Ged Spanish
I am a Restaurant Manager that needs to learn practical Mexican Spanish any
Ideas?
Some thoughts:
1. Don't get discouraged during your first year. Realize this is a
long-term adventure.
2. Might start with some of the very reasonably priced grammar books
(even including Spanish for Dummies, also Spanish Now by Barrons) -
most can be found in paperback under $20, certainly under $30 at your
local bookstore.
3. Work on your pronunciation. Pronounce things at your work that are
written in Spanish and have your employees critique your
pronunciation. Go to the Learning Spanish website and practice your
sounds there. Make tapes of yourself reading whatever.
Notice the pronunciation link here:
http://www.studyspanish.com/index.htm
In fact, working your way through just the free stuff at this web site
will take you a long way in learning some basic Spanish concepts.
4. Go through want-ads of whatever local paper you have, or find one
on the net. Ask your employees for stuff in the want-ads that you
can't find in a dictionary - graduate from want-ads to the regular ads
in the paper - this will get you started on some vocabulary building.
5. Read and translate an article a day from a Spanish newspaper into
English (after a couple of months) - after the first year, try
translating from an English paper to Spanish.
6. Work on Vocabulary building:
Words only
Phrase building
Sentence and thought building
Putting Sentences and thoughts together.
A first step in the above could be to step up your reading from
want-ads:
6.5 Verb Conjugations
You will have to learn those Conjugations as you go. You should be
pretty comfortable understanding conjugations you read after about the
first year - in probably the second year you will be working on
"unconsciously" selecting conjugations as you talk without thinking
about it - this will take awhile.
7. Start with some children's school books, fairy tales, etc, in both
English and Spanish. Readily available right now, but probably at
junior high level, are the Harry Potter books in both English and
Spanish.
8. Review the various tape programs and plan some purchases here. I've
used about all of them and they all have pluses and minuses in
comparison to each other.
9. Don't get discouraged in your first year (Did I say that already?)
if you forget stuff that you think you should have remembered - it
just needs to get a little "deeper" into your "deeper" memory - it'll
get there eventually - give it 30 minutes a day over a year.
10. Read posts of this newsgroup as you find the time.
11. Read things of interest to you - search for Spanish stuff on the
web on Restaurant Management, commercial food, recipes, or whatever
strikes your fancy - use one of the translation services to help
understand the page - but you'll still need a dictionary - those
services don't quite get some words right.
12. I consider indispensable references are:
A good dictionary. I use Larousse, 120,000 words,
list price $11.95
501 Spanish Verbs, Kendris - lists at $13.95
I also like various kinds of phrase books, like:
Guide to Spanish Idioms, Pierson, List $6.95
750 Verbs & Their Uses, Zamir & others, List $18.95
Mastering Spanish Vocabulary, Navarro & Ramil, List 9.95
Spanish for Reading, Franco & Sandberg, List $14.95
Also, try various of the Spanish GED Guidebooks. I have one put out by
Contemporary Books, lists $12.95
Remember that 30 minutes a day will probably help you remember things
better as opposed to week-end marathons - but we all do the week-end
marathons because we want to learn it all and we're busy during the
week