Comments on: LingusTV: Learning Spanish by watching online video

By: Voices en Español » Announcements and a plea for more attention from you guys

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:54:57 +0000

[...] everyone! I’ve started blogging once a week over at Lingus.TV. Back in July, I wrote a review about that web site when it had just launched. After I wrote that piece, Sergio Gazeu, one of the [...]

By: eleena

eleena — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:38:24 +0000

Sergio,
Thanks for dropping by and for the invite to brainstorm. I’ll send you a PM.

By: Sergio

Sergio — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:06:01 +0000

First of all, thanks Elena for your review. I’m so glad that you consider our site to be mentioned in your blog. Second: sorry for my written english .

We’ve launched LingusTV last June 25th, and we are very excited about all the things we want to do. We would be very grateful if you share with us all the features that you consider interesting to introduce in LingusTV to be more helpful for Spanish teachers and students.

Please, feel free to contact with us and have a brainstorming via Skype or whatever

Best,

Sergio

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:39:38 +0000

This site seems interesting to me…. I am a licensed Spanish teacher here in the USA and some of their materials look promising, even for use once and a while in my classroom, with modified worksheets and accompanying materials, of course. I’d be interested to see what more they come out with…

And about the pace of speaking… second language acquisition research shows it is best to NOT modify the pace when dealing with beginners…. let them hear the language the way it is REALLY spoken. I tend to agree with that, but do see how it can be frustrating for beginners at the same time…. I like to remind my students to focus on what they can understand rather than get hung up on things they can’t quite get yet.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:42:49 +0000

Seems interesting, but not that promising quite yet. They clearly need to set some parameters and criteria with regard to distinguishing between levels. If they are going to use an audio component to deliver the Spanish lessons, I would suspect that they would not be able create one for complete beginners, as you certainly need some background in the language to see any improvement. One thing is for sure, though, it can definitely give some audio exposure to beginners in the language, which will ultimately help with word recognition, pronunciation, and intonation. For right now, though, I think this mainly serves to benefit intermediate-to-advanced learners with its abundance of colloquial expressions, slang, and rapid conversation. It’ll be good to keep tabs on this one, as it could certainly make some great improvements.

By: Ramses

Ramses — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:51:18 +0000

You ARE old-fashioned, hehe. Beginners shouldn’t worry about grammar, only advanced learners. Concentrating on grammar (especially in the beginning) ruins your fluency further down the road.

About the pace of speaking; I learned Spanish by listening materials for natives. Listen to it more and more and it becomes clear. I actually think that slow-pace speaking does more damage than it does good. If you start out with slow materials it might cause you to speak at that same pace, even if you’re more advanced. That’s not what you want! (Example: I once met a guy in Spain who was from Germany. He lived and worked in Spain for years and was totally immersed, but he spoke soooooo slowly, it was horrible. Even I, as a beginner, thought: ‘What the **** is wrong with him?!’).

I love the site by the way. When I’m back in the Netherland I’ll have a closer look. It’s actually a pity that the advanced videos aren’t longer. Do they contain subtitles as well? And about the notes: those come in handy for my SRS, hehe .