The White Hindu has moved

The White Hindu has moved! This blog is no longer updated, but Ambaa is still writing The White Hindu every weekday at Patheos.com.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

I'm going to learn Spanish!

I know you're thinking, where did that come from?

:)

I can't talk much about the details, but I've been offered a chance to test out a new product from Rosetta Stone, whose products I adore. It will be for Latin American Spanish and last 1-3 months.

I'm excited to test out how much I have learned about learning language from my Hindi adventure. Hindi will take a back burner for these few months while I see just how much Spanish I can pick up in that time. Spanish would certainly be a useful language to know and though I haven't had any interest in it since I was eight years old, I may as well see how far I can get since it's being offered to me for free.

Lack of vocabulary is the main thing holding me back in Hindi right now. I'm picking up bits of grammar as I read and reread Teach Yourself Hindi, so what I need is just a lot more words to work with.

My vocabulary right now is about 500 words and I'm working intensively on vocabulary growth. Each new word has expanded my understanding of the movies and tv shows and books so much.

I've read that a native speaker usually has a vocabulary of 10,000 words, using about 3,000 of them on a daily basis (we all have our favorite words and phrases that we turn to again and again, though we understand other people's favorite words and phrases). So, I have a long way to go before I'm going to be able to fully understand and communicate.

I'm trying to learn 10 new words each day, which feels a little overwhelming to me, but seems to be on the low end for the impressive people on How-To-Learn-Any-Language.com

I think this little break will help me get a clearer perspective on just how much Hindi I have learned and I can return to it refreshed. I have not yet decided whether I will keep up with a little bit of reading and watching in Hindi while I'm doing the Spanish. I don't know if that will confuse me but I also don't want to lose the progress that I've made in Hindi.

I've reached that point in language learning where each new thing learned feels like such a tiny drop that it will never help! I read somewhere the idea that the first ten words you learn in a language are so exciting and you feel like you're making great progress, but then when you're going from 520 words to 530 words it feels like no progress at all, just a drop of water in the ocean. It's hard to stay focused and motivated when you feel like you're at a standstill.

For fun, for anyone who knows Hindi (or is learning) I found this free Hindi Scrabble Game to download. It's very challenging for me, since I know so few words. It's really a cool program and I wrote to the man who created it to thank him. I hope that he'll have success with this and make other games in Hindi.

Hindi Scrabble Game

5 comments:

  1. I'm sorry the whole Spanish thing didn't work out with Rosetta Stone. If you want to still try it....LiveMocha.com is a descent free site that you can learn Spanish on. It uses the same concept as Rosetta stone, but not quite as good due to it being free.

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  2. Hey friend… I think your site is very interesting for me, your site give me some important information, thanks a lot!

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. ear your blog is really very impress to me and I would say there is a lost of sits are available to learn Spanish but choose only one site to which are providing basic starting like alphabets so you can easily learn Spanish,
    learn spanish language

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  5. Alen, I was only trying to learn Spanish because Rosetta Stone offered it to me for free.

    To update on this situation, I did end up doing the beta test program and I just don't want to learn Spanish! For some reason, it doesn't connect with me.

    I dislike LiveMocha, actually. I find them to be ridiculously obsessed with comparing themselves to Rosetta Stone (and they come out behind, if you ask me!)

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