Stop wasting time with language apps!

Most aspiring polyglots in this age of digital convenience seek a panacea in language learning apps. They promise fast results, with the whole process gamified and a totally flexible system — learn whenever and wherever. But despite all of this, they might not be the best use of your time if you want to become truly fluent. Here's why you should reconsider your dependence on this digital tool and see into more effective ways of mastering a new language.

The Parrot Problem

This is one of the significant problems with language apps; they tend to turn their users into parrots. Repetition is surely key in language learning, but parroting sentences without understanding context, nuance, or cultural relevance only leads one to superficial knowledge. A lot of these apps are based around rote learning of phrases, which might help you in the purchase of a coffee in a foreign country but somewhat less in building a deeper conversation.

Language itself is necessarily social. It's a tool for communication, rather than being words and rules of grammar taken in isolation. Language apps do not have this interactive component that is present in real-life conversations. They only provide you with one form of interaction in which you respond to prompts—sayings, with little or no feedback on your pronunciation or context. This is very much unlike a real conversation, where you would listen, respond, and adjust on the fly.

They can lack customisation

No two learners are exactly alike; they will all have their strengths, weaknesses, and ways that they learn best. In general, language apps provide a one-size-fits-all approach in which the content and activities are the same for everyone. This lack of personalisation can be frustrating and inefficient. If you are struggling with a certain feature of the language, an app will not give you the tailored guidance to overcome this obstacle.

Overemphasis on vocabulary

While having a rich vocabulary is important, knowing many words does not mean that a person is fluent. Most language apps focus far more on the acquisition of vocabulary than on other crucial skills, in particular, learning how to listen and speak with the correct emphasis or intonation or stress patterns and about the culture of the host language. Fluency is the ability to use the language fluently and appropriately in different contexts, not just through memorising long word lists.

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Alternatives to Language Apps

So, what are the more effective ways to spend your time learning a new language? Some alternatives can provide a more holistic and practical language learning experience:

1. Language Classes with a Tutor

   This is, beyond doubt, the best way to learn a language. Personalised feedback from your human tutor, lessons that match your learning speed, and making live corrections are all benefits of learning with a great tutor. Even more significantly, classes are interactive and simulate honest life conversations where you are given practice to learn how to speak and listen in a supportive environment.

2. Language Exchange Partnerships

   Having language exchange partnerships is another exceptional practice method. A language exchange partnership is a situation whereby individuals seeking fluency in a target language pair up with a native speaker who seeks to learn the partner's native language. It'll be reciprocal since both will have an equal share of talk in each language and, at the same time, be beneficial in speaking and knowing about one another's culture. It helps improve conversational skills by exposing you to colloquial expressions and slang that you might never hear within formal surroundings.

3. Immersive Experiences

   Immersion is a powerful way to learn a language. If possible, spend time in a country where the language is spoken. Immersion surrounds you with the language in your daily interactions, and so, therefore, is the way to learn very quickly. If travel is not possible, it is always possible to create an immersion experience at home through movies, music, or books.

4. Attend Language Meetups and Clubs

   Most cities have language meetups and clubs where learners can practice speaking in informal, social contexts. This would mean the chance to communicate with more than one person or compels one to remain in touch with various accents or speaking styles. They also add an element of fun and remove the inherent isolation in a study by inviting a sense of community and support within the group.

Although language apps can be pretty helpful as an additional tool, overreliance on them wouldn't be a good strategy for achieving fluency. Most often, these are aimed at but miss delivering the interactive, personal, context-rich experiences that may be required to acquire appropriate proficiency in a language. For a better way, consider taking language classes, exchanging with native speakers, immersing yourself, meeting with others, and getting professional tutors. Humans learn languages to communicate with other humans, right? Therefore, in such an enterprise, there is no substitute for interacting with other humans. Use your time wisely, and you will speak confidently and naturally in no time.

Getting better at listening

Yes, listening is hard. But here are some tips that will help you get better at it.

Anyone who’s been learning Spanish for long enough will agree that listening is one of the hardest things. This is to do with many things: the speed of the language, the many accents, the many things a person might talk about, the fact not every speaker is a professional voice artist, etc. This problem is further exacerbated by bad teaching creating wrong expectations about listening. Many students are trained to listen in class, wasting a lot of time in the process, with very little gains. We believe this is the wrong way to go about it.

The moment of listening in class should not be seen as specifically training listening skills. We use that moment to introduce concepts in a practical way, and to see how your listening is progressing. Think about it like going to a tennis class: you’ll still have to play tennis outside of class to get good at it — no one would think the class alone is the moment in which you get good at your tennis, or that you’ll go to class and do a simulacrum of a game, as if you were playing with mates. Instead you will see the class as a moment of learning, and your instructor will use that time to correct your posture, and to suggest ways of improving your skills, perhaps to introduce a new trick, etc.

So, if the class is not really the moment of playing / listening, when do you play / listen? Well there are many things to do in your own time, and none of them need to be a chore. There are things that you can do actively; and there are things that don’t need your attention 100%.

Actively, in a nutshell, try to listen to podcasts, watch things on Netflix with subtitles, listen to people talking and try to spot words, expressions, etc. There are many exercises that we teach our students for them to listen actively and if you want to learn more about these please get in touch because after wall we are a school! That said, there are no limits to the things you can do with free materials available online. Be inventive and just go for it.

In terms of non-active learning there’s a lot to do too. This is very interesting, very simple, and rarely exploited by language tutors (spoiler: we do; but we are also the best around, so there’s that). In our classes we talk a lot about the concept of unconscious acquisition. If this is something of interest there’s an article here about what this means in depth. Basically, it means that there are things that happen when we learn, when we pick up the language without really trying; listening has a lot to do here, and we still don’t know how this works but we know it works, judging from how kids continue to learn their mother tongue: did you mum or dad sit you down and explained the subjunctive to you or did you just pick up the language from them? More likely the second option…

So we need to try to replicate that situation of someone learning their mother tongue. For that reason it’s important that you spend time in the language — there’s a post here for you to see what we mean by that. But to put it simply, one thing you can do is having a radio in Spanish in the background when you aren’t necessarily paying attention 100%. This will improve your listening and your overall language learning, through that unconscious acquisition. We see this all the time — our students who do this learn much faster than the ones who do no! (We would have to say that they also learn faster and better than in other schools but that’s something for another post!).

So, yes, do some proper work with podcasts, etc, or get in touch with us and follow our method to go about this. But also, next time you are doing exercise or cooking, just blast a Spanish radio station instead of the latest Coldplay (yawns in Spanish). You’ll be taking a lot in without even noticing it!

FREE ONLINE RESOURCES:

Good podcasts: Radio Ambulante (www.radioambulante.org), El Hilo (http://elhilo.audio), Sobremesa, a podcast by Memrise (https://memrise.libsyn.com), Duolingo Podcast (https://podcast.duolingo.com/spanish).

A good place to find radios in Spanish:  http://www.radio.garden. 

Lots of news in Spanish: BBC Mundo (https://www.bbc.com/mundo)

And there’s a lot more online!

From Carmen to a Fox — The image of the woman in Spain #IWD2018

Despite the lingering stereotypes of passionate women 'a la Carmen’, from Bizet’s opera, Spanish women sung about women, fashioning up and down their image in the last half century. 

The Francoist regime, propped by the most conservative section of the Catholic church, made use of the movies to reinforce the image of a passionate, passive and ever forgiving woman. In 1953, Lola Flores in ‘Pena, penita’ embodies the prototype of a Roma woman, tanned and long curly jet black hair, who blames herself for the crimes of her lover and will forever wait for him until he gets out of jail. This is the same kind of woman who was taught to sew and to cook in the Women’s Section of the fascist schools. Still in 1961, Conchita Bautista represented Spain in the Eurovision contest with a flamenco outfit longing for her lover because she was only happy ‘estando contigo’ (being with you). 

Only four years later, on the opposite side of the spectrum, Concha Velasco wanted to be a ‘Chica Ye-Ye’ (Ye-ye Girl) with a messy hair and colourful tights. The modern outlook of the Beatles bypassed the censorship and a lot of cool bands started to sing in rudimentary English. Most of these bands were made up of men, but great many feminine exceptions populated the radio of the late dictatorship. Mari Trini did not want to be a quiet and agreeable girl in ‘Yo no soy esa’ (I’m Not That One). Salomé in ‘Vivo cantando’ (I Live Singing) and Paloma San Basilio in ‘La fiesta terminó’ (The Party Is Over) celebrated their break-ups and upcoming freedom. Even more, Cecilia — ‘Dama Dama’ (Lady, Lady) — expanded the murky frustration of women cloistered at home to ladies of high station, wives of their “Master”. 

Yet, the same singers would always declare their unconditional love and their incompleteness without “him”. This trope would continue until today, along all cruel contradictions of La Transición, as the period of transition from Franco’s dictatorship to democracy is known in Spain. To start with, the genre of the protests song, those anthems of the democratic youth, were almost exclusively run by bearded men, with women providing the chorus. 

In February 1982, Colonel Tejero launched a failed coup against the recently born democracy. Too late. Free speech was already rooted in the rebellious youth and during summer that year Las Vulpes jumped into stage singing 'Me gusta ser una zorra' (I Like Being a Whore) demolishing in four bars the good girl stereotype. How feeble does Jeanette’s ‘Soy Rebelde’ (I’m a rebel), from 1974, look in comparison!

By then, the whole the musical scenario had undergone a Kafkaesque shift and punk-rock would linger at the forefront for two more decades. In Madrid, Alaska was singing ‘¿A quién le importa?’ (Who’s concerned?), no less of a political statement: she didn’t care about what people thought of her. While as early as 1988, Mecano would produce one of the first pop gay anthem in Spain in ‘Mujer contra mujer’ (Woman Against Woman).

Today, the image of women in music is changing rapidly. The pay gap in the art industry is progressively being bridged and there is a zero tolerance against physical or emotional abuse. Women like La Mala Rodriguez in hip hop, Las Odio in punk-indie, or Chanel in trap are crushing the musical scene. But importantly, all musicians are called out for their misogynist lyrics and it seems that feminism starts to be accepted as a normalized frame for any cultural production. 

By Julio Cirujano

Ser or estar — that is the question

You might be aware that Spanish has two ways of expressing the verb to be: ser and estar. This is something that puzzles most beginners, and that many advanced students continue to find difficult as they progress with their studies. This difficulty is generally made worse by the fact that the use of these two verbs is generally simplified in this way: 

• Ser is permanent

• Estar is temporary

While this is truth, it is only partially truth. How would this explain a sentence like “Mi casa está en Hackney” (My house is in Hackney)? The location of my house is permanent, so it can't be explained with the opposition between ser as permanent and estar as temporary. 

A better way of thinking about these two verbs is thinking of two different functions that explain the vast majority of its uses: qualifying versus locating. 

QUALIFYING

When we want to say how a thing or someone is we are qualifying. And here the opposition between permanent and temporary is true. 

We use ser when we understand something to be intrinsically related to the thing or person we are qualifying. It is important to note that we aren’t talking permanent and temporary from a scientific point of view here, but about how Spanish speakers perceive these things to be.  If I say “Soy Español” (I am Spanish) I understand that this is something that I can’t change. It’s not like it will go away. If I say “Soy delgado” (I am thin) it means that I am generally this way. 

On the other hand, estar is used to talk about states. A state is something that can change. If I say “Estoy enfermo” (I am sick) I understand that I wasn’t always sick, and that I will very likely stop being sick at some point. The same with “Estoy cansado” (I am tired) — I will at some point stop being tired. 

Sometimes I can use both verbs to qualify things or persons. What do you think is the difference between “Soy delgado” and “Estoy delgado”? In English you would need another word to make this difference clear. “Soy delgado” means I am thin always. That is just the way I am. Whereas “Estoy delgado” means I am thin now, because I have lost weight, for example. 

This is the opposition between ser as permanent and estar as temporary. Let’s see what other things we can do with these two verbs. 

LOCATING

Both verbs can be used to locate. 

I can use ser to locate events. An event is something that happens in time and space. I can use ser to locate an event in time and space. I can, for example, say “La fiesta es en mi casa” (The party is in my house). Here I am locating an event (the party), in space (my house). I can also say “La fiesta es a las 9:00” (The party is at 9:00). Here I am locating an event (the party), in time (9:00). 

When it comes to things or people, which can only be located in space, we use estar. For that reason I would say “Mi casa está en Hackney” (My house is in Hackney) or “Londres está en el Reino Unido” (London is in the UK). 

See that these uses of ser and estar can’t be explained with permanent versus temporary? 

TO SUM UP

These are the two functions that will help you get right 99% of the uses of ser and estar:

• QUALIFICATION: SER — PERMANENT // ESTAR — TEMPORARY

• LOCATION: EVENTS — SER // THINGS — ESTAR

We hope this helps and if you need more help feel free to drop us an email or take some classes with us!

Happy learning!