My Blog

Some Spanish Materials for SCC Spring Course 2024

These materials were written by me as I attended a delightful introductory Spanish course of eight sessions taught by Luz Delgado. Of course, any errors in what follows are strictly my own and I appreciate any notification thereof. Contact me via email with comments and/or corrections via the CONTACT menu item on my home page. I am attaching .pdf files here, but they were created from OpenOffice .odt files. These, of course, are modifiable and if you would like copies, please email me.

First, a charming aside: At our second class meeting, our instructor, Luz Delgado, treated us to a recording of a beautiful song. Here are the lyrics to “Gracias a La Vida” as sung by the famous Argentinian soloist Mercedes Sosa; it is an elegant tribute to the many gifts of life that we so often take for granted. Following is a link to the lyrics of this lovely song:

GraciasLaVida

Now about the course itself: It was definitely a conversational approach. I (and a few others in the class, I suspect) have long taken the academic approach to learning something about a language — get a textbook, learn words and grammar, etc, etc. On my way to getting my PhD in math, I had to pick up a reading knowledge of French, German and Russian in order to read some research papers in those languages. I also had a few courses in Latin in high school and German in undergraduate college, all taught in the traditional manner. So our teacher’s approach came as a bit of a culture shock to me.

But her provocative question, “How did you learn English?”, as a justification for her methodology caused me to think: Not only of the obvious answer (by hearing and thereby learning to understand and speak the language), but how the traditional approach did not really give me conversational ability even though I could read written words in the language with understanding.

This course was a new experience for me. Prior to it I had purchased a book titled “Spanish in ten minutes a day” and had started to read it. I also purchased a set of DVDs for the book. By starting to read the book I did get an idea of which letters corresponded to what sounds, and that helped me in taking notes in the class. But interestingly enough, the DVDs provided no pictures of word spelling, but focused on the spoken word — just like the class!

As the course proceeded there were fewer English translations provided, so I had to consult my dear friend “Google Translate” to help me out in spots. A few of the topics in my notes came from the Spanish book, not from class (like the days of the week, counting numbers, household names and a few other topics).

So what I am providing is a pdf of my class notes titled “SCC_Spanish.pdf”, but a week ago I had an inspiration: Also create complete copies of my notes, one excluding the English translations, the other excluding the Spanish sources. These might make good tools for going back and forth in Spanish and English — we’ll see! So I have included these as well as “SCC_SpanishBlankEnglish.pdf” and “SCC_SpanishBlankSpanish.pdf”. I used OpenOffice to write the original odt files and exported them as pdf. If you would like to modify those files, email me and I will send them to you. Or if you have corrections (which no doubt there will be), notify me and eventually I’ll incorporate them. I will also provide the Spanish personal introductions that we were asked to provide for the last day of class, provided you send a copy to me via email with the understanding that I will publish them (if you only have printed copies, send me a photo!). Here are the class files. Have fun!