Book review: Correct your Spanish Blunders

Beginner to intermediate level Spanish students (or those teaching Spanish at high school level) will be interested in the review of Correct your Spanish Blunders (McGraw-Hill) now available on the Español-Inglés site. As with its French counterpart, the book takes a particularly straightforward, practical approach to Spanish grammar that some students will welcome. It's probably fair to say that the book assumes that the reader has a small amount of previous knowledge of Spanish and basic grammar terms such as verb, tense etc. But with that in mind, the book covers most of the grammar you're likely to need at high school level in a compact, no-nonesense way.

As mentioned in the review, the main caveat is that more advanced students will be looking for something a little more in-depth, such as Butt & Benjamin's New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, which covers more advanced topics such as regional and stylistic variation in Spanish, use of literary forms such as the future subjunctive, more detailed treatment of Spanish pronominal verbs, and in general a more "discursive" approach to grammar.

For many students, though, Correct your Spanish Blunders will hit the nail on the head in terms of providing just enough detail in just the right way. See the review for more details.

Spanish pronunciation and rhythm

Users of the Español-Inglés site may be interested in an article I wrote recently entitled Improve your Spanish pronunciation: Getting the rhythm. The article looks in particular at how Spanish speakers divide their speech into syllables. The rhythm of speech can be an important factor in making it easier to understand. The article looks at some subtle cases that you may not have considered, for example, that the Spanish word usual is generally pronounced in two syllables, whereas its English counterpart generally has three.

Vocabulary podcast creation tool

The first version of this new tool allows you to create Spanish vocabulary podcasts from your computer. The podcasts are designed to help you to learn and reinforce your Spanish vocab on a variety of topics. The software has been tested under Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux. Support will shortly be added to Mac OS.

The tool itself is currently available for download free of charge. It requires English and Spanish voices to be installed on your machine, and the link above gives more information on where to get these.

The vocabulary is taken from the Spanish phrases section of the web site, although it has been modified slightly for the podcast software.

The Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado: using a monolingual dictionary

Students that have reached a medium to advanced level of study may be interested in a Spanish monolingual dictionary such as the Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado reviewed on this site. In the review, we look at the virtues and pitfalls of a monolingual dictionary for language learning, and one or two subtle language features to look out for in the dictionary definitions.

Do you use a monolingual dictionary in your Spanish studies? Do you use the Pequeño Larousse or did you opt for a different dictionary? How useful do you find it? As ever, we'd be interested to hear your comments and experiences.

Using the on-line Spanish exercises

Various of the pages in the Spanish grammar section of the web site contain on-line grammar exercises that are designed to help you make sure that the information you are learning is "sinking in", or simply as a refresher if you're already familiar with the material. Particularly if the grammar point in question is new, it is worth spending a few minutes doing the corresponding exercise, as this will help the point in question to become part of your "active knowledge".

Note that to learn grammar and vocabulary effectively, most learners will have more success if they have a variety of experiences with that grammar or vocabulary: so your strategy for learning Spanish needs to encompass a variety of activities such as on-line exercises, "active" reading (where you're needing to look a small percentage of words up in a dictionary), creating a video diary or blog in Spanish etc. So the on-line exercises in the grammar section should be seen as part of this strategy, but you should also be actively looking for the examples of the grammar points you've learnt while reading, for example.

Now back to the exercises. There are essentially two ways in which you do most of the grammar exercises on the site:

• for working privately or in small groups, you can fill in the exercise directly on the page
• for larger groups, or when working with a whiteboard, you can use the exercise in full screen mode

In full screen mode, the question and answer are shown in a large font, and an on-screen keyboard appears below the exercise which will function as a touch-screen keyboard when using an interactive whiteboard. (Note that if you are looking for other Spanish activities to use on a interactive whiteboard, you may like to check out the Spanish wordsearch games and Spanish crossword games also available on the site.)

Private/small group use: filling in on the page

In this mode, you see ten questions at a time (1). To the right of each question, you fill in the answer (2). When you press ENTER (or TAB) inside one of the question boxes, that question will be "marked", and you'll start the next question. If you get the question wrong, you can go back. To type accents, you can either use one of the standard ways of typing accents, or you can use the accent buttons at the bottom of the exercise (3).

Vocabulary used in exercises

Note that the exercises will generally expect particular vocabulary to be used. If a word list isn't explicitly given on the page, then which word to use should be obvious from the type of exercise. (In the example -ar verb exercise pictured, if we're asked for a form of the verb meaning "to drink", this obviously would not be beber, as the latter is not an -ar verb!) However, if you're not sure which word to use, then most exercises have a vocabulary button (4), which will give you the list of vocabulary used by the exercise in question.

Full-screen/whiteboard mode

To use the exercises on a whiteboard (or with a large group), access the full screen mode (5). In this mode, questions are displayed one at a time, in large font, and the on-screen keyboard can is used to type the answer. In this mode, an overall numeric score is kept as follows:

• 3 points for an answer correct on the first attempt
• 2 points for an answer correct on the second attempt
• 1 point for an answer correct on the third attempt

Comments about the exercises are always welcome and can be left on this blog entry. Please contact the author if you wish to use these or similar exercises in your own web page.

Recordings in Spanish Pronunciation section

Various recordings have been added to the section Spanish Pronunciation. If you haven't seen this section, you may wish to check it out: it presents a basic overview of the typical pronunciation of the various sounds/letters of Spanish, with some tips on how native speakers tend to pronounce the various sounds, and how they often differ from English.

Spanish wordsearches/crosswords in PDF format

Firstly, let me offer all users of the Español-Inglés site most hearty Felicidades for 2009!

The first new content of the year is some freely-downloadable Spanish crosswords and wordsearches, available in the new Spanish worksheets section of the web site. The activities are downloadable as PDF files, so you should be able to print them out from any machine that has a PDF reader installed.

The wordsearches and crosswords are organised into various themes, chosen from the basic Spanish section of the web site. Each PDF file includes several activities on the chosen theme, of varying levels of difficulty (small/medium/large grid size). Watch this space for further topics.

New Spanish vocab sections and word games

The following new Spanish vocab sections have been added, along with corresponding on-line crossword games to help reinforce this vocabulary.

Christmas in Spanish: various words and phrases for Christmas and the New Year, including names of Christmas icons and foods traditional in Spanish-speaking countries. A corresponding Spanish Christmas crossword is also available.
House and furniture: the first page of this section deals with how to say different rooms of the hosue in Spanish, then the following page deals with more specific items found in different rooms. A corresponding home and furniture crossword is also available.
Clothes and accessories: covers the Spanish words for general terms such as coat and trousers, plus more detailed vocabulary. A corresponding Spanish clothes crossword is also available.

Spanish dictionary update

The latest update to the English-Spanish dictionary includes translations for around 8,000 additional words, including a number of translations from Sofronio Calderón's 1915 Spanish-English-Tagalog dictionary (now out of copyright).

Spanish translation tool

An experimental automatic Spanish-English translation system has been added to the site. Like its French/English cousin, the tool is based on the Google Translate system and incorporates features such as extra orthographical correction, annotations on the resulting translation, and automatic submission of a variant to the translation system if it is detected that an alternative source sentence may give a more accurate translation.

Spanish dictionary update

The Español-Inglés site's Spanish Dictionary has been updated. As usual, various new words and expressions have been added based on words searched for by users that were not in the dictionary. A few corrections have also been made.

Because of the methodology used, updates to the Spanish-English dictionary generally apply automatically to the English-Spanish dictionary.

Feedback on individual entries is always welcome via the feedback button at the bottom of the entry. Thank you to everyone who uses the dictionary for your valuable feedback.

Dictionary update: DGT glossary beta

This site is now trialling a new feature for the Spanish-English dictionary. Entries in the Spanish-English side now include related entries from the EC's DGT Multilingual Translation Memory. The latter is a set of translated terms extracted from a body of parallel texts produced by the European Union. Many of the entries are translations of technical or legal terms.

At present, approximately 15,000 translated terms from the DGT translation memory are included alongside this site's dictionary. They are clearly attributed under the heading "Terms from the DGT glossary" at the bottom of dictionary entries.

Not all terms from the DGT translation memory are included, since many are repetitious (e.g. translations of scores of similar chapter and article headings, "ARTICLE XX" etc), or are translations of large chunks of text. The filtering process used to select terms to include alongside dictionary entries is ongoing.