12 December 2006 - A Spanish class project was prosecuting or defending Christopher Columbus from accusations that he could be compared to Hitler and genocide of early Americans. I think accusations like that are over the top and people are looking for notoriety. First of all, he was not the only Spanish expedition into the Americas but they are assigning all of the bad things that happened to him as Governor of Hispañola. He may have been the govenor but he was scarcely in control. That is not to say he was nice to the natives. He wasn't nice. He was brutal to the crew and the natives.
Consider some of the accuser's such as Bartolomé de Las Casas. He was responsible for suggesting that the natives should not be treated as slaves but import Africans to be the slaves. His sight looking back was really good and he later changed his mind about using Africans as slaves when he saw the effects on the Africans. Slavery was not nice; however, in a time period where modern equipment did not exist, the developments of rural areas depended on slavery for labor. In early American history, there were white slaves as well as the black. The white slaves could work off their indenture. It was unfortunate that everyone did not have the hindsight of de Las Casas because it took so long for everyone to recognize the side effects and stop using slaves.
In addition, much of the die off in 16th Century America, which is what they refer to as the genocide, can be associated with both a smallpox epidemic and a much greater die off associated with something the Nahuatl called cocoliztli. An interesting CDC article is available called "Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico" by Rodolfo Acuna-Soto, David W. Stahle, Malcolm K. Cleaveland, and Matthew D. Therrell. The die off numbers they quote are 50% for the European plague and 80% for 16th century Mexico. The presence of the Spanish had nothing to do with the epidemic refered to as cocoliztli, which caused approximately 2/3 of the deaths.
17 November 2006 - Miré "El Codigo Da Vinci" en español anoche. Hube prender subtítulos pero en español. Entiendo mucho pero no entender todas. Estuvo muy divertido porque los subtítulos y voz no está mismo. Aún es un cine muy bueno.
4 November 2006 - Since late Spring, I have been taking a class(es) in Spanish that is provided by the Richland, Washington recreation group and taught by Señora Cecy Arcia. I am suddenly starting to see real progress in learning Spanish. What is really funny is that I am losing some of the English-Spanish translations but not losing the usage in Spanish.
20 October 2006 - I saw an interesting table on Spanish verb endings and made my own version. You can use any book about Spanish regular verbs to create it. So, I have a file called "spanish-verb-endings" that you can view or print.
28 June 2006 - I had to read an article out of a reading comprehension book for children. I was at a loss when I had to translate because of so many new words. I felt like some of the singers that would sing phonetically but didn't have much of a clue as to what they were saying.
9 June 2006 - I signed up to take a beginning class on Spanish. I jumped into the class after 5 classes had been held. I know more Spanish words than most of the class but some of them can talk and I can't. It is kind of funny because the teacher has us read articles and I understand most of them. You read a sentence or 2 and then translate what you read. Most of the time I understand what I am reading. It must be intimidating to some of the class because there are times when I probably don't belong in the beginner class but there are important things I need to know and they are only taught in the beginner class.
I recently started reading a book by Isabel Allende called "El Bosque de los Pigmeos". She is related to Chile's Allende regime. I have friends that were severly repressed when he was the president. I have no problem reading books by Allende. She was not part of the chain of command and I do not believe that the sins of the family fall on the children. If anything, she is one of the few writers that I would like to meet. Another writer that meets that criteria is Julia Alvarez. How many writers do you have that you would buy 2 copies of each their books. For me, one is in Spanish and the other is in English.
On 3 November 2004, I found a very interesting web site. It was by Lerner.org. It is a site really for teachers in the US schools system. Lerner.org has an Annenberg/CPB project, which has a goal of developing teaching projects for the K-12 environment. I have a ADSL broadband connection and can watch the series Destinos with the "Video on Demand". They also simulcast over the internet what they are transmitting over their ku-band satelite system. Destinos is broadcast, an episode a week, at 12 pm and 5 pm ET. They recognize their classes will benefit more than just K-12 students and talk about students in the college environment and adult learners. Since I am over 65, I definitely fall into the adult learners. The series can be purchased on various media but is fairly expensive. The 2 part DVDs cost over $900 but that also includes the book and workbooks. I am up to episode 23 and find that I understand more than 50% without any work but will probably need the various books to proceed to a higher percentage.
Destinos grabs your interest by having a Don Fernando fall seriously ill. He had recently received a letter telling him that his first wife was not dead. She had not died in the bombing of Guernica, Spain. When he last saw Rosario, she was pregnant and he wants to find the rest of his family that he thought had died in the war. So, he askes his abogado (lawyer) hermano (brother) to try to track down his wife that didn't die as he thought. The hermano de Don Fernando arranges for an abogada de Los Angeles, California (USA), who has demonstrated investigative skills that he admires, to try to track down Rosario, the missing wife. The stories are in the telenovela tradition and leaving you waiting to see the next episode. With VoD, you don't have the problem of waiting until next Friday to see the next episode. So far, I have watched 23 episodes in 3 days. I finished watching episode 21 around 3:15 am and found it difficult to shutdown the broadcast. I just don't know how patient I can be at waiting to see the next episode.
Well, I wasn't too patient tonight. It is 4:30 am on 8 November 2004 and I just finished episode 52. I have read reviews that knocked the presentation but I think they lost sight of the fact that it was written and filmed in 1992. It was to be presented to a class room of students studying Spanish. The Spanish is very easy and they repeat concepts until you understand them.
It is broadcast on satelite on Friday, which means it was intended to last a year. I think I understood about 80% of what was being said. There were some episodes that I may have understood 50-60% and some that I understood everything. Since there isn't a test, 80% may be a little bit high; however, I am going back and watching each show until I understand the conversation Spanish.
I was hunting for a page by a Madrid teacher and found WordReference.com. They install buttons into Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator that will let you click a word and then right-click it to be able to translate it between a number of languages. My choices were Spanish and English. You have to be connected to the Internet, which I am through a ADSL line. It is ADSL because it is up to 768kbs on the downloads and up to 128kbs on the uploads.
Another translation dictionary that I use is the "FreeLang Dictionary". I downloaded the dictionaries that translate English into French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The link will take you to their home page.
I am going to try something new. It is called "Musical Spanish" by Stacey Tipton. I am getting so that I can read Spanish but find that using español is a problem. I like to listen to música latína and I like to sing along to my favorite Spanish Singers. I have for many months now. As an educational tool, Tipton´s web site is interesting to visit even if you aren't fighting to learn Spanish like I am. A promotional link from her web site is the following.
It is 6:30 am and I haven't gone to bed yet and I was reading Tipton's book. I had not paid attention to the "Learn By Example" section on page 7. There is a warning about listening to latino music and that you might find yourself insatiably addicted to it. I chuckled because I had read the warning almost 2 years too late and now I am hopelessly hooked on música latina.
When I first tried using Musical Spanish (MS), I had problems getting Windows XP to use it. MS depends on Adobe Acrobat Reader but I wanted to install it on my system that already had version 5.05 installed. When I tried to read mspanish.pdf off of the CD-ROM, Acrobat Reader would basically hang my XP system. There is a file specification inconsistancy with respect to version 5 that I think is an attempt to start Macromedia's Flash program. At first, when I clicked the flash program on the CD-ROM and then clicked the pdf file, Acrobat version 5.05 no longer had problems dealing with the version 4 file. This was not true. It just took longer to have problems; however, I can use MS on a system that still uses Acrobat Reader 4.0. I finally figured out what was wrong and almost everything makes sense. The pdf file itself was corrupt. You could not look at pages 63-71. What ever was affecting those pages caused all of the problems. It was just much worse with XP than it was with W2K. I also do not have any idea what caused the problem. That is beyond my interest in diagnosing the problem. Tipton fixed the problem and I had a new CD-ROM that worked.
Musical Spanish has two features that got my attention. First, of course, is using music to get your attention and teach Spanish. Next, Tipton fully explains the relationships. I have found that most of the books trying to teach me Spanish assumed I was an expert in English. I have news for them. My mind rejected the rules on English because there were too many exceptions, which made me consider it non-logical. I hate anything that is non-logical. For example, the typical text would define something as a "to be" verb and expected me to understand what that meant. I think the end result of all of this is that I will understand English better than when I started.
As far as learning Spanish is concerned, I can sight recognize 100 verbs but can only conjugate most of 3 or 4 of them. My vocabulary is running pretty close to 1,000 words right now. About half of them are words I have used for years and never thought of them being Spanish. I find remembering the new words is tough but I have a flash card program that lets me come back and check what I know. I am about 2/3 of the way through 1,500 words. The interesting part is the flash card program is coupled with a talking dictionary. I can look a word up and have it pronounced correctly all at the same time. I can learn about 10 new words a day but have to keep going back to them every day for more than a week. I will loose the meaning of 1 or 2 of the new words after not using them for 3 or 4 days. After two weeks, they seems to stick around for a while. I have more to do than learn 10 new words a day and that leaves me at a net gain of 3 or 4 day. I have a book on Spanish Verbs that I occasionally read while I am eating at my favorite restaurant called "Old Country Buffet". This turned out to not work that well for me. I needed something with more visual reinforcement.
A computerized language product called the Rosetta Stone by Fairfield Language Technologies is changing everything. My memory is highly visual and is close to photographic on some things. I can have someone write a phone number down and I will remember it for months. If there is something magical about the number, I will remember it for years. When I was younger, I never needed a "black book". If I was interested, I just automatically remembered her telephone number. The Rosetta Stone uses visual reinforcement to memorize Spanish. You listen to someone say something in Spanish and you have to choose the right image. It asks the same question many different ways. After playing with it for a couple of days, I woke up dreaming about "something" saltando. This was a drastic difference when compared to not remembering what saltando was after I stood up to get a cup of coffee. The useage was a caballo (horse) jumping, niños (children) jumping, adults, and other animals all in various stages of jumping. This was just the first of many experiences where I woke up dreaming about my current lessons.
Not too long ago, i.e., the middle of October 2002, I had been listening to Enrique Iglesias sing "La Chica de Ayer", and "Mamacita" from his album "Quizás". I was listening to the album while I ate dinner and I found several songs that I could understand about 80% of what was being sung. I don't think I can understand more than 80% in most of the English CDs. There were 4 all together but I can not remember the names of the other 2. There were also a couple of songs by "Paquita la del barrio" that keep running through my mind. The excitement in all of this was waking up with these songs still on my mind.
I went back after a week of intensive study and looked at my flash card list of verbs that were giving me serious problems. I knew I was making progress because I could remember what most of them meant. This made me feel good but just recently, I was looking at the text for one of the future lessons and had to smile because the line read something like "The airplane is flying in front of a snow covered mountain." I was smiling because I didn't have to translate anything using a dictionary.
Now all I have to do is learn enough Spanish that I can take an immersion course in one of the places that teach Spanish that way. You go to classes for 4 hours a day and live with a Spanish speaking family. A month long session was really reasonable. The places providing lesson where I would be interested is Merida or Oaxaca. There are some people that I occasionally work with that live from Tampico to Merida. It would be interesting to see what these areas are like.
My first choice is Oaxaca. It has more archaelogy sites that you can visit. Oaxaca has several advantages. It is fairly high and is cooler than the Yucatán. I can deal with 85 °F temperatures and 60% humidity much better than the 90 °F and 90% humidy encountered at Merida or Cancun. Both areas will have uv ratings in the 10+ so there isn't any advantage to either area. In addition, the archaeolgy books that I have read credit the appearance of writing in the Americas with the Zapotec culture around Oaxaca. So, it is choice based on a comparison of the pros and cons. I think the structures on the Yucatán or more interesting but I could spend a more comfortable month in Oaxaca. I also figure that I could take a second trip to see the Yucatán.
