No. Right now I am back in my country and unfortunately I am not listening to any Spanish. Most of my on-line live is English based.
But I might mention that I gave my first presentation in netbased conference now in November. It was a Nordic conference “The Nordic Voice” and most of the participants were language teachers. I used the system Horizon Wimba. Actually my presentation was about using netbased tools in language learning and as part of my presentation I made a blog www.samkoma.net/spanish which will also be my learning journal in Spanish. As I have been promoting blogging for year as a way of monitoring your own progress I think it is appropriate that I myself use this tool
Today we played a game, everyone got a sign on their back describing their situation and the others in class should read it and give advice to the persons. Later we went to the park and I watch Megan and Heidi study irregular verbs.
After the Spanish language class today, five of us from the class had lunch at restaurant at Plaza Universitet and siting outside in the sun we collaborated on the homework for tomorrow.
I learned a lot today. I had to consentrate hard as there were I think several hundred new worlds I learned. I liked the teaching material, the book is called GENTE.
I have also bought the AULA books, those are used in many Spanish language schools, four books. Both GENTE and AULA are very attractive, lots of situations and lots of exercises and both have Audio CD.
I am now trying to find material on the web to practice, one way of doing this is to find weblogs about things that I am interested in and that cover fields that I have some knowledge about, I am not interested in cars or soccer games but I like technology gadgets. Here is one blog in Spanish about that: http://spanish.engadget.com/ I also like the idea of special Spanish as in this podcast, but perhaps it is about religion http://chilepodcast.libsyn.com/index.php?post_category=Special%20Spanish
I started a two week Spanish course this morning, I will be between 9 and 1 every day. I choose Speakeasy language school http://www.speakeasybcn.com/ because it was the one closest to where I live. I am only about seven minutes to walk to Plaza Universitet where the shcool is. The cost of two week course is around 200 euros.
There are nine students in the class. This is Spanish for beginners. I must say that I feel like a total beginner even if I attended a Spanish course for three weeks several years ago.
I downloaded a trial version of the babylon.com dictionary, I don’t bother to look up words in paper dictionaries, it takes much to long time. I also like that you can have a voice pronounce the words.
Being a teacher myself I had almost forgotten how boring it is to be a student, I really had trouble to be awake in the course…and this was the first morning.
Also one small thing… perhaps not so small… is that I am left-handed and all the language schools have small chairs made especially for right handed people. There were no chairs for left handed people. This makes it very difficult for me to write and to be in such chair for four hours a day.
Just a thought how little schools seem to adapt to individual student needs… the physical learning environment is ignoring lots of people.. around 10% of people are left handed.
I am now trying to listen to on-line radio in Spanish I can crasp what the discussion is about (I am listening to political debate) http://www.rtve.es/rne/web/index.php
I am also watching the TV station TVE 1 at the same time, there is a dancing competition and I am trying to understand the judges while they tell pros and cons of the dancers.
