Monthly Archives: November 2007
On learning Spanish for specific or special purpose
Last month I wrote a post here, about the nature of Spanish for travel courses. A Spanish course for specific or special purpose doesn’t have the same characteristics as a typical Spanish for travel course as presented on the post in reference. On the other hand, a lengthy Spanish for travel course can certainly be classified within a specific or special purpose category.
A Spanish course for specific or special purpose usually requires a complete learning of all the language features necessary to achieve language competence in a given field. A medical doctor or an electronics engineer, for example, has specific language needs which must be fulfilled by a course designed to satisfy their particular needs.
No course of this nature is exactly the same even if they are intended for an identical field. A biologist may need specific language structures that may differ with a course designed for an enologist (wine industry scientist).
Spanish courses for specific or special courses require that the student learn all the general aspects of Spanish before engaging in the acquisition of the specialized features needed to become an effective user of Spanish in both written and spoken language.
As stated above, to be really effective, a Spanish course for specific or special purpose involves that a student must fully learn all aspects of the language. This implies that the learning process can be time consuming and that the student must be prepared to do a good amount of homework, apart of engaging in a constant tuition arrangement with an experienced Spanish language professional.
The importance of cognate words in the learning process of Spanish
There are lots of words in Spanish that have a very close connection to an English word. Just to tease my students, when studying the sound and structure of some Spanish words, I list orally or on the whiteboard Spanish words such us ‘visible’, ‘posible’ or ‘motor’.
In most cases they find it quite amusing and curious that words like ‘visible’ and ‘motor’ are exactly the same in both languages except for the different pronunciation. Then when I write twice the word ‘visible’ on the whiteboard and asked them to tell me which word is the Spanish or the English word, they really think that I’m going crazy; as for them both words are just the same. Things get sort out when I pronounce either of them as Spanish or English word.
Spanish and English share a vast amount of cognate words. Cognate words share a common origin; however, the meaning of a word can be different. For example the Spanish ‘sensitivo’ is not the same as the English ‘sensitive’, even though they originate from the same source. The Spanish ‘sensible’ and the English ‘sensible’ don’t mean the same thing either, even though they look exactly the same!
Students learning Spanish should, if in doubt check with their teacher or a dictionary to make sure that a given cognate word has the meaning that they intend to convey.
Cognates are of great help when pursuing a faster and efficient learning of Spanish as they make the sometimes tedious process of learning vocabulary an easier and more enjoyable task.
Letter ‘ñ’, the ‘ü’ and vowels carrying graphic accents in Spanish domain names
Letter ‘ñ’ is an integral part of the Spanish language. I wasn’t aware until last week that this letter and many other characters used by Castilian Spanish and other languages from Spain, were still not allowed to register in Spanish domain names.
But reading El Mundo last week, I’ve found that all of that has been changed since June this year. And it’s not only letter ‘ñ’ that can be registered; the list includes vowels carrying the graphic accents and the u with dieresis (‘ü’). Apart from letter ‘ñ’ the list of incorporated new characters affecting Castilian Spanish is: ‘á’, ‘é’, ‘í’, ‘ó’, ‘ú’ and ‘ü’.
Spanish is a language that requires all the special characters listed above in its standard written forms. Thus ‘ñ’, ‘ü’ and the graphically accented vowels as essential parts of the language were sorely needed for registering correctly Spanish domain names requiring such characters.
According to El Mundo, RAE – the Spanish initials for the Royal Spanish Language Academy – is celebrating this milestone as a great cultural achievement for the Spanish language.
This change will surely contribute to promote a proper usage of standard written Spanish on the web as well as making it easier to search for Spanish terms using correct spelling that also includes proper graphic accents.
Where did the Spanish ‘v’ go? Do you pronounce it like a b, a v or…?
Some of the phonological (sound) patterns of Spanish can seem at first sight an insurmountable challenge for a student learning this language. For lots people who are just starting to learn Spanish, and who are native English speakers, it’s a bit of a shock to find out about the inherent differences that exist between the sounds patterns they know compared to some of the sounds used in the Spanish language. Some of these contrasting sound patterns include the pronunciation in Spanish of the letters b and v.
As a native Spanish speaker I was never fully aware of the nature of these sounds until I started teaching the language and students began to question mi pronunciation of these two letters during their Spanish lessons.
Spanish stopped using a clear differentiation between b and v a long time ago. However it still has two ‘b’ type sounds, but none of them is pronounced as the English v. It can be very helpful to have in mind from the outset, that there is only one of these two sounds which is actually shared in both languages. This sound is the one represented by the letter b as used in English. The letter v as used in a Spanish word does not sound as the English v !
Using the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, the Spanish letters b (‘be’) and v (‘uve’) are both represented by either /b/ or /B/. Therefore you must notice that the letters b or v can sound either /b/ or /B/ depending on where they are found in a word. As a result of this, neither of the two letters can exclusively be represented by only one of these two phonetic symbols.
The letters b or v, are pronounced /b/ in words with structures as those found in vino, beso or banco. But when these two letters are found in words such as oveja, cabra or abeja, their pronunciation uses /B/. This sound doesn’t have a direct equivalent in English, so the student very often requires expert help from a language professional in order to achieve acceptable pronunciation ability.
In general terms, achieving the right pronunciation of /B/ is not a very hard task to accomplish. In most cases native English speakers learning Spanish can acquire an acceptable pronunciation of the /B/ sound quite quickly during the initial stages of their learning process or later by direct imitation of native Spanish speakers.
