Here is the first installment of Assorted Websites.
Aquí está la primera entrega de “Una Variedad De Sitios Web”.

1000 of the most frequently used Spanish words, gleaned from movie and television subtitles.

From the founders of 37 Signals: Getting Real Español (free)

One of the most important yet under-recognized websites on the internet. I’m linking to the Spanish section, but this is a fantastic resource for learning any language.

Gives the phrase “slow news day” a bit of a twist.

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Gaff. Photo by Eric Chan

A story from my friend:

I had this experience when I was a math teacher in East San Jose. I had a ton of Spanish-speaking students, so I’d talk in my inexpert Spanish occassionally, just to make myself understood. Once I had hay fever and wanted to explain to my students why my eyes were so watery. Hay fever is ‘fiebre de heno.’ Apparently ‘heno’ and ‘ano’ can sound rather similar. Imagine how much more concerned my students became as they politely reacted to the news that their teacher had ‘anus fever.’

For related reasons, you’ll want to exercise caution when wishing Spanish-speakers a Happy New Year, or ‘Feliz Año Nuevo.’

Ever make a jackass of yourself trying to speak another language? If you haven’t, you’re not trying hard enough.

Share your haunting experience in the comments section below. Who knows, maybe it will help you forget and move on with your life (don’t bank on it).

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Piano and the Damning Effect of Choice

At the age of seven, I had the opportunity of learning the piano. Piano lessons were after school in the collegiate directly beside my public school. Unfortunately, the lessons felt like detention to me.  My usual activities of playing hand ball  or loitering at the 7-11 were way more fun, so I stopped going.

Fast forward 10 years later, when I desperately wanted to play the piano to impress a hot freckle-faced doll I crushed over, I couldn’t. I never stuck it out and learned the instrument when I had a chance (and my parents didn’t force me), so the choice to play the piano wasn’t  available to me.

My point? Choice can be damning. Giving yourself more choice now can deprive you of choice later in life. In a world ripe with distraction, choice  provides yet another alternative to doing what you should be doing. A path of least resistance.

Here’s what I propose: If you have mp3s of Spanish lessons on your iPod, remove all the music so that Spanish is the only thing left to listen to. You’ll have no choice but to practice your Spanish even when you don’t feel like it.

If you bought a book on Spanish verbs, don’t you dare join Oprah’s book club. The easy reading will seduce  you away from the monotonous but imperative work of drilling Spanish verb conjugations into your skull!

Remove choice from your life and “leverage the lack.” Focus on your Spanish, so that later, when you desperately need to speak Spanish, you can.

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“There’s a difference between knowing programming languages and knowing how to program.  Similarly I’ve met people who could speak six languages but didn’t have coherent thought to express in any of them.” ~Read on Slashdot

If you know the person who made this comment, I’ll be happy to attribute it to him or her.

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Several weeks ago I reluctantly joined the church soccer team. I say reluctantly because I hadn’t kicked a soccer ball since I was a snotty-faced eight year old, and there was a real chance of looking like a useless tool in front of my friends.

Not something I was in a hurry to do.

So, fifteen minutes before the first team practice, I “Googled up” some tips on playing the defender position.

I arrived at (what seemed to me) four fundamental rules of playing the sweeper position in soccer. They are:

1. Watch the ball, not the player
2. Stay goalside, which in soccer terminology means the defender should be closer to the goal than the player being covered
3. Think one move ahead
4. Get directly in front of the opposing player and never give him or her a direct shot on net

I resolved to focus on these four tips (and not try and get fancy with the ball).

The result? I held my own amongst a group of experienced players. In fact, an english friend who played on the opposing squad likened me to the late Bobby Moore, the team Captain and legendary sweeper of the 1966 World Cup champs.

Note: This was a gross exaggeration on his part of course, but it was a big vote of confidence for me.

The experience enlightened me on how dominant the fundamentals are in sports.  The lion’s share of a  player’s game play is performing the basics, with a much smaller share relying on technical skill and athletic ability ( Pareto principle anyone?).

Moral of the story: Stick to the fundamentals and you can hang with almost anybody.

Now let’s turn our focus on learning Spanish. If speaking Spanish could be boiled down to four fundamental rules – rules that when followed would enable anyone to go from knowing absolutely zero spanish to hablo espanol in very little time – what would those four rules be?

I don’t know the answer, but since I brought it up, here’s my list of…

Four fundamental rules of speaking Spanish competently and quickly (even if you can’t speak a word):

1. Cognates, Spanish words whose look and meaning are almost identical to their English equivalents, are gifts from heaven. Learn them
2. Memorize conjugations like “I have”/tengo, “I need”/necessito, “I want”/quiero and so forth
3. Commit to memory as many infinitive verbs as you can. Mix and match with the conjugations in rule #2. Add in the cognates you learned from rule #1
4. Know the Spanish alphabet and how the letters sound. Correct pronounciation is essential to being understood

UPDATE

At the the Waterloo Spanish Language Meetup I asked Norbert and Matthew what they thought were the four most important rules to speaking Spanish.

Norbert’s Four Fundamentals:

1. “Nouns, nouns and more nouns”
2. “Verbs, verbs and more verbs”
3. Learn three tenses, past (I spoke), present (I speak) and future (I will speak).  If you can say that in Spanish, you can build from that.
4. Learn prepositions like “of”, “to”, “in”, “for”, “with” and “on”

Matthew’s Big Four:

1. Inmersión
2. Música (here’s a fine example how rhythm can help you memorize tricky Spanish grammar)
3. Cerveza y chocolate
4. A partner (una mujer ;-)

Now it’s your turn. Please share your big four fundamentals in the comments section.

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Erase Bad Memories Forever? Photo by Sasha Wolff

I’ve made some big mistakes in my life. One mistake in particular stole a chunk of years and left me only with the strewn wreckage of bad memories. These memories, innocently enough, are triggered by mere words.

For example, the word sunrise should invoke the  rich, shimmering colors of daybreak into the mind’s eye. But if you used to watch each morning’s sunrise with someone who has become estranged,  the word will remind you of  loss and even betrayal.

Tragically, one of the most  serene and beautiful exhibits of nature becomes a source of anguish, and an innocent seven letter word now carries a payload of painful memories that sears your soul every time you hear it.

Been there. Done that. Bought the t-shirt.

Okay, now let’s imagine the word sunrise no longer exists to you. The memories associated with the word sunrise stay dormant because they are not invoked, and dormant memories become forgotten in time.

So I’m testing a hypothesis. I believe that by learning and adopting a new language,  you and I can eradicate memories of the past by replacing words that trigger bad memories with new words and a new vocabulary.

When your entire vocabulary has been replaced, and you think and dream in a new language all the time, any bad memories that were linked with old words and phrases wither away and die. It’s like the rebirth of the mind. The new language burns clean and sanctifies the mind of any vestiges of a painful past.

It’s like a frontal lobotomy without an incision.

I look forward to thinking and dreaming in Spanish, and perhaps my theory will be proven true for me. I will document my progress along the way.

P.S. If you’re not ready to learn a new language, but would like a new way to eradicate bad thoughts and habits, try my new game Addiction & Subtraction.

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Learn Spanish with LEGO Rock Band? I wish.

I purchased a Spanish grammar book a few weeks ago, and you want to know how many times I’ve cracked it open? Once. The book is collecting dust on my bookshelf because the curriculum, while important, is dry and the complete opposite of fun.

Enter Lyrics Training, the free website service that provides music videos to learn and improve your foreign languages skills through the music and lyrics of the songs.

And it is fun. The objective is to fill in the words of a verse for the song to continue playing.

The only downside I see is I’m not familiar with any of the Spanish bands or songs listed. I say bring on the Sepultura and not only will I rock my face off, I’ll learn twice as fast.

Mucho gracias a mi Twitter amiga @darker_stiletto por compartir Lyrics Training

Lyrics Training is an easy and fun method to learn and improve your foreign languages skills like English through the music and lyrics of the songs.

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Learn while Sleeping? Photo by Abe and Liina Novy

As a boy, I was up on my rock bands. From April Wine to ZZ Top, if it was on rock radio, I knew it.

At the time, I remember being a little surprised of my own (rather impressive) knowledge of rock radio bands, since I didn’t really pay attention to the stuff. The music was just there, in the background of my life. Even when I slept.

You see, I used to leave my favorite rock radio station on all night. It was habitual for me.

Now I’m wondering if listening to music and radio talk while asleep inadvertently educated me on rock music minutiae.

More importantly, can listening to Spanish while asleep help you and I learn the language more efficiently today?

So I thought I’d poll my friends on Twitter, and the good people on Aardvark:

Twitter: @rinkjustice

Here were some responses (and a big thanks to everyone who participated):

Reply by Germán Salízar P. Twitter: @gersapa

Reply by Seth Meadows. Twitter: @SethCo_Inc

Reply by Kent Julian. Twitter: @KentJulian

Reply by Garo Hovnanian. Twitter: @ghovnanian

Reply by Tony Gonzalez

Here’s my favorite reply (and a ray of hope for pro-subliminal learners everywhere):

Reply by Tony Gonzalez

Tony’s clarification really resonates with me. I suspect we need to consciously process our new words and phrases, and deliberately find or create those relationships and patterns in the new information, for these words to snap snugly into our mental maps and become part of our new vocabulary.

It’s a huge subject, and not fully understood by anyone, so I’ll leave further extrapolation for another time ;-)

Conclusion: I think I’ll continue with my subconscious / subliminal training, but only on preprocessed material and not uncharted terrain. Who knows, maybe it’ll help me dream in español a little bit sooner.

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Subscribe to dream in español. You WILL be entertained!

It’s my first post for dream in español, the blog for learners of Spanish, so I’ll start it off with a bang! “¿Le no entretienen?!” is a quote from Ridley Scott’s masterpiece “Gladiator”, staring Russell Crowe.

I watch all movies in Spanish now, or at least with Spanish subtitles enabled (and therein lies the first of many tips, tricks, hacks and secrets to  learning Spanish fast).

Mind you, I’m still a beginner. It was four weeks ago, from the time of this posting, that I started practicing Spanish. Before then, the only Spanish I could speak was a few menu items from Taco Bell.

Now, I can cobble together whole sentences – although my vocabulary is extremely limited and my delivery is slow.  Still,  my Spanish speaking amigos are thrilled with my progress, and I’m determined to be conversant in Spanish.

I’m also determined to share any knowledge I have with you.

Now allow me to introduce myself.

Me llamo es [ my name is ] Jason Comely.  I have written two books, Zero to Superhero and Economtricks and am a Search Engine Optimization expert in Cambridge Ontario. I maintain a number of blogs (albeit sporadically).

If you take a moment to visit these websites of mine, you’ll notice a running theme: lifehacks and success systems, to better myself, and help others do the same.

You’ll find dream in español has the same success-oriented objective.

The goal of this blog, for both you and I, is to experience a dream in the Spanish language.

I’ve been told by several bilingual friends that to dream in español signifies the language has truly taken hold. Hence the name of this blog.

You can be involved by leaving comments in the comment section, and sharing your Spanish language hacks with me and the rest of the readers via email, or you can hit me up on Twitter.

Subscribe to dream in español now and let’s make this Spanish dream a reality.

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