Another creative idea in learning Spanish

 At the beginning of Sept I wrote about an approach to one part of learning Spanish that I was trying. It was slow, but was working well enough. It involved memorising ten random sentences and joining them together with a 'story' so that I didn't forget their order. 

The idea was to give me some fluency in getting Spanish words out of my brain in a proper order and onto my tongue. 

I've been doing that over the last few months as one aspect of my Spanish learning, but it takes a bit of effort to keep up with that as well as the daily use of Anki cards, reading the Bible in Spanish, and memorising a couple of Psalms as well (in Spanish, of course - I already know them well in English). 

I'm always keeping an eye out for different approaches because it's easy to get into a rut and not really put any effort into something you've doing for a while. Continuing to be creative, in other words. 

Anyway, another aspect of my learning has been to get Grok (the AI from X, formerly Twitter) to translate a children's book I wrote a few years back into Spanish, one short section at a time. At present we've just finished chapter four, so the progress is quite slow. That's okay, it's all part of the learning process. 

Yesterday I had an idea as to how I could make further use of this translation. Up till now I've been taking various sentences from each section as it gets translated and putting them on the Anki cards. I have a 'deck' on Anki that's devoted to these. Yesterday, I decided to challenge myself further by seeing if I could memorise the latest section that's been translated - in Spanish. This is going to take some time, but then learning Psalm 139 also took some time, but was worth it. It introduced me to new words, gave me a better sense of grammar than I'd previously gained while doing Duolingo, and showed me how Spanish has a different approach to the arrangement of words in sentences. 

I was already aware of that, of course - two years of Duolingo taught me some things at least - but getting that sense of re-ordering in my head rather than just parroting it off Duo forces me to think more carefully about where words go. Sometimes it even shows me why they go that way, though not always (so far!)

So, one more step on the way. I don't have any great ambition in terms of being able to speak Spanish at this point - there aren't many Spanish speakers in my part of the world - though I have improved in terms of reading it. Being able to speak it out, even if it's because I've memorised it, is another way of helping myself become more familiar with the language overall. 

The original cover of the book I'm having translated into Spanish -
one day I may have another go at updating it. 
Cover by Regan Nicholls