Spanish Conversation Help

[Jhansensd_72638]

Hello, I also wanted to mention that understanding Spanish in a conversation is extremely frustratingly difficult. I took four semesters recently at a community college, I was one of the top students and everyone went to me for help (probably has something to do with being a software engineer and writing code in 10 languages). Anyhow, even this being the case, and knowing the whole language’s grammar, when giving a final project in Spanish 4 neither myself, nor anyone in the entire class could even conjugate simple verbs in the present off the top of their head without a major pause and it was very awkward. Even hearing statements in the present when spoken fast I have a really hard time understanding what is being spoken even though I have nearly a 100% memorized understanding of the grammar and a very good vocabulary of which I keep expanding on. After coming back from Barcelona, Spain over New Years I have been spending hours and hours a day going over what I already know, and working with various apps to improve my vocabulary, reading Spanish, and listening to Spanish on the radio here in Southern California.

Still, even though this is all the case, I find it extremely difficult to understand spoken Spanish when spoken really fast (at normal speed).

Does anyone have any suggestions or can you comment on this?

My personal feeling on the matter is that understanding grammar is a good starting point but is really far from understanding any language conversationally. Some people I know throw out ideas like "when I learned Japanese" which I consider preposterous. There is no way around spending massive quantities of time learning a language. My Israeli friend lived in Italy for 6 years, took Italian classes, and still after 6 years told me he could still only comprehend 60 percent of what was being said when native speakers spoke fast. If there is any research or anyone has any ideas about how to understand and speak Spanish at a high level, let me know what you think! I am really fascinated by this topic. There is no way around needing to speaking millions of combinations of all the words, verbs, and conjugations to make the language stick. I am a big martial artists and it is the same thing there. You drill different patterns over and over in different sequences, trained first by themselves, and later together in combination with everything else. Once you can put these patterns to use at any time without thought, you are then a good practitioner and understand the style...

[nprestongeo3273]

I agree wholeheartedly with you. I have been working with learning Spanish for several years and have yet to find a method that fits my style of learning. I went through 5 courses of Pimsleur, which is good at developing phrases and building sentences, but doesn't explain anything about the grammar at all. When I found SP101, I was very pleased, as it filled in a lot of the holes left by Pimsleur. But as I progress through it, I find myself increasingly frustrated because it is all oriented toward individual words and grammar rules, without giving any significant practice in hearing those words in various contexts and phrases, or in building phrases and sentences for ourselves.

How many programs have you looked at? There is one other that I think probably comes close to what I am looking for, but at this point I am reluctant to start at the beginning of another program....

If your username is your correct email address, I would be interested in continuing the discussion offlist....

Neil Preston