your spanish is TERRIBLE buy a phrasebook, and obviously do independent study about topics as you seem to be noticing them.

But there is no way you can learn as quickly in classes as you can simply talking to native speakers, your best resource is all around you.

[JonnyBravo]

I was in the same boat as you and started around the same time as you. when I decided to go to Colombia I knew perhaps 20-30 words of spanish (and I'm including counting to ten.)

I found these 4 sources to be very useful:

1)livemocha.com
2)spanishdict.com
3)learnspanish.com
4) Michel Thomas (and rose lee hayden) audio tapes/.mp3s

Livemocha was somehting I started with in the weeks before I got there and it helped to familiarize me. I found I remembered a lot. When I landed I still knew almost nothing but when the woman said "turisto" I said "Si" and when she said "trabajo" I said "no". Considering I had never taken a spanish class, I was quite happy with my small victory and I then proceeded to enter the country for "trabajo" anyway.

Spanishdict I found to be the most detailed, versatile dictionary available. Looking up a word in English will yield dozens of possible spanish meanings and translation, depending on circumstances. Example sentences and common phrases are included for everything. I cannot stress how much info is in one dictionary entry on this website. entering a spanish verb will give you more conjugations than you can shake a stick at, ireggular conjugations being highlighted in red.

learnspanish.com -- This helped me connect familiarity with words to rules for application. I had seen 100 verbs and probably knew what 30 of them were talking about (as in, the general meaning but not how it was being used) when I found this. Simple explainers for how to use words for a certain type of scenario followed by free quizzes for practice. One night I looked up how to make the gerund form of a verb in spanish. The next day I applied it to all the verbs I already knew the meaning of and all the sudden I had 30 or more gerunds.

Michel Thomas tapes (and later on the Rose Lee Hayden tapes which expand on the originals using the same method) were super helpful in getting me to be able to predict a word in spanish. After listening to these tapes and the constant translation rules that were so easy to remember I found myself guessing words in spanish I didn't know and finding out I was usually right.

The key for me was, after being bombarded by words that I didnt know, the words would start to bother me. Every night I went to spanishdict.com and looked up words that I had been unable to parse and read their translations and uses in detail. I had intended to write these words into a language journal, but this rarely happened in practice.

This combination of things worked for me and people often commented they were amazed how much I spoke after so little time. Try them out and figure out what works best for you. I realize this isnt a suggestion for classes or a teacher, but I thought it might be helpful to either you or future folks who come along.

[Enrico Palazo]

So how do you like teaching in Bogot�? Is it easy to get around there with no car?

[JonnyBravo]

That's a bit of a detour from this post on learning Spanish, but you are asking the wrong question my friend. A car?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/world/americas/06bogota.html

Don't bite to hard on the backslide part of that article, Bogota is still making progress. I would generally agree with the the article though about the insanity this construction has created. The two transit lines in question are already 6 months behind schedule and won't open for another few months. There are times of day when any form of traveling which does not involve your feet is a bad idea. You couldn't pay me to drive a car in Bogota.

If you plan on heading to Bogota long-term, make a point of learning the neighborhoods where you're located and the ones you need to go to by name and then have somebody teach you how to take a colectivo. Know when its better to take a colectivo and when its better to take Transmilenio and you'll be fine. It sounds harder than it is. Don't worry if you screw up, the whole city is late for everything anyway.