Learning Spanish - Multilingual HP Readalong

[dorsetgirl]

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Inspired by this post at linguaphiles, I ordered Harry Potter y La Piedra Filosofal from Amazon last night and will be joining in. I don't know yet to what extent, if at all, I'll be posting about it. People are doing the readalong in whatever language they choose; I've chosen Spanish

Comments

[dorsetgirl]

"also being a pathologically shy child who hated being made to speak in front of people" " I hated Games more"

OMG we're twins! In some respects I was lucky with my languages at school, because actually speaking the damn language was the last thing anyone was trying to prepare us for. Our learning was all about reading, listening and producing perfect written work, all of which I found extremely easy. Unfortunately the emphasis on output being perfect put most of us off ever daring to actually speak.

Nowadays language GCSEs seem to involve huge amounts of speaking, loads of controlled assessments etc, and I'm not sure I'd do very well at all.

completely unable to retain anything because I hadn't seen it written down

I've always had problems in meetings because of that. Either I participate in the meeting, in which case I can't remember anything that was said or what I agreed to do, or I take detailed notes in which case some arse always taps me for doing the minutes. Which is tricky because I'm not necessarily writing everything down - I'm more likely to be writing stuff like "For fuck's sake how many more times do we have to listen to this arsehole talking complete shit." But you can't give that as a reason for not doing the minutes so it's lucky that I can retain - retain but not process - large chunks of what people said if I get enough peace and quiet to go straight back to my desk and type it all up. Then I read it, and then I can process it.

[suzie_shooter]

I still managed to get an A in German, but that was entirely due to the fact I was good at exams rather than good at the language. I can barely remember any of it now, other than a few words.

People (read: my boss) take the piss out of me at work for constantly carrying a notebook around with me, but I get so many instructions if I don't write them down immediately I'm bound to forget something. (also, both the people I work for have the world's worst memories, so I need to retain facts for three people, hah!)