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Review: Mi Vida Loca
Jan. 11th, 2015 09:10 pm(If you don't care about learning Spanish, skip to the last paragraph.)
One of the things I did to try to retain my Spanish over the break between my Spanish I class and my Spanish II class was to listen to Mi Vida Loca, a Spanish learning telenovela for beginners. (A telenovela is said to be like a soap opera but really it's like a miniseries because they plan for a certain number of episodes right from the beginning.)
The BBC is no longer maintaining it's language learning pages, but it is leaving them up there for us to use and everything I tried worked perfectly.
It grabs you in the beginning--you're supposed to meet a friend for a vacation in Madrid, but it turns out she can't make it. She says you should still come and you can use her flat. She sends you a dictionary. Once you get into her flat, you notice a few things that are a bit odd. Next thing you know, someone's coming at you aggressively with a frying pan. Speaking Spanish very quickly!
I don't know how good it is for learning Spanish--I'm a pretty slow learner of foreign languages, so I don't think it would have been very good for me for that purpose. I need a lot of clear explanations and lots of repetition.
However, for my purpose, it was perfect. There were plenty of times I had no idea what was going on at first, but then there would be great explanations. Also there are subtitles in both English (automatically on) and Spanish. I already knew most of what they were teaching, but there was some new stuff mixed in with the reviews, plus a bunch of real Spanish that I couldn't quite follow without subtitles.
And it's tempting to just sit there and watch it passively, but then all of a sudden, wham, it's your turn to do something. For example, the person you're with at the cafe has told you what she wants to order but has to take a phone call and now you have to do the ordering! Yikes! Fun times.
Plus they did have some exercises to provide a little review at the end of each of the twenty-two episodes. Occasionally I was supposed to figure out what someone was saying but really couldn't, but mostly the exercises were challenging but possible.
The story is supposed to be an exciting drama, and it is very exciting for the first three episodes and a few episodes after that. But it can't be all that exciting when you are learning things like greetings and clothing. They do the trick of moving you from place to place (running from bad guys) so you get to see different parts of Spain, so that's fun.
At the end of most episodes, I really did want to know what was going to happen next. And for a while I was wondering if the bad guy really was a bad guy. And I got to find that out. The ending was not as satisfying as I hoped, and I felt there were some plot problems, but then it was much, much better than the sort of children's book I would (almost) be able to read at my current level of knowledge, so two thumbs up there.
The other thing that kept me coming back was the "dictionary," which is our teacher, narrator, explainer, and cultural advisor. He is trying to be all serious, speaking slowly and clearly, but sometimes a smile would come out, or his eyebrows would go up, or one shoulder would betray his enthusiasm.
Also, it was fun being taught Castillian Spanish via British English. For example, we learned that unas bragas are some knickers and unos calzoncillos are underpants. I did not know those were different. So I looked up those words in my British English dictionary and learned that knickers are for females.
One of the things I did to try to retain my Spanish over the break between my Spanish I class and my Spanish II class was to listen to Mi Vida Loca, a Spanish learning telenovela for beginners. (A telenovela is said to be like a soap opera but really it's like a miniseries because they plan for a certain number of episodes right from the beginning.)
The BBC is no longer maintaining it's language learning pages, but it is leaving them up there for us to use and everything I tried worked perfectly.
It grabs you in the beginning--you're supposed to meet a friend for a vacation in Madrid, but it turns out she can't make it. She says you should still come and you can use her flat. She sends you a dictionary. Once you get into her flat, you notice a few things that are a bit odd. Next thing you know, someone's coming at you aggressively with a frying pan. Speaking Spanish very quickly!
I don't know how good it is for learning Spanish--I'm a pretty slow learner of foreign languages, so I don't think it would have been very good for me for that purpose. I need a lot of clear explanations and lots of repetition.
However, for my purpose, it was perfect. There were plenty of times I had no idea what was going on at first, but then there would be great explanations. Also there are subtitles in both English (automatically on) and Spanish. I already knew most of what they were teaching, but there was some new stuff mixed in with the reviews, plus a bunch of real Spanish that I couldn't quite follow without subtitles.
And it's tempting to just sit there and watch it passively, but then all of a sudden, wham, it's your turn to do something. For example, the person you're with at the cafe has told you what she wants to order but has to take a phone call and now you have to do the ordering! Yikes! Fun times.
Plus they did have some exercises to provide a little review at the end of each of the twenty-two episodes. Occasionally I was supposed to figure out what someone was saying but really couldn't, but mostly the exercises were challenging but possible.
The story is supposed to be an exciting drama, and it is very exciting for the first three episodes and a few episodes after that. But it can't be all that exciting when you are learning things like greetings and clothing. They do the trick of moving you from place to place (running from bad guys) so you get to see different parts of Spain, so that's fun.
At the end of most episodes, I really did want to know what was going to happen next. And for a while I was wondering if the bad guy really was a bad guy. And I got to find that out. The ending was not as satisfying as I hoped, and I felt there were some plot problems, but then it was much, much better than the sort of children's book I would (almost) be able to read at my current level of knowledge, so two thumbs up there.
The other thing that kept me coming back was the "dictionary," which is our teacher, narrator, explainer, and cultural advisor. He is trying to be all serious, speaking slowly and clearly, but sometimes a smile would come out, or his eyebrows would go up, or one shoulder would betray his enthusiasm.
Also, it was fun being taught Castillian Spanish via British English. For example, we learned that unas bragas are some knickers and unos calzoncillos are underpants. I did not know those were different. So I looked up those words in my British English dictionary and learned that knickers are for females.