Spanish Tutor

[livingdeb]

I finally remembered to go to the community college and check out the tutoring yesterday. Robin came with. Many sources agree that tutoring is the best way to learn a language short of full immersion.

I didn't really know what to expect, although I've actually been a math tutor before (statistics). Generally what would happen in math is that the students would bring some homework they were having trouble with and I would re-teach them the parts they didn't understand and then they would try to finish the problems from where they had gone wrong. We don't exactly have problems to work out in Spanish class.

So I asked the tutor what generally happens. And she said you bring something you're having trouble with. So neither one of us was properly prepared.

So we started by asking her to explain "gustar," the weird backwards-seeming word. It doesn't actually mean "to like" but to "please" and so you actually have to say that dancing pleases you rather than that you like dancing. But it feels like you are saying "Me likey dancing." And "Me likeys cookies." Because the verb agrees with the thing(s) you like, not with you.

Then I realized I wanted her to ask us questions using the new verbs we're learning, so we did that for a while. And that's when I realized a few more phrases that are a lot quicker to say in Spanish than in English which is way fun. The most handy one for us is "¿Qué buscas?" (pronounced KAY BOOSS-kahss). That means "What are you looking for?" Two words instead of five! Three syllables instead of six!

Other good ones:
* ¿Qué miras - What are you looking at?
* ¿Qué esperas? - What are you waiting for? (The bus.) Or What are you hoping for? (I'm hoping a bus will come someday.)
* ¿Qué escuchas? - What are you listening to?

And this short form is possible because you can tell the subject pronoun from the verb and because those particular verbs include the prepositions (for/at/to) that we have to add in English.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Yanno... I have studied 4 different foreign languages (Spanish, French, German & Norwegian) and it always makes me a little bit crazy that more direct translations aren't used when teaching the language - like in the case of "me gusta". Because with every language I've studied there are 2 separate elements: one is vocabulary, and the other is word order/usage. When you teach a phrase translation from "the way we would say it" to "the way they would say it", you completely gloss over these distinctions and make it much more confusing than it actually is.

When I learned Norwegian it was basically through immersion (I spent a year as an exchange student there) and the way I learned it was by picking up the word order/usage first, and filling in the vocabulary second.

I dunno... maybe I'm just crazy, but part of me thinks that people would have an easier time learning to think in the other language (which is what you really need to learn how to do in order to achieve any real level of proficiency) if they started out by teaching people word order and usage and then filling in the vocabulary as you go.

Like in Spanish, I think it would just make more sense if people first learned that "I like chocolate" is translated to "me pleases chocolate" and finally to "me gusta chocolate" or "My name is Cat" is translated to "myself, I call Cat" and finally "me llamo Cat".

That's my take anyhow!

:-)
Cat

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Yes, I like that idea.

That can sort of happen if you know some people who are new at English--their mistakes show us some of the word order differences.

[fraeuleinchen.livejournal.com]

That's a great idea, Cat - it could lead to buy-in through humor, too, which is welcome in the classroom so long as it's not better than the actual teaching! Lots of Yoda-like talk would be fun.

So, Deb, did you think the tutor was a good teacher/tutor?

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Yes, constructive fun in the classroom is definitely a plus.

Yes, she explained well and also made us do plenty of talking. I forget her name, but it's the lady who works on Fridays, 12-3. If you look at the tutoring schedule for Friday at Northridge, I think she's the one they say to check the English tutors for.

[fraeuleinchen.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I also like the shortened Spanish for things like:

¡Desayuno!

In English, one would have to say "I am having breakfast." Which is so long and laborious that one's next sentence would surely be about going back to bed, or asking how long until it's time for siesta.