Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

In Spanish II. I have a great Mexican accent.

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I am in Spanish I and I am the best in my class because almost everyone else in there is an underachiever.

It's the greatest class, though. We're all very rowdy and pervy and jokey kids and we can make the worst jokes and get away with it because our teacher's pretty lenient. She says we're an awesome class, although she does have an air of constant frustration at our antics and lack of actually caring about Spanish. Sometimes we'll get way off-subject and talk about like motorcycles or foreign food or Ralph-knows-what. It's great. XD

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So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell?

Advice to those in Spanish 1-3 planning to go on to 4, whether because it's required or because they want to or what:

study your vocab study your vocab study your vocab study your vocab study your vocab study your vocab study your vocab study your vocab study your vocab.

Verbs, while daunting, are only half of it - you need to be memorizing the nouns and adjectives too or else when you need to start stringing together coherent sentences more complex than "I live in a red house," you'll be screwed.

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get LOST

I find that when learning a new language, it always helps to completely immerse yourself in that language at times. This should be very easy if you're learning spanish.

When I was learning italian, I would buy the italian paper at the news stand. I would take it home, and attempt to read it (Of course, this was nearly impossible as I was first learning). I would have a dictionary and would be translating everything I didnt know. Withing a few months, I was able to read an entire newspaper with little problem (Lots of inferrence, though.)

Right now, I've set my xbox 360 to only display russian. I spend a lot of time in чат with my друзья.

Also, this keeps my brother off of my xbox live account, since he has no idea what anything means.

My aunt will be taking me to little odessa in NYC soon (Russian area). I might pick up some newspapers and dvds and such. Right now, the only DVD I can find is the 1967 War and Peace.

That thing's hard enough to understand in english, so I'll pass on russian.

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Turns out that this is not correct, and it only needed the CD-ROM the first time for some reason. That's a relief. Still not sure it's worth $50, though...

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So I've been doing alright in Spanish lately. Lack of progress had more to do with general confidence issues than me having trouble with Spanish itself. The professor really liked that paper I wrote (posted in the other thread), errors aside.

I'm on a wait-list for another Spanish class next semester, but who knows if I'll get into that. If not, my learning foreign languages pretty much ends with this semester until after graduation. Then I'll look into Chinese classes.

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ATTN: LOWER BOARD USERS HAVE MOVED TO ANOTHER FORUM. COME JOIN THE FUN!

Just ordered pimsleur's comprehensive russian from the library. I would have bought it, but its expensive.

They sell the first 10 lessons as sort of a "Trial" kinda thing, that they package as the basic course. I got it, and it's pretty good. I'll probably burn a copy of the libray's one. I'd buy it, but I just dont have $219 right now.

Also, I'd end up having to get russian 2 anyway, so I definitely wouldnt be able to afford it.

My aunt was planning to come up tomorrow, but due to weather, she cant. She was going to bring me a newspaper from moscow. She gave me this cool deck of cards from russia. It's actually bilingual. It has pictures of lots of buildings in russia on all of the faces, with descriptions (All the backs are the same, obviously).

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This year we have to take Spanish. Mext uear it's required to take French.

Since Spanish would probably be more useful than French, I'm gonna probably take Spanish and pick up French later on.

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You can do it, Inverse!

Anyway. xD I was going to try and take Chinese this year just because I needed a seventh class, but I ended up with Psychology because they couldn't get the Chinese teacher. :c I was kinda looking forward to taking Chinese - I have a friend who's fluent in it with whom I can embarrass myself through horrible Yankee pronunciation and everything!

On a more interesting note, I recently discovered that my school once offered Russian as a language, about 12 years ago. I don't know what happened or why we don't anymore. Maybe the teacher died, or maybe budget cuts meant we had to drop a language and they chose the least popular/least useful. Either theory is plausible - you don't see a lot of Russians in Florida, much less people who speak good enough Russian and English to be able to teach the former to other people. And, of course, who wants to waste taxpayers' money on stupid things like edjamakation anyway?

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get LOST

I'm fluent in english as well as hebrew. i learn a bit of arabic last year and now im stuck in a french class

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"Don't forget the crap-flap!" -Strongbad from "pop-up"

Yesterday I spent $65.11 on two Japanese dictionaries, a Latin dictionary, and a Japanese grammar book. After having spent $50 on a Spanish dictionary a couple of weeks ago... not to mention I probably already have $250 worth of Japanese learning materials and maybe $150-200 worth of other Spanish stuff, as a very rough guess.

Learning languages can be expensive sometimes. But it's fun! (And it's certainly not as expensive as buying modern video games all the time... no doubt my game collection would be worth quite a heap if the games still carried their original prices.)

- Kef

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Hey guys, did you know that The Sims comes with both the English and Spanish versions? Just reinstall the game to play it in Spanish! Naturally, you might have other software lying around that you can use in Spanish (or other languages!) without even realizing it...

- Kef

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sims don't speak spanish. they speak simlish.

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Yeah, but you don't speak Simlish, so the game talks to you in English (or Spanish).

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gee, that's a wild accusation right there. how do you know I don't?

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'Cause there's no materials to learn from. What the Sims say in the games isn't enough to understand everything else in the game if it were translated, and there are no dictionaries or anything.

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While we're on the subject...

About 2 months ago, I set my xbox 360 to russian, just so I could have a little extra russian in my face during the day.

A month ago ago, after watching Il Postino for the 1000th time (Great movie for the italian students out there), I decided to change my xbox's language to italian. Then, when I loaded up halo 3, most of the stuff was in italian. The same goes for many xbox live arcade games. The text was italian, but the dialogue in-game, however, remains english.

Anyway, in matchmaking online, you can choose to prefer people who speak your language. I couldnt find too many italian games, but I know there are plenty of spanish games.

Or at least there were. Maybe they're all on COD4 now...


Anyway, I recently decided that I'm going to make language a major part of my curriculum next year in college. The college I'm going to (Community college for 2 years before transferring out) has german, french, spanish, and italian. I'll most likely start on an advanced italian and german level. As for french and spanish, I'll just have to see what beginners courses will fit into my schedule after filling all required courses. Although I may hold off on them until a differet semester. Also, they have a six week class that takes place entirely in italy.

For christmas, I got the War and Peace DVD (7 Hr long movie), Russian Ark, and a russian workbook from my parents. I got a russian workbook from my girlfriend.

Also, since last I posted in this thread, I went down to brighton beach in NYC. It's basically little russia (Or little odessa as it is more commonly known). I bought some stuff, ordered some food, showed some dolt how to use a camera (WHAT'S THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR BACKWARDS!?!?! *Dictionary*).

There is a cool shop there called moscvideofilm. I bought an atlas there. I figured that reading the recognizable country names might make it easy to get used to reading the cyrillic alphabet. I also bought a sci-fi book. Azyris nuna. I picked up some free flyers and newspapers, and bought some other ones. I bought a movie: Mapc (Mars), about a small town called mars. I got a bunch of other hings. An O. Henry novel (Kings and cabbages), and I later bought the english equivalent, for reference.

I was going to buy a cool soviet flag shirt, but they sold out of every size higher than medium.

On the subway ride to the library, I overheard some russian kid complaining about something. My aunt was with me. She doesnt speak any russian. This made me feel really cool about understanding what the kid was saying.

I'm going back soon. All of the russian people were nice, and quite tolerant of my poor russian. If anything, they seemed grateful that I wasnt "just another dumb american tourist". Most importantly of all, they understood what I was saying.

And finally, I went to barnes and noble and found that they have expanded their foreign section of DVDs.

I looked for italian, german, and russian movies. I got Amarcord (Italian), Bike Theives (Italian), and The Italian (Oddly enough, this one's in russian. )

I was going to pick up Das Boot, but I know several friends who have it, so I figuered I'd borrow it rather than pay $40. Especially since I dont know a lot of german. But now that I have extra free periods, I can focus on german more.

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I so want to learn Italian right now. I think it is indeed la bella lingua (although I hear that native speakers don't actually use that phrase). It looks beautiful, it sounds beautiful. Unfortunately, I just don't have time for it... I'm already behind on my Japanese studies, and I'm still not fluent in Spanish, either. In addition, my flash card repetitions are beginning to be burdensome. So on the whole I don't think there's going to be any time for it anytime soon. :/

- Kef

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Yo vivo en casa rojo.

IS IT RIGHT

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No, tiene ser "la casa roja," porque la casa es feminina.



I've taken Spanish since eighth grade, and I've taken it so far for two semesters at Cornell, but next semester I'm switching to Japanese. I've gotten pretty bored with the Spanish language, since I've been taking it for so long, and I can already communicate in it decently well. I'm never going to be fluent, unless I end up living in Spain somehow, but I think I'm OK at it. Japanese is going to be fun, and also complicated. When a college course is worth six credits, you know there's gonna be a lot of work involved.

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beep beep I'm a Jeep

I was talking about in general, not her house.

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You always use "la" as the definite article for "casa" so it's feminine, so the adjective "rojo" has to agree and become "roja."


I don't make the rules, I just ENFORCE 'EM.

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beep beep I'm a Jeep

Jitka, the Foreign Language Mod. I think we should give that to you as a lower title.

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Sorry, I'm a grammar bandito.
It's like you said "has be" instead of "has to be".

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Yeah well you're a doody head.

I'm only in like Spanish Pre-0, gimme a break.

also, ^B-B-B-BURN

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Noid: Tu madre.

Y Ath-A-Late: Gracias por la ayuda.

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beep beep I'm a Jeep

Eh.

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And "tiene ser" is ungrammatical. I would say "debe ser", but I think "tiene que ser" might be possible. (I see that somebody else has already corrected this, but I'm keeping it in here anyway. Nyah!)

I would say "Vivo en una casa roja". The word "yo" is unnecessary and I think the article is required here.



¡P...pero en primer lugar fui yo el que empezó este hilo! ¡Ambas veces!



Do be aware this is a very severe insult in Latin America and you should not use it there unless you want a broken jaw. It's no problem here, of course; I'm just giving you the heads-up because I don't want you to get a broken jaw one day for a silly reason.

Incidentally, since we both are studying Spanish and Japanese, it amuses me that Jitka may become one of the only people I can make trilingual puns with.

- Kef

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Ich sorge mich nicht. Jitka hat einen unteren Titel verdient.

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In Latinam Duam sum. (That's not quite correct, but close enough.)

I used to have an absolutely awful eighty year old woman as a teacher who was one of the most boring teachers I ever had. Every class would either be going over homework or taking a test. Now, thankfully, I have a teacher who is actually aware of what the class is doing, and actually tries to make the class somewhat interesting. Plus we're using a much easier book now.

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