Spanish Vocabulary Question...

[Irmao]

... in response to Spanish Vocabulary Question..., posted by yc on Oct 26, 2004

what do you mean by just learning the variations of the words??  you mean the verb conjugations??  you should be doing that anyway.  if not you will speak like an indian.

if you mean the most common nouns, such as autobus instead of camioneta or guagua  I guess that is fine.  However, once you actually go somewhere, the local dialect will prevail.  

[nocomment]

... in response to Spanish Vocabulary Question..., posted by yc on Oct 26, 2004

You think too much. Don't make things more complicated. You can get some cheap 2nd hand language tapes off the obvious website and sign up for Spanish I at the local community college. That's what I have done. I'm both irritated and having a good time learning the language.

[Red Clay]

... in response to Re: Spanish Vocabulary Question..., posted by nocomment on Oct 26, 2004

Agree with no comment.

[surfscum]

... in response to Spanish Vocabulary Question..., posted by yc on Oct 26, 2004

I've thought about this too. One problem is how those basic words decline or conjugate.  Knowing "decir" means to say is fine, but you gotta know how to conjugate it to get any use from it.  Then you have to have pronouns, but which one to use? Relative, reflexive, direct, indirect? You can find a guide to basic grammer, so if you can master the concepts there and then memorize 500-1000 words, you've just crammed spanish. Some people find languages easy, others just can't get the hang of 'em. I don't think this would work for most people, but for those who have learned one Romance language, it might.

[kented]

... in response to Spanish Vocabulary Question..., posted by yc on Oct 26, 2004

Here is my analysis as someone who is fluent in French and Spanish and teaches ESL to students who are learning English.  My analysis is less technical and more pragmatic than the one you cited.  

I tell my students that the most difficult challenge in English is pronunciation.  We have no consistent pronunciation rules whereas Spanish is always pronounced the same.  So it is MUCH easier to learn Spanish pronunciation.  

Spanish grammer is harder because we must know the gender of nouns (el libro is masculine, la mesa is femainine) and since adjectives must agree with nouns (take the same gender  we have un libro lindo and una mesa linda.  Every vocabulary word we must learn the gender, and when we speak we must remember to change adjectives.

English verbs have only one change...talk is talks in the 3rd person singular.  Our tenses use a prior word and don't require different endings.  The only irregularity that is harder in English is past participles.  There are about 150 common irregular past participles in English and 11 in Spanish.  

Spanish verbs are a killer.  There is a book 501 Spanish verbs.  You could probably reduce this to 100 verbs and 400 which follow one of these patterns.  But in English there are virtually no irregular verbs (and only one, the verb to be, has more than one irregular form in the present).  Several pages with the past and past participle irregularities and you have it for irregular English verbs.  In Grammar III, I have a verb drill where my students learn the 100 most common verbs and they basically know English verbs.  

Besides irregularities, there are verb endings in the imprefect, future and past for the learner to mess up.  Subjunctive is very large and important in Spanish and virtually not existant in English.

In sum, I consider the languages of equal difficulty but once you are good, the Spanish learner will make more mistakes because there are more gramatical details.  It is harder to produce than to receive input so you can understand more than you can say and you can read more than you can write.  

My suggestion is to take Spanish I and II at a community college.  It's cheap and you get the basic grammar without which you don't have a structure to build on.