study languages in small, daily bites

I like reading on the train as the (usually) limited Internet makes for fewer distractions. So this time, on a cross-country journey to Burmingham, I bought the Spanish newspaper El Pais. I’ve read a few article and found to my astonishment that an op-Ed on the Eurozone crisis made more sense when I was also trying to figure out the words . Probably just a matter of focusing, or maybe it was just well-written. The BBC commentators I usually hear about this stuff from lean on a lot of jargon and assume a high level of understanding in the part of listeners. This piece started out with an analogy from the Roadrunner cartoon – excellent.

I watched about 5 minutes of this interview with Francois Hollande before I realised that A was sitting next to me, patiently(?) waiting for me to stop so he could get on with his music listening.

I’m ambivalent about how much to focus on French. It’s not one of my top three languages, but material is readily available, and I sense that it wouldn’t take that much effort to improve quite a bit. However, with regard to learning toward teaching, I suspect Spanish and German are more in demand in this country.

I am finding it challenging to actually sit down each day and do something substantive and concerted. I wonder whether I’m too old/poor/settled to go and live in Spain or Germany for a few weeks to practice intensively. That would surely be more fun than my current stay-at-home state!

Nothing yesterday, but there is always a bit of French and usually something else to be consumed on a FB group called UNIVERSALBREAD, also good for bread porn. Will go check that out now.

Read an article w A from Die Welt about an interview with the Israeli Chief General and his thoughts on Iran (hint: he’s less hawkish than Netanyahu, go figure). Tough vocabulary. Maybe we’ll try something on culture next time, for contrast.

Meanwhile, will go dig up one of the Spanish novels I abandoned halfway through.

if I included in this a commitment to recording what I actually do. It’s extra-important now as I’d like to train to teach secondary school Spanish and German, and may be picking up some Hebrew/bat mitzvah tutoring as well.

So for starters, we found a copy of Die Zeit yesterday. A and I will try and read bits of it together, as his German is a lot better than mine. I also bought a cheapo German grammar book (part of a buy 1, get 1 free series from Blackwell’s), but I can already tell it isn’t very good…still, it’s a start, and since I’m not learning from scratch, it probably won’t be too harmful.

Oh, and I bought two Hebrew textbooks for adults, one biblical, one modern. More good review, and teaching materials as well.

This is going slowly, but today A and I read half of an article about baguettes from the Dictionnaire du Pain. Need to work on large numbers such as dates.

specifically (though I guess I don’t have to do all of them every day…)

• Spanish: read a few pages from a novel, in the morning or at bedtime
• Portuguese: work through teach-yourself book and find a good cooking blog or something to take stabs at, for fun
• German: read bread-baking blog
• Italian: um. Not sure what I’ll do for this. I have a teach-yourself book but it’s pretty crap. Maybe read one of those travel-propaganda books? Problem is I really need the background and grammar.
• French: Dictionnaire Universel du Pain. Fun! Really hard! Once again, I have just enough French to be dangerous, not useful.
• Hebrew: browse Ha’aretz regularly