Here's Catherine blowing out her first birthday candle with Mommy's help. I opted out of making a cake for her -- not knowing about sugar is a blissful state of being!
She very much enjoyed the bananas, strawberries and blueberries...
Friday, July 25, 2008
Catherine's Birthday
Here's Catherine blowing out her first birthday candle with Mommy's help. I opted out of making a cake for her -- not knowing about sugar is a blissful state of being!
She very much enjoyed the bananas, strawberries and blueberries...
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Baby Catherine... Then and Now
We've been promising pictures of baby Catherine... here are two!
Catherine in action! She's a little over eight months old and just got her 4th tooth today. Yeay!
Nathalie and Catherine one week after her birth.
Catherine in action! She's a little over eight months old and just got her 4th tooth today. Yeay!
Claudette's Wedding
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
SpeakEZ Spanish I Course
It's been many months now since the birth of baby Catherine, and I'm finally getting back to updating our blog.
Apart from learning how to be a Mommy, I've been putting a lot of time into the details of our Spanish I course. The dialogs were written by María del Carmen Muley, who has become a good friend of mine in the process. She has extensive experience in using the Birkenbihl Approach teaching Spanish in Germany, and was recently asked to lead a teacher training at the FH Coburg, a university in Germany. That's great news!
So for the past few months, in between her teaching and my playing with Catherine, we were on the phone discussing decoding from Spanish to English. If you are unfamiliar with "decoding," it means translating word by word into your native language.
Decoding the main vocabulary is straightforward, and I learned a great deal just doing that. Since I knew the content of the dialogs, it was easy to guess the meaning of words I didn't know yet. The tricky part is decoding expressions that just don't have an exact equivalent in English, such as "tengo que" (I need to/I have to) - it doesn't make any sense if you translate literally.
We found ways around it that work. What's interesting, too, is that new trouble spots come up with each different language pair. Since Carmen was used to decode from Spanish to German, some of the questions that came up were new to her as well.
I can only encourage you to decode all you can. I see it as an intellectual challenge that takes me deeply into the structure of the language and leads me to ask the right questions. If you are a beginner, you'd want to start by using texts that were decoded for you. The grammar will seem so clear right from the beginning that you won't experience the typical "grammar fog" I've seen on so many students' faces over the years.
Later on, though, you'll learn a lot by trying to find out what exactly a phrase like "hoy tengo ganas de ir al restaurante italiano" means and how it's put together.
We plan on publishing the course within the next month - we'll keep you posted!
Apart from learning how to be a Mommy, I've been putting a lot of time into the details of our Spanish I course. The dialogs were written by María del Carmen Muley, who has become a good friend of mine in the process. She has extensive experience in using the Birkenbihl Approach teaching Spanish in Germany, and was recently asked to lead a teacher training at the FH Coburg, a university in Germany. That's great news!
So for the past few months, in between her teaching and my playing with Catherine, we were on the phone discussing decoding from Spanish to English. If you are unfamiliar with "decoding," it means translating word by word into your native language.
Decoding the main vocabulary is straightforward, and I learned a great deal just doing that. Since I knew the content of the dialogs, it was easy to guess the meaning of words I didn't know yet. The tricky part is decoding expressions that just don't have an exact equivalent in English, such as "tengo que" (I need to/I have to) - it doesn't make any sense if you translate literally.
We found ways around it that work. What's interesting, too, is that new trouble spots come up with each different language pair. Since Carmen was used to decode from Spanish to German, some of the questions that came up were new to her as well.
I can only encourage you to decode all you can. I see it as an intellectual challenge that takes me deeply into the structure of the language and leads me to ask the right questions. If you are a beginner, you'd want to start by using texts that were decoded for you. The grammar will seem so clear right from the beginning that you won't experience the typical "grammar fog" I've seen on so many students' faces over the years.
Later on, though, you'll learn a lot by trying to find out what exactly a phrase like "hoy tengo ganas de ir al restaurante italiano" means and how it's put together.
We plan on publishing the course within the next month - we'll keep you posted!
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Opportunities to Practice Spanish
Practicing Spanish while spending a week in Las Vegas might not be everyone's idea of fun. Since it is the closest city to where we live, we spend a good amount of time there and I probably don't associate "travel destination" with Vegas as much as people who live in other parts of the world.
I choose not to watch TV at home, so staying at a hotel gives me the opportunity to dive into pop culture every so often. This time, it also allowed me to flip through the Spanish-speaking channels and find out how much I could actually understand.
Telemundo seemed to have the most programs that I could grasp. I started out with "Laura Sin Censura" and realized that my listening comprehension skills were not ready for this level of interaction quite yet... It's a talk-show where people come to discuss their issues with each other in front of an audience and get very emotional. Being emotional usually accelerates the speed of delivery when people talk, and I found it impossible to follow.
What didn't help either is that they used a high percentage of curse words which kept being bleeped out, so that I was left with only parts of sentences, mostly delivered in tears. That didn't work. I was quite amazed that the opponents had to be held back by guards to not get at each others' throats - oh my!
I switched to another show, similar in its structure, but much more civilized, "Caso Cerrado con la Dra. Ana María Polo." Although the topics discussed were not uplifting, at least I could understand what was going on. I got used to Dra. Polo's pronunciation and very much appreciated the summaries that she gave before and after each break. I found that it was easier for me to understand women than men, I am not sure why. Maybe they articulated more. I would guess my level of comprehension was at about 70% - not bad, I thought!
Commercials are great to watch as well - I pretty much knew what they would be saying, plus they are repeated a few times. I think these were the easiest to grasp.
Meanwhile, I got to have a conversation with the housekeeping lady who didn't speak any English. She was very patient with me and made an effort to try to understand what I was saying, which I was very grateful for. This was one of the best situations - if I wanted her to understand me, I had to come out of my shell and speak. We were able to agree that I didn't need to leave the room for her to make it up and shared a little small talk.
The next opportunity arose at a restaurant where I was waiting for the food. A young Hispanic couple sat at the table next to ours and the lady was wearing maternity clothes. I asked her when she was expecting her baby and got to show my own growing tummy. There will never be a lack of topics to discuss among expecting mothers, that's for sure! It was very pleasant and we understood each other just fine.
I choose not to watch TV at home, so staying at a hotel gives me the opportunity to dive into pop culture every so often. This time, it also allowed me to flip through the Spanish-speaking channels and find out how much I could actually understand.
Telemundo seemed to have the most programs that I could grasp. I started out with "Laura Sin Censura" and realized that my listening comprehension skills were not ready for this level of interaction quite yet... It's a talk-show where people come to discuss their issues with each other in front of an audience and get very emotional. Being emotional usually accelerates the speed of delivery when people talk, and I found it impossible to follow.
What didn't help either is that they used a high percentage of curse words which kept being bleeped out, so that I was left with only parts of sentences, mostly delivered in tears. That didn't work. I was quite amazed that the opponents had to be held back by guards to not get at each others' throats - oh my!
I switched to another show, similar in its structure, but much more civilized, "Caso Cerrado con la Dra. Ana María Polo." Although the topics discussed were not uplifting, at least I could understand what was going on. I got used to Dra. Polo's pronunciation and very much appreciated the summaries that she gave before and after each break. I found that it was easier for me to understand women than men, I am not sure why. Maybe they articulated more. I would guess my level of comprehension was at about 70% - not bad, I thought!
Commercials are great to watch as well - I pretty much knew what they would be saying, plus they are repeated a few times. I think these were the easiest to grasp.
Meanwhile, I got to have a conversation with the housekeeping lady who didn't speak any English. She was very patient with me and made an effort to try to understand what I was saying, which I was very grateful for. This was one of the best situations - if I wanted her to understand me, I had to come out of my shell and speak. We were able to agree that I didn't need to leave the room for her to make it up and shared a little small talk.
The next opportunity arose at a restaurant where I was waiting for the food. A young Hispanic couple sat at the table next to ours and the lady was wearing maternity clothes. I asked her when she was expecting her baby and got to show my own growing tummy. There will never be a lack of topics to discuss among expecting mothers, that's for sure! It was very pleasant and we understood each other just fine.
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