My Experience in Studying Spanish Language Learning
Introduction
Learning foreign languages has gone from a school requirement
to a need for a well-paid job and to curiosity. During my high school years,
one of the subjects was French, which, during the 1990s, was introduced in most
of high schools in Cambodia from grade 6—the first grade of junior high school.
For the period of six academic years, I had between two to three hours of
French class every week. Quite sadly, I managed to get the least out of my
French class; yet, I never wanted to find out why I did poorly studying this
language; it might have been because this language would never bring me
anywhere in the Cambodian job market so I just ignored it.
In late 1999, after my high school graduation, I moved to
Phnom Penh, the capital city, to pursue my higher education; that was the time
I started to learn English hoping to have a well-paid job. In the same year,
for curiosity, I also took up three other Asian language classes, Mandarin,
Japanese, and Korean, all of which I gave up only after six months, two years,
and on year respectively. Since then, I have only focused on my English, which
I have improved a lot.
Interestingly enough, as part of the course requirement of
the Language Acquisition class by Dr. Alexander Arguelles, I was assigned to
start studying a foreign language as hands-on example for the explanation of
language learning theories that we discuss in class. Out of the options of
whatever language I can choose, I select Spanish for a few reasons. First of
all, it is one of the European language which, I had thought, may have some
connections to English; doing that I wish to see whether it would be easier to
study the language in the same family or it would have negative impact on the
new language I am studying in terms of, for example, pronunciation or grammar,
or even sentence structure. Secondly, I may use this opportunity to explain why
I could get very little out of my French class and to have a better guess if I
could have done better, or worse, than that.
Materials and Learning Methods
Since it was our at-our-will options, different students
selected different languages to study; therefore, it had to be
self-teaching/learning strategy.
However, kindly enough, Dr. Alexander Arguelles helped us by providing
both materials and suggestions on learning strategy of the language we chose. For
this reason, I got given the first ten lessons of Pimsleur's Spanish Audio CDs.
I was advised to follow Pimsleur's Methods by listening to the thirty-minute
audio track during which I have to loudly repeat the words or phrases I am told
to. At the same time, I also have to keep a study log in which I note down all
issues related to how I perceive the language study, the method, especially the
connection between language learning theories discussed in Language Acquisition
class and my real-world experience in learning this new language.
As Information and Computer Technology (ICT) has also
influenced on my both personal and professional life, I know that there are
some ways that ICT will be of help in learning this new language. I found a
website that offers free basic Spanish lessons on top of the http://translate.google.com/ that I use
for translation a lot of languages into English or vices versa. Therefore, I am
not going to rely only on the Pimsleur's Spanish materials but also extra
materials available online.
