Spanish Reading Comprehension for Beginners #3 - A Mexican Spanish Service Notice at the Station

Learn Mexican Spanish with SpanishPod101.com! Welcome to the Mexican Spanish Reading Comprehension for Absolute Beginners series. In this series, you will start to build up your Mexican Spanish reading skills through lessons focussed on everyday activities like taking the bus or train. You’ll learn how to read tickets, notices in the station, timetables, and more. [...]

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How Do Spies Hide Their Accent?

Want to know how to improve your accent in a new language? In 2010, eleven people blew the minds of their friends and neighbours. Their arrests by the United States government revealed that they weren’t simply “normal” Americans, living the suburban dream. It turned out that they were intelligence agents, collecting information to send back to their native country of Russia. Many of them had gone undetected for years. How on earth had they achieved this? Put simply, they blended in. They looked, acted and sounded like any other American living in the United States. They mimicked the local culture. These spies achieved something that many language learners struggle with – they mastered an accent to the point where they were indistinguishable from native speakers.

How Exactly Do Spies Hide Their Accents?

A intelligence agent who had lived undercover in the United States for over 20 years gave an interview describing his experience after he’d returned to Russia. In the interview, he was asked how he was able to fool those around him for such an extended period of time. His answer was quite simple – he’d stopped speaking Russian and conversed entirely in English or French, no matter where he was at the time.

“ You cannot use your native tongue, even at home; you have to be a control freak. That said, after working for several years, it comes naturally to you. You even have dreams in other languages.” - Andrei Bezrukov

How do spies get to this point? This is information that countries such as the United States and Russia keep very close to their chests – but from general understanding, it’s due to hours upon hours of study in intensive training programmes. Intelligence agents are made to concentrate solely on their pursuit of mastering both the language and accent of the country they plan to infiltrate. Spies-in-training spend up to eight hours a day in language classes, along with at least a couple of hours of homework per night. It’s a hard slog that pays off when in six months’ time you may not be able to single them out as anything other than native speakers. Unfortunately, not all of us have the same amount of time on our hands. So what do you do if you want to master the accent of a foreign country, but your resources aren’t exactly in the same ballpark as those of the Russian or US military? I have a few ideas for how to improve your accent. Read on to find out more.

How to Improve Your Pronunciation and Accent (5 Steps)

Step 1: Find a Native Speaker of Your Target Language

Ideally, you’d want to find native speakers of your target language - then talk to them! You’ll hear the inflections and tones of the language and your ear will start honing itself to these sounds. Also, it never hurts to have someone on hand to help you when you get stuck on a pronunciation or are having trouble rolling your ‘r’s. However, sometimes this is easier said than done – particularly if you don’t live in a big city, or you’re learning a less common language. What can you do if this is you? One of my favourite resources for practising with native speakers is italki. italki helps you find language teachers to Skype with online. It’s helped me out in several situations. I used italki to learn Mandarin Chinese when I was living in Taipei, because it turned out to be a much cheaper option than having lessons in person. There have even been times where I learned a language before travelling, such as when I learned Egyptian Arabic while living in Brazil. I was fluent to the point where I could walk into the Egyptian Embassy in Brasília and apply for my visa – speaking entirely in Egyptian Arabic. Skype lessons were key in achieving this conversational fluency. What if you’re learning a language that’s not spoken by many people? I’ve heard about people learning less common languages who have had issues trying to track down a native speaker. Here’s an option: extend your search from native speakers to fellow learners who are at a more advanced level than you. You can use the language option on italki and untick “native speaker”. Alternatively, meet up in person. Couchsurfing and Meetup are great for finding other language learners in your town or city. Chatting with native speakers online isn’t the only thing you can do to improve your accent...

Step 2: Get Cultural Immersion with Radio and TV

Television is brilliant for language learning – if you approach it the right way. You can find many foreign shows (with subtitles!) online. Movies are handy too – as long as you remember there is a right and wrong way to use films to learn a language. Watching the news is particularly valuable. News anchors and journalists enunciate clearly and use correct pronunciation. Pro-tip: watch news shows on YouTube, and slow the videos down using the video settings button. You can slow videos to quarter speed. Similarly, radio is a helpful resource, particularly for learning on the go. The radio app TuneIn has radio stations in most major languages. Likewise, Spotify has an excellent selection of music from around the world. Through the use of these resources, you’ll be tuning your ear to the inflections, tones and general pronunciations of your target language, which will in turn make it easier for you to master the accent. REMEMBER: watching TV or listening to the radio is not an excuse to switch off your brain. Passive learning on its own does not work! You need to be actively studying what you are watching/listening to. Radio and TV should should be just one tool in your language learning toolbox – it’s difficult to maintain any progress if you rely on them alone.

Step 3: Stick Post-Its Around Your Home

A great way to improve your pronunciation of words is with forced repetition. Try this: label some key items around the house with Post-Its. Don’t forget to add the articles before the words if you’re learning a language that uses them, such as un/une/des in French. This will help you avoid confusion in the future. Beneath the name of the item, write how it’s pronounced. Soon enough, you’ll be able to remember both the word and the pronunciation.

Step 3: Record Yourself Speaking

Recording yourself - and listening back to it - is one of the most powerful hacks I know for improving pronunciation. Does the idea of it make you cringe? You’re not alone. Many people experience waves of revulsion whenever they hear an audio clip of themselves talking. Over time you’ll get used to it - especially once you’ve realised how powerful it is. Use the voice recorder on your phone to record yourself saying phrases or words you’ve had difficulty pronouncing. Then, get ruthless! Listen to yourself as though you were listening to someone else. Start with being kind. Celebrate the small victories – such as mastering a word you have previously had issues with. Then, pick apart the mistakes. Identify which words need improvement and go to town on them! What if you’re unsure if you’ve got the correct pronunciation? Find a native speaker, and ask them for feedback on your recording. You could even ask them to record a word that you’re having difficulty with, for reference.

Step 5: Check Out the Mimic Method

My friend and fellow polyglot Idahosa Ness has spent years developing a system that has helped thousands of people lose their strong “foreign” accent when speaking a new language. Mimic Method takes you through the component sounds of a language: the rhythm, the beat, the musicality and individual sounds, and how they all tie together. And it shows you exactly what steps to take to develop a more authentic accent. The Mimic Method offers accent training for:

• English
• Spanish
• French
• Portuguese
• Mandarin
• German
• Italian
• Japanese

Click the language you want to learn to find out more about how to improve your accent and pronunciation when you’re speaking.

You Don’t Have to Be a Spy to Master An Accent

Don’t worry – you can breathe a sigh of relief! You don’t need to go through intensive spy training to master a foreign accent. You just need to practise and tune your ear to the language you’re learning. Don’t be scared to seek assistance from those more advanced in the language than you. Do you have any tips or tricks for pronunciation that you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments.

The post How Do Spies Hide Their Accent? appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.

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Academy Status Update

Incident: Friday 6th January 2017 13:00 UTC

We’re experiencing some technical difficulties on the Coffee Break Academy site today as a result of some updates the hosting company (Teachable) have made. They’re looking into the problems and we’ll be back up and running as soon as possible. You can keep up to date with the status report for the Student View on the Teachable Status page.

As soon as we have an update we’ll post further details here. In the meantime please accept our apologies for any inconvenience.

Friday 6th January 2017 13:28 UTC

It looks like the issue has been fixed. We’ll continue to monitor the site carefully but for now all services are accessible. Once again, apologies for any inconvenience.

 

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3-Minute Mexican Spanish #19 - Going without

Learn common Mexican Spanish conversational phrases with SpanishPod101.com’s 3-Minute Mexican Spanish series! In Mexico, manners are important, and this step-by-step lesson teaches you some of the basics you need to be polite while speaking Mexican Spanish. A native Mexican Spanish teacher will explain the simple phrases necessary. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to say ‘not’ [...]

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Episodio 245: Costumbres raras de los españoles

Spaniards have weird habits. Learn Spanish and improve your Spanish listening and speaking skills while you learn something about Spanish culture and life: "Aprender español no solo significa aprender el idioma. Cuando quieres aprender un idioma, si quieres hacerlo bien, tienes que conocer la cultura de las personas que hablan ese idioma. De esa forma conseguirás una inmersión mejor y comprenderás mucho mejor las expresiones, la forma de ser y el carácter del idioma. Hoy te voy a hablar de algunas costumbres que tienen los españoles y que resultan raras a las personas de otros países. Es posible que algunas de estas cosas se hagan en tu país, pero puede que otras no. En otro episodio te hablaré de mitos sobre los españoles, es decir, cosas que se piensan sobre los españoles pero que no son ciertas. Pero hoy te voy a hablar de algunas costumbres raras que tenemos e intentaré explicarte por qué ... "

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New Mission: Introducing Holly’s Portuguese in 3 Months Mission

Fluent in 3 Months team member Holly is taking on the challenge of learning Portuguese in 3 months. This is the first update in her Portuguese mission. How does she feel about taking on this challenge? Will she make it? Here's Holly: I’m a language enthusiast. I’m fluent in French and speak Thai at an upper intermediate level. But I started studying French in school at the age of eight, and Thai when I was 19 on an exchange program. Since then, I’ve studied five other languages, but never made it very far, and have since forgotten everything. Recently, I realised that it had been FIFTEEN YEARS since I’d last learned a language to a useful level. What kind of “language enthusiast” was I? I decided to do something about it. Right around the time that I was toying with the idea of learning Spanish or Portuguese, Benny contacted the Fluent in 3 Months (Fi3M) team about doing reviews of various language products. Woohoo! I thought. A chance to start a new language, and really stick with it this time.

How I Chose to Learn Portuguese

I couldn’t decide which language to choose, however. I recently moved to California, so Spanish would be a practical choice. On the other hand, I very much want to visit Portugal and Brazil in the near future (in fact, I already have a 5-year tourist visa for Brazil!). So I decided to let Benny choose for me. I told him I would be happy to review a product for either beginner Spanish or beginner Portuguese. He sent me the Michel Thomas Total Portuguese CD course, which teaches European Portuguese. I did the course, recorded a (very slow and painful) conversation with a native speaker, and wrote my review. Honestly, if I hadn’t done that live conversation with a native speaker, I probably would have called it quits after finishing the review. But using the language with a real person - even though I understood very little, and could express even less - gave me the enthusiasm to continue. In a few weeks, I had gone from knowing absolutely no Portuguese (not even “Hello” or “Thank you”), to having a basic conversation. In all the other languages I had studied and forgotten over the years, I had never gotten that far, because I was learning in a traditional classroom setting. This involved lots of reading and writing, a bit of listening, and very little speaking. I didn’t want to forget Portuguese like I had so many other languages. With the Michel Thomas CD course and one conversation with a native speaker under my belt, I decided to do my very own three-month Portuguese mission. I set the very reasonable goal of reaching B1 level.

How I Started My First Ever Three-Month Language Mission

I had never done a three-month mission of my own before. Before starting, I took a good, long look at my past successes and failures in language learning. I wanted this mission to succeed where my other attempts had failed. I asked myself what my biggest weaknesses were in language learning. Without a doubt, for every language I had ever studied, the answer was always the same: listening comprehension and speaking ability. (This appears to be the case for most Fi3M readers too.) Reading and writing for me are easy, even for languages with non-Latin alphabets. I’ve read 300-page Thai novels before, and yet still struggle to understand all the dialogue on a Thai children’s TV show! I wanted things to be different this time. I wanted to be able to understand spoken Portuguese, and speak it myself, without struggling all the time. So I decided that the big rule I would follow throughout the entire mission would be:

Go All-in: No Reading or Writing - Only Speaking and Listening

I didn’t want to opt for a “mostly” speaking and listening approach; I went all-in. I decided to do virtually NO reading or writing in Portuguese for the entire three months. No Harry Potter books, newspapers or children’s picture books. No writing down vocabulary lists or useful phrases. No flashcards, even! Instead, any time I set aside time to study Portuguese, it would be either through listening or speaking the language The reason I went “all-in” is simple: I know myself. I know that if I allowed myself to incorporate reading and writing exercises into my study routine, they would quickly take over. I would get lazy and stop scheduling Skype conversations or struggling through Portuguese TV shows. I’d always choose the easy way out whenever I sat down to study. By not allowing myself to read and write, any time I decided to study Portuguese, it would have to be through audio exercises, Portuguese TV shows or podcasts, or a conversation with a native speaker. That said, I did plan to allow myself three small exceptions to this rule:

• I changed my phone’s OS to Portuguese (because I have to use my phone anyway, so using it for everyday tasks wouldn’t replace an actual Portuguese study session)
• Duolingo (for vocabulary building, and because I don’t love the app enough to study it for long stretches - so it wouldn’t cut into my listening/speaking exercises very much)
• Reading song lyrics (because I wanted to use music to help me learn, but understanding song lyrics is difficult without seeing them written down - even in English!)

The other, more minor reason I decided to take this approach was to experiment with different learning methods. I wasn’t sure how well I would learn the language without reading and writing. Would it be possible to have intermediate-level conversations after only three months if I didn’t build up my grammar skills through reading and writing? I wanted to try it this way so I could report to you, the reader, about whether it was a viable approach.

My Plans for Getting Listening and Speaking Practice

Now that I’ve laid out what I planned NOT to do during my mission, here’s what I DID plan to do for getting tons of listening and speaking practice throughout the three months:

• italki - for meeting conversation partners and Portuguese teachers to get both speaking and listening practice.
• Meetup.com - for finding Portuguese meetups and language exchanges in my area.
• PortuguesePod101.com - for learning grammar, and getting experience with spoken Portuguese in a variety of settings. I purchased a three-month basic subscription, which gave me everything I needed for my three month mission.
• TV shows - anyone who knows me knows I love a good TV show. I planned to find as many Portuguese language TV shows online as I could, and actively listen to them.
• Music - when the TV’s off in my house, the music gets turned on. I LOVE music. So I planned to research some good Portuguese-speaking bands so I could learn their songs by heart.
• Podcasts - for (actively!) listening to spoken Portuguese when I couldn’t watch videos.
• Audio flashcards - for learning vocabulary, grammar and important phrases by listening to them, not reading them (I will explain how I did this in a later post).

My goal was to do at least one - preferably three or four - of these activities every single day.

What Was My Level on Day 1?

As I mentioned, I completed Michel Thomas Total Portuguese before starting this mission. Michel Thomas Total Portuguese is a seven-hour audio course - though it takes slightly longer than seven hours to complete since you’re supposed to pause playback a lot while you’re learning new phrases. Instead of teaching you canned phrases to memorize, it introduces you to the rules of the language little by little. After learning a new rule, the teacher asks you to use that rule, and the rules you’ve already learned, to deduce how to say new words and phrases. By the end of the course, you can use what you’ve learned as a foundation to figure out how to say all kinds of phrases without having to memorize them or repeat after the instructor. For example: “I would like to…”, followed by a verb, or “Could you please”, followed by a request. You learn verbs as you go, so you can complete these phrases in a variety of different ways. While it couldn’t teach a huge variety of material in a mere seven hours, I came away able to use what I’d learned with confidence. When I completed the course and recorded my Portuguese conversation for the product review, I wasn’t planning on doing a three-month Portuguese mission. I didn’t start my mission until a few weeks after this. So technically, I didn’t start my Portuguese mission at zero. However, I wouldn’t call myself a “false beginner”. Unlike most false beginners, I haven’t been studying the language on and off for years, or picked up the basics from my surroundings. In fact, before starting the Portuguese CD course, I had never studied the language a day in my life, and my level was literally zero. I didn’t even know how to say Olá or Tchau (hello and goodbye). In my next post, I’ll talk about the first few days of my mission. You can also watch my “Day 0” video - the conversation I recorded after doing the Michel Thomas Total Portuguese CD course, and a few weeks before officially starting my three-month mission. I hope you enjoy following along with my Portuguese in 3 months mission. Stay tuned for more updates!

The post New Mission: Introducing Holly’s Portuguese in 3 Months Mission appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.

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Spanish Vocab Builder #77 - Happy New Year! Words & Phrases for the New Year!

Learn Spanish with SpanishPod101.com! Our Spanish vocabulary lists are listener favorites, and now we’ve made it even better! In each lesson, you’ll hear the Spanish words and phrases from the Spanish vocabulary lists. Join us for Spanish Vocab Builder! In this lesson, you’ll learn words and phrases for Happy New Year! Words & Phrases for the [...]

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