Is Interlingua a good primer for Spanish?
Blxxdyharry
is overwhelming and so, obviously, it would be quite a luxury to at
least understand my friends when they are talking about me in Spanish.
:) The problem is most Spanish courses I come across are quite emersive
and it seems like it takes almost years to even say something fluently.
So my question is how understandable is Interlingua amongst, say,
Spanish-speakers? I hear it's much easier to learn and quite
understandable for those whom are familiar with Romance languages. Is
Interlingua a good primer for Spanish?
ranjit_...@yahoo.com
One of its claimed advantages over Esperanto:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
You can speak Interlingua with anybody who knows Italian or Spanish. He
will think you have a strange dialect, but he will understand you. If
you speak Esperanto he will not understand much, unless he has learned
Esperanto.
Neeraj Mathur
"Blxxdyharry" <BlooDi...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1131598583.0...@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> So my question is how understandable is Interlingua amongst, say,
> Spanish-speakers? I hear it's much easier to learn and quite
> understandable for those whom are familiar with Romance languages. Is
> Interlingua a good primer for Spanish?
For your purposes - for most purposes in fact - Interlingua is a waste of
time. Most people consider Spanish to be the easiest second language for
monoglot Anglophones to learn. Moreover, you live in a community where you
have access to lots of sources for practise - not just your friends, but
music, books, and tv shows. None of these exist for Interlingua (certainly
not on any comparable scale).
If you want to learn Spanish, I'd suggest that you use a simple book like
the Teach Yourself series (I don't their Spanish volume personally, but have
good things to say about the rest of the series) and couple it with things
that you enjoy, particularly music if possible. Between Mexican pop,
Spanish-language hip hop, Afro-Cuban jazz and the various Buena Vista-type
discs, I'm sure you'll find something you'll like. Listen to the songs, look
up the lyrics on the internet, learn them, maybe look at a translation to
get a feel for them and, eventually, learn their meanings. (There are issues
with different pronunciations here; in general, Mexican pop is the easiest
to correlate to the written forms of the words.)
An excellent - and cheap - book is *Spanish for Reading* by Fabiola Franco
and Karl Sandberg. Because of it's focus on written language, it has you
working with interesting, detailed passages within the first few chapters.
Of course, you should probably want to couple that book with some kind of
basic oral instruction as well - maybe get a tape from a library and do the
first few units on that.
Myself, I used the Franco and Sandberg book, together with music, to develop
a pretty good understanding of Spanish. I'm now using *Teach Yourself:
Improve Your Spanish* to get up to speed in oral confidence, the one field I
lack most. But my success (as I see it) is probably slightly atypical, in
that 1) I haven't set the bar very high for myself in terms of oral
productive fluency, and 2) I learnt French in school as a wee one in Canada,
and am doing my degree in Latin.
I think that for now, you should be looking at and evaluating different
kinds of materials to learn Spanish; forget about Interlingua, which will
only waste time that you could be devoting to your actual goal, which is
Spanish. If you feel that Interlingua will be helpful to later learn French
or Italian - again, it's a waste of time; having learned Spanish will be a
far greater aid (because of the comparable fullness of their conjugation
systems, and their highly similar - schematically and morphologically -
tense structures). If one of those languages is your main goal, then learn
it first.
Good luck!
Neeraj Mathur
Ruud Harmsen
<neem...@hotmail.com>: in sci.lang:
> (There are issues
>with different pronunciations here;
Are there? AFAIK, the only points are that final -s sometimes becomes
-h or gets missing, and that y/ll varies a lot, [j], [dj], [Z], [z],
etc. But that's about all, apart from that, Spanish pronunciation is
vastly uniform.
>in general, Mexican pop is the easiest
>to correlate to the written forms of the words.)
Doesn't it everywhere?
--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com
Neeraj Mathur
"Ruud Harmsen" <realemail...@rudhar.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:ngf6n1h32d2fi6v3g...@4ax.com...
> Thu, 10 Nov 2005 10:20:33 -0000: "Neeraj Mathur"
> <neem...@hotmail.com>: in sci.lang:
>
>> (There are issues
>>with different pronunciations here;
>
> Are there? AFAIK, the only points are that final -s sometimes becomes
> -h or gets missing, and that y/ll varies a lot, [j], [dj], [Z], [z],
> etc. But that's about all, apart from that, Spanish pronunciation is
> vastly uniform.
There are other differences that I've noticed; some bits of Latin America do
funny things with the diphthongs, so a word like 'quiero' comes out as
[k'iro] (with ' for palatalization). But the biggest stumbling blocks are in
the treatment of elisions, contractions, and synizesis, which are all
particularly rampant in Cuban music (as a totally subjective impression on
my part).
>>in general, Mexican pop is the easiest
>>to correlate to the written forms of the words.)
>
> Doesn't it everywhere?
Well, the best I can say is, not for me. If I have a text of a Mexican pop
song (or the few songs I know from Spain) and I remember the melody, I can
usually sing it quite easily; if I have the text for an Ibrahim Ferrer or
other Cuban piece, I have to perform some kind of scansion first mentally in
order to get it to fit the rhythm. That may be just me, of course.
Neeraj Mathur
Blxxdyharry
some have considered "Spanglish". For instance, I do know that in
Spanish the word "carpeta" means "folder" but here, because of the
intensive influences of English, it is Spanish for "carpet". This is
another reason why I agree that Interlingua may not be the right
choice. Spanish-speakers in, say, Spain (where half of my family is
from) speak quite differently than, say, the Chicano dialect of this
area. My grandfather was visiting us from Barcelona and tried to carry
on a conversation with one of my American-born Chicano friends who
speaks a sort of slang. They didn't understand eachother. Yet when he
carried on a conversation with an elderly Mexican-born woman, they
became quick friends and still keep in contact today. Language is quite
an amazing phenomon.
Ruud Harmsen
sci.lang:
>My grandfather was visiting us from Barcelona and tried to carry
>on a conversation /
In Catalan?
>/ with one of my American-born Chicano friends who
>speaks a sort of slang. They didn't understand eachother.
Doesn't surprise me if it was Spanish-Catalan, very different
languages.
Miguel Carrasquer
<realemail...@rudhar.com.invalid> wrote:
>10 Nov 2005 17:09:27 -0800: "Blxxdyharry" <BlooDi...@gmail.com>: in
>sci.lang:
>
>>My grandfather was visiting us from Barcelona and tried to carry
>>on a conversation /
>
>In Catalan?
Not likely. About half the population of Barcelona has
Spanish as their mother tongue, and the other half knows
better than to carry on a conversion with a Mexican person
in Catalan. To my knowledge there are no monolingual
Catalan speakers in Barcelona (only a few that sometimes
pretend to be).
>>/ with one of my American-born Chicano friends who
>>speaks a sort of slang. They didn't understand eachother.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
m...@wxs.nl
Francis Tyers
> If you want to learn Spanish, I'd suggest that you use a simple book like
> the Teach Yourself series (I don't their Spanish volume personally, but have
> good things to say about the rest of the series) and couple it with things
> that you enjoy, particularly music if possible. Between Mexican pop,
> Spanish-language hip hop, Afro-Cuban jazz and the various Buena Vista-type
> discs, I'm sure you'll find something you'll like. Listen to the songs, look
> up the lyrics on the internet, learn them, maybe look at a translation to
> get a feel for them and, eventually, learn their meanings. (There are issues
> with different pronunciations here; in general, Mexican pop is the easiest
> to correlate to the written forms of the words.)
If pop/hip-hop isn't your thing there is a lot of excellent spanish
language punk music out there, a lot of which can be freely downloaded.
Eskorbuto, Envidia Kotxina, Barricada and Monaguillos sin Fronteras would
be good places to start for spain-esque spanish. Then you have groups like
Attaque 77 (from Argentina), Pirexia (from Uruguay) and Cojoba (from
Puerto Rico).
I'd say Eskorbutos lyrics are pretty easy to get a grasp of, and those of
MSF are much more opaque.
Just a thought...
Fran