English Recordings

Into these bowls, Mrs Squeers, assisted by the hungry servant, poured a brown composition, which looked like diluted pincushions without the covers, and was called porridge.

A minute wedge of brown bread was inserted in each bowl, and when they had eaten their porridge by means of the bread, the boys ate the bread itself, and had finished their breakfast.

There was none of the noise and clamour of a schoolroom; none of its boisterous play, or hearty mirth.

From my personal experience, I have to say the second one. In less than a year I acquired a level of fluency in French that I had never had in my many years studying English. However, it is not always that easy to spend a year abroad, especially when you get older and have a family. But can you improve or master a foreign language just studying it from at home in your own country? Sure you can! Especially nowadays, with all of the excellent resources that we have available. It may take longer, or require a greater effort to do so, but it can be done, as I hope to demonstrate in the coming months as I continue to improve my English.

Finally, the “half language” I can speak is Italian. I say “half” because I studied Italian in a language school here in Barcelona many years ago, but just for one year. Anyway, Italian has a lot in common with Spanish and Catalan (and even with French), so it is an “easy language” for me to learn. Of course, there are no truly “easy” languages, but I could say that it is far easier for me than, for example, German.

I can understand Italian more or less if the speaker does not speak really fast or use a lot of slang, and I can say some basic things in Italian.
Another similar example would be Portuguese, which I have never studied and I don’t speak, but because of the similarities with my languages, I can more or less understand a conversation. For example, I remember when I went to Lisbon for a week of vacation some years ago—I could made myself understood and I could ask some basic things, having just learnt some very basic vocabulary (like hello, goodbye, excuse me, thank you, coffee, milk, etc.) Of course, I do not consider Portuguese as one of my foreign languages. Or at least, not yet.
However, maybe after dealing with German and improving my Italian... who knows?

A couple of months before coming back to Spain I took a trip to Norway to visit a Spanish friend who was doing her Erasmus there. I flew to Oslo and then I had to buy another ticket for Bergen. So I found myself in front of a desk trying to buy a ticket and speaking in English. I was having quite a bad time of it; to the point that I was unable to ask a simple question such as “How much is it?”

The kind and helpful sales assistant suddenly asked me: “Do you speak any other language?” As you may guess, the normal predictable answer should have been “Spanish?” Not for me in that moment. I said “French!” I felt really relieved when she said “Sure, no problem” and I could buy my ticket in French. I can say I had acquired an extremely high level in French. Unfortunately, until a few months ago, I have not spoken French for many years, and my level of fluency went down and I forgot a lot of vocabulary.

Right now I feel more or less fluent, as I can hold a conversation with a native speaker, but my pronunciation is far from what it was and I often have to think hard to find a particular word or think of another way to express an idea.

The good part is that thanks to Facebook, some months ago I again met my French friend and we have spoken several times, so I have both rekindled a friendship and have found the motivation to begin improving my French so as to be able to communicate with him with the same or almost the same level of fluency I had many years ago. To sum up, which is the best approach to master a language?

My experience with French is completely different. As I said before, I started learning French at the University, and after just one year of traditional learning, by my second year I had the opportunity to take an Erasmus grant. In contrast to many of my friends who went to England to improve their first foreign language, I decided to go to Toulouse, in the south of France.
My experience there was just remarkable in all aspects, both as a personal adventure, and as a language learning one. Learning a language can be just amazing, because you learn from every input you receive, whether watching TV, hanging around with friends, etc. My wife often tells me: “You are not studying English, you’re just watching the television” My response is that “The TV show is in English, so I'm learning English.”

Oops, I'm digressing—back to the topic. In my first month in France, I made the same mistake many Erasmus students make: I only associated with Spanish speaking people. You still learn something, because you sit for your classes which are taught in this foreign language and you are surrounded by it when going to the supermarket, etc., but your progress will be much slower.

Thankfully, after just a couple of months I had the good fortune to hit it off with a French guy. I spent a lot of time with a group of 5 or 6 Spanish friends, but this French guy was also with us all the time, and he was really patient and helpful, and my French got better very quickly. In just about half a year I felt really fluent in French—almost to the point that I almost forgot my ability to speak English (which in theory was my major foreign language)!

When I came back home, I decided to keep on improving my English, and after a lot of research (and dismissing the traditional grammar approach offered by most of the language schools here), I came across LingQ on the Internet. I am not going to explain here how it works, but I just love its approach to language learning. It has been really useful to me since I started using it, about a year and a half ago.
I also believe, however, that there is not a magic formula for everyone, and that you must choose what works best for you. In the beginning, I only used LingQ to study their lessons and to improve my vocabulary and reading comprehension.

After a few months, when I felt more confident, I started to sign up for one-on-one conversations with native speaking tutors. Eventually, I began to also participate in group conversations (which I personally think requires a higher level as you should be able to take part in a discussion with several people simultaneously).

Right now I am using LingQ mainly to improve my speaking or communicative skills by participating in individual and group conversations. I also review some vocabulary from time to time, but I use a lot of content from outside sources such as the Internet. I watch and listen to a lot of content in English, such as YouTube videos, TV shows and movies. I also read a lot (I think that all the novels I have read for the last year have been in English) and I try to write to as many people that I can, whether in forums or corresponding with friends.

So where am I right now? I feel fluent and confident enough to hold a conversation with a native speaker. I understand most of what I hear, and I can even understand a lot of jokes and some kinds of irony. Have I reach my goal? No yet. There are still a lot of moments in a conversation in which I do not find the words I want to use so I have to try to express myself in another way. I still have to expand my active vocabulary, but I am really satisfied with my progress so far.

At the University, I studied Translation and Interpreting, and I had English as my major and French as the minor (I started French from scratch). So in the first year I had some classes in English with native speaker teachers, but they were more focused on general culture and history rather than on actually teaching the language.

I finished my degree, and did a postgraduate degree in localization (the adaptation of computer software for nonnative environments, especially in other nations and cultures) and I started to work as a freelance translator.
I've been working in this for the last 8 years (apart from also proofreading and translating between Spanish and Catalan).
Reading and translating, reading and translating... Contrary to popular belief, translating is not about communicating (in its interactive meaning); it is about understanding an original text and trying to say the same things or express the same ideas in your own language, and in a natural way.

So what happened after a few years of just reading and translating? My speaking skills got worse and worse. I also forgot a lot of basic, everyday's vocabulary because I just read technical English.

A couple of years ago, at a friend's party, I met a German guy and when I tried to speak to him in English I felt really uncomfortable and a bit embarrassed, especially when I told him that I was a translator! “Yes, I know, it's weird, I'm not really fluent in English, but you know, I just read boring technical manuals all day....” Oh God, it was a disaster! It is true, I do not need any speaking skill to do my job properly, but anyway, for my personal pride it was unacceptable.

Therefore, my first move to change that situation was to spent a month in an English speaking country, such as Ireland.

After spending four weeks there I could not say that I became fluent, but it was a first step towards losing my fear of speaking. It was the first time I had ever lived surrounded by English, and I had to use the language everyday in order to survive there. It was a great and very useful experience.

The other two languages that I feel more or less fluent in are English and French, but I have a really different experience with each of them and I have learned them in quite different ways.

I will start with English, because it is my first foreign language and the one I have been studying for the longest time. At present in Spain students start studying English earlier than I did, even though I am not sure this means they will do better in the future. In my time as a student we started at 6th (more or less at 12 years old).
The foreign language teaching here is really unproductive and not the best way for one to learn the real language. Fortunately, I was one of the few privileged students that had a native speaking English teacher for the first two years. She was tough and strict, but I learned a lot (even if I was taught in the traditional way); to the point that I consider that they were indeed the only two years in which I really learned something about English in school.

From then on, I just had several average teachers that just repeated the same boring and utterly useless things year after year. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but those first two years with that native speaking teacher, I was in no way a brilliant English student; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth!
However, in the years that followed (High School), I was one of the best students in my English class, although I really did not do anything to deserve that “title,” as I did not really study a lot.
There was no Internet or anything similar available to us, so we did not have the amount of resources that we have at present. Apart from the little bit that you got at school, it was hard to get any materials with real English content of any kind, aside from the occasional movies playing in some small old-fashioned cinema from time to time.

Having watched many great videos on YouTube featuring quite a few people amazingly speaking so many languages, I began thinking about how many languages I could learn to speak myself, with the aim of someday posting similar videos on YouTube. At present, I may say that I can get by in four and a half languages: Catalan, Spanish, English, French and Italian, even though I do not feel I have the same level of proficiency in all of them. But let's start at the beginning...

My name is Albert Subirats, and I am from Barcelona, Catalonia, in the north-east of Spain. I am a privileged person because I was born in an area that has its own language (Catalan) and culture alongside the Spanish one, so I have grown up using two languages or interchangeably—in other words—as a perfectly bilingual person.

In Catalonia around 47% of the population speaks Catalan, but everyone also speaks Spanish. Among those who have Spanish as their main language, some of them also speak Catalan, while others understand it but cannot speak it. A smaller percentage neither speak nor understand it.

Usually, in a bilingual environment one language prevails over the other; that is, you can effortlessly speak both languages, but you feel more comfortable with one of them. In my case, I may say that I think more often in Catalan than in Spanish, but at any rate I consider myself a perfect bilingual because I have always spoken Spanish with my mother and Catalan with others. Thus, I feel equally comfortable in using both languages.

When you live in a bilingual environment, there is always a lot of contact between both languages, and there is some inevitable vocabulary transfer. In other words, because Catalan and Spanish are quite similar languages (both are Romance languages), most of the grammar or spelling mistakes we make are due to the influence of the other language. Is this too confusing or does it imply that we make more mistakes than, say, a monolingual Spanish speaker? No, not necessarily. It is just that the kind of mistakes we make are mainly because of the influence of the other language. I utterly understand that people tend to defend their own language, but I do not understand why some people prefer to be monolingual instead of bilingual or multilingual. As I said, I consider myself to be privileged and I am very proud of being bilingual.

Instrumental case / Instrumentalis:
Used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action.

It seems that many people request me to explain the big motive behind my dream.

Even though my heart is filled with desire to achieve my dream, suddenly i'm afraid of quiting a stable job.

I'm worry if I can do English well.