Voices en Español

I got an email this week from Doug Shivers, a language teacher who lives in Portland, Oregon. He’s got a program called “Teachers Learn Spanish,” where he organizes summer trips to Guatemala for teachers, social workers and students interested in studying Spanish and learning about Guatemalan culture.

There will be two sessions, one in June and the other in July. Each participant will receive 3 1/2 hours daily of private, one-on-one Spanish classes and get to live with a local Guatemalan family. There will also be planned excursions to Tikal, the Mayan temple ruins, and Lake Atitlán. The total cost of the program is $1550, not including airfare. For an extra fee, participants can get five hours of graduate credit from Portland State University.

Here’s what Doug says about the program:

This will be the fourth year that I have been doing the Teachers Learn Spanish program to Guatemala. Each year we have had between 15-20 participants. This has been a very good number, so I am limiting it to 20 students in each group. The absolute deadline is May 15 in order to leave enough time to orient the participants and inform the language school in Antigua.

We have had people on the program who have not spoken any Spanish at all as well as advanced speakers. Since each participant has his/her own private teacher, the lessons can be tailored to the needs of each person. We have also had children of participants from age 7 through high school and they have all had a great time and have learned Spanish quickly. There are teachers at the language school that are very good at teaching young children.

All of the U.S. teachers that have participated in the past have said that they have had so many new ideas for their own classrooms. Many of them have also said that after the Spanish classes they were able to converse with immigrant children in their classrooms and with the parents.

You can find more information on the Teachers Learn Spanish web site. If you’ve never been to Gautemala, I highly recommend it. I went there three years ago to work on a volunteer project and found the people very warm and welcoming and the landscapes beautiful.

Tikal ruins photo from travelblog.org

Going overseas or leaving one’s country to study is a common desire of many university students. In fact, some academic advisers don’t consider a college education complete unless a student has spent some time in another country studying a foreign language or learning about a different culture. According to the Institute of International Education, higher education study abroad programs are growing in popularity, with approximately 220,000 U.S. college students, an almost 9% increase from the year before, seeking out these kinds of programs.

The most popular destinations for U.S. students are, in the following order, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain. In 2007 there were roughly 21,000 Americans who came to Spain to study in university programs. Latin America also attracts a significant number of students as well.

Teresa Cordova, a coordinator for Middlebury College’s program in Spain is the featured speaker in today’s podcast. Teresa, a puertorriqueña, talks about the benefits and the challenges of taking a semester or an academic year to study in a Spanish university.

Personally, I think that study abroad programs should be a part of any undergraduate education. I realize that not everyone can afford it and for some majors, perhaps it may not seem particularly relevant, but for students who are majoring in the humanities, business or social sciences, a semester spent abroad can be an invaluable and illuminating experience.

Try as you might, if you do enough intercambios (language exchanges), you’ll eventually encounter a few people who think that intercambios = free classes.

Don’t get me wrong, a language exchange is a marvelous way to practice a foreign language. The great thing about having an intercambio is the opportunity to learn Spanish straight directly with a native speaker. But it is a two-way street. If one person is a passive participant who only takes and takes and takes and doesn’t give anything back, that’s not an intercambio, that’s a free private lesson.
Here are 4 signs that your language exchange has become a bit lopsided, with you receiving the short end of the stick.

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¡Hola!

Today I posted an entry over at the wonderful Notes from Spain blog. Major thanks to Ben Curtis for inviting me. If this is your first time visiting Voices en Español, ¡bienvenidos! (And if this isn’t your first time visiting, Welcome Back!)

Feel free to look around, leave comments, etc. The topics you’ll find covered here are pretty varied — from Spanish grammar tips to the translations of movie titles to Spanish podcasts. Hay de todo. You can also find several posts written in Spanish on the other side of this blog.

Here’s a sample of some previous posts:

5 Questions to Ask Your Intercambio 

Hispanic or Latino?

Spanish Pronunciation 101: English Consonants

¿Dígame? Tips for talking on the phone in Spanish

Qué vs. Cuál: Which one should I use?

4 Myths about raising bilingual kids 

Like what you see? Then please subscribe to the Voices en Español RSS feed. It’s free and it will notify you every time new content is published on this blog. What’s a RSS feed? Click here to find out more.

Thanks for visiting and hope to see you around here again in the future!

If you’ve been studying Spanish for even only a short period of time, you probably already know that the two prepositions por and para are a bundle of trouble. It can be confusing to know when to use them. One could write a book on the subject.

In any case, that’s not what today’s entry is about exactly. This Spanish grammar tip focuses on two specific uses of por vs. para when paired with the verb estar. Estar por and estar para both generally mean “to be about to” but with different nuances. It may seem rather narrow but actually the phrases that you can build using estar por or estar para are very common and extremely useful.

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The BBC announced a few days ago that it was shutting down its Spanish podcast and news forum called BBC Enlace. For the past three years the BBC has produced an interactive news podcast in Spanish where the topics were suggested by listeners. It was an excellent podcast that routinely featured Spanish speakers, from all walks of life and all parts of the globe, giving their opinions on a wide range of topics, from politics to fashion. If you never visited BBC Enlace you missed out on using an excellent online Spanish-language resource.

Fortunately, you can still find an archive of BBC Enlace podcasts dating back to 2006 here.

The cancellation of the program seems rather sudden and rushed. No detailed reason was given for the termination other than the typical “internal restructuring” comment. It’s clear that the BBC didn’t want to have a long good-bye because they gave the public only a week’s notice of the plans to shut the program down. Certainly not enough time for BBC Enlace fans to mount a global protest. It’s unfortunate that this decision was made because the BBC is one of the few global media companies that has the clout, credibility and cash to provide this type of programming. I’m going to miss it.

Were you a regular listener of BBC Enlace? Did you have a favorite episode? What’s your reaction to the cancellation?

Last month I announced that I was cooking up a surprise for you guys. Well, today is finally the day that I go public with it. “It” is a new podcast in Spanish called Cody’s Cuentos featuring classic fairy tales. Have you ever heard Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Rapunzel or Rumpelstiltskin in Spanish? Soon you will be able to find all of these classics and many more over at Cody’s Cuentos.

Who’s Cody? He’s the digital version of my real-life dog. And why fairy tales? Well, when I was a kid, I enjoyed hearing them. And then when I was old enough to read on my own, I loved reading them. In fact, my father bought a book of illustrated fairy tales that I spent so much time with that the pages eventually fell out. Thanks to fairy tales, I discovered the joy and the power of reading. The vivid images that those classic stories painted in my young mind were more powerful than anything I could’ve seen on television.

Times have changed but many of these fairy tales are still relevant and insightful. At the very least, they’re still very enjoyable. And so, at least twice a month, I will bring you some of these classics in a modern mp3 format. Each story will be read by a native Spanish speaker and transcripts of the stories will be available on the Cody blog. In the future there will be podcasts of legends, folk tales and original short stories for children. When you get a second, check it out and let me know what you think. I hope you like it.

¡Hasta pronto!

Cody’s Cuentos: www.codyscuentos.com

RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/codyscuentos

Eduardo González Viaña, author of El corrido de Dante and the subject of podcast #18, will be speaking in Madrid on March 25 at Casa de América at 7:30 p.m. He will be speaking about immigration and his novel which is coming out in a new edition for the Iberian Spanish market this month. Also appearing on the panel with him will be writer Jorge Eduardo Benavides and editor Fernando Fernández Villa. The address is Plaza de Cibeles 2 in Madrid and the phone number is 91-595-4800. Entrance is free.

He will also be appearing in Murcia and Seville. Here are the dates and locations:

MURCIA, 24 de marzo, 7.30pm, Centro Cultural “Las Claras”, Fundación Cajamurcia.

MADRID, 25 de marzo, 7.30 pm, Casa de América.

SEVILLA, 26 de marzo, 8pm, Casa del libro de Sevilla

SEVILLA, 27 de marzo, 5pm, Universidad de Sevilla. Also, worth noting is the Spanish Audio Gazette, a project of the University of Toronto. They’ve got online samples of audio content with speakers from Cuba, Puerto Rico and Venezuela.

Sunday morning. Wake up, walk the dog, get coffee, go home. Turn on computer, log-on to Skype and look for your Spanish intercambio. Two hours later you log-off, strangely dissatisfied.

Maybe you are still half-sleep. Maybe you needed more time for the caffeine to kick in. Whatever it is, you can’t pinpoint why you feel so “blah” afterwards. You replay the conversation in your mind and realize that during a conversation that lasted roughly 120 minutes, you got 5 minutes, okay, 10 minutes tops, of actual conversation in Spanish. Whoa. You woke up early on Sunday morning for this? What happened?

You’ve just been conversationally hijacked.

Photo: Too Talkative by Sanguine Rouge. Used with permission.

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OK, so I know this is a wee bit off topic but it’s kind of oddly related, considering yesterday’s Spanish pronunciation podcast. I find this YouTube video amusing and amazing at the same time. Amy Walker, a 25-year-old actress from Seattle now living in Philadelphia, can speak in 21 different accents. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do a Spanish accent. Maybe in the sequel?

What do you think of her accents? Which ones are your favorites?