Los Blogs de BBC Mundo

As part of my "multi-track" learning of the Spanish language, reading is an essential part. So I have found the Los Blogs de BBC Mundo to be very useful. In particular, I have been reading with interest a particular series of blogs written by José Baig. He is currently touring 8 states of the US and asking people he meets on the way one simple question. “¿Hablas español?”

So the exercise I undertake is to translate the blog into English. Firstly, without the aid of a dictionary. If I don't know the meaning of a word or phrase then I will try to guess based on the context of the paragraph. If I am completely stumped I just enter "xxx" and carry on.

The next stage is to then translate the whole paragraph using "Altavista" . This is by no means an exact science and cannot be relied on. However, I normally have an idea of what the paragraph is about and can tell if the translation is OK or not.

Finally, any suspect words from the translation I will look up in the WordReference.com website. Without a doubt the single best learning tool I have at my disposal. The dictionary section usually gives you a number of different translations, along with any combinations with other words to give a new phrase. For example the word "Vez", meaning "time", usually in the context of "una vez" meaning "one time" or more commonly "Once". But the dictionary also gives you the phrase "en vez de", literally "In time of", which means "instead of".

By comparing my original translations, or guesses, to what I subsequently learn, I use a colour code to highlight my errors. "Red" indicates that I don't know the word at all and could not understand the sentence. "Yellow" is where I know the meaning of the words but was still made a mistake in translation. This is a common fault of mine where I mistake who is doing what to whom. For example "me comentaba.." I would read as "I comented" when in fact it is "he/she commented to me". "Green" indicates that I may not know the word but was able to guess it or understand the sentence anyway.

This colour coding gives me a measure of how well (or bad) I am doing. Surprisingly, I seem to be doing quite well with these blogs!