Spanish Tutor
Sep. 20th, 2014 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebI 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.
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.