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TuxedoKat

(3,818 posts)
7. Here are some tips
Sun Dec 11, 2011, 12:45 PM
Dec 2011

First get yourself some Spanish music. Little kid music is good because the words are sometimes more repetitive. Someone told me once that the area of the brain that processes music also does language so you are getting a double benefit there. Linda Ronstadt put out some great CDs of Mexican ballads in the '80s that are great, Canciones de Mi Padre and Mas Canciones (the words are easy to understand). A good one for kids' songs is Diez Deditos by Juan Luiz Orozco (you can find in on Amazon) of maybe you can find them on i-Tunes too. Funny thing is you don't always have to be paying attention to get the benefits, so go ahead and play them in the background while you are sleeping too if you want to. I used to play Chinese children's songs for my kids in the car and would get lost in my own thoughts while driving them. Chinese is a hard language to speak and read without sounding hesitant. Everyone was having that problem in my class but one day I could suddenly read and speak Chinese with the right cadence, I was pretty amazed and so was everyone else in the class and I have to give the credit to that Chinese music. Something similar happened with French, my mom used to play French albums of various French singers every day (drove us crazy as kids) but one day after a few months of struggling with French (our whole class was frustrated again) something just clicked and I could understand the teacher's spoken French much better and other French speakers on tape too. Again, the class was amazed I was doing something they couldn't do...

Second, I would do more writing in the language. I don't think teachers nowadays have kids do enough writing where they have to think in the target language. The best exercises for me were when teachers would give us sentences in English and we had to write them in the target language. I don't know where you can find exercises like this. You can sign up for Spanish-Word-a-Day and then will send you a new vocabulary word each day used in a sentence though, I think that would be helpful too, then to write down the sentence in a notebook. Here's a few but there are alot more:

http://www.spanish-word-a-day.com/

http://www.braser.com/spanword.php

http://www.spanishwordoftheday.com/

Good Luck with your final!

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