Speak in a Week, Chinese Write Away & a Journaling update

Speak in a Week Spanish. The other day in the bookstore, I flipped through Week 4 of Speak in a Week Spanish. The focus was preterit, imperfect and object pronouns. Pretty standard fare, and things that I know. But not things that always pop out of my mouth. I picked up the full 4-week set, and have just about finished flipping through week 1.

Thoughts: This doesn't necessarily strike me as the best tool for learning Spanish. But then again, nothing is. As I work through my Pimsleur course (about which more later), I've been impressed with their gradual integration of grammar through actual examples with the explicit grammar only (and barely) coming later. Still, no one program is going to teach you a language. If you're serious about learning, you'll use one program to build your foundations, another to rebuild them, another to get things coming naturally, etc. Starting to learn a language is easy. Maintaining and building on it is a lifetime task.

If you're looking for a concise review of some basic Spanish and grammar in an easy to carry around format, go for it. If you're learning for the first time, check out this article, linked by the Foreign Language Blogger, and think about setting a good program for doing and reviewing the lessons - by spacing out your studies, instead of cramming, you can lay the foundations for longer term retention instead of spinning your wheels.


Chinese Write Away. Tired of the old character manuals where you copy the same character 20 times from the diagram? With Chinese Write Away, you get a dry-erase marker and 100 laminated pages of Chinese characters. You can trace directly over the character, then make your own copies in the remaining squares. Then you erase and start over.

What's great about Chinese Write Away, however, is not just its ingenious way of letting you carry your character study with you wherever you go. Better, it's well organized. For example, in the opening greeting section, you first learn ni (you), then hao (good) so you're ready to write your first sentence, ni hao (hello) before you're done with page one. It's a welcome change from the many books which start with the one stroke characters, move to the two stroke characters and wind up seeming more than anything like short character dictionaries.

If you want to learn some everyday characters for everyday items either just for fun or as a way of easing into more serious study down the road, Chinese Write Away is a great option.

Journaling update. Since I started my second ledger for language learning, this one for doing Pimsleur Spanish II, I've missed one day, completing 11 lessons in ten days. Granted, it's not the most impressive record in the history of language learning, but with things crazy at work it's actually better than I would have expected. If you want to learn, but don't always stay focused on learning, keeping a diary or ledger that you write in every day is a great way to keep yourself on task.