Ahead of meeting online with my Tutor Lindsay for lesson 4 of my Spanish course I wrote up a little piece of content that I would look to use in a potential business conversation with a customer prospect by way of an introduction to what my company www.signature-leather.com does together with a little background information. This was then inserted into Google translate producing the following Spanish text;
Is using Google Translate cheating in this regard?
Well after just 4 weeks of study the idea of this learner exercise was to have a “Speaking” challenge so that I could have a go at reading some Spanish and acquiring my own choice of vocabulary as the content!
So at this stage happy for Google Translate to take my English and provide the Spanish text for me to read!
What I am going to call “Learning by Self” from my perspective provides lots of highly valuable Purpose and real life Context to my studies. After all being able to talk about my products in Spanish obviously a big big plus for an Exporter with ambitions to sell to Retailers on mainland Spain!
So my personal (not prescribed by Lindsay) homework in advance of my lesson and forwarded to Lindsay also in advance allowed me to kick off our lesson by reading (well as best I could!) this piece of text to Lindsay.
Then the big advantage of being able to discuss vocabulary that I am interested in and to acquire the correct pronunciation with Lindsay and then re-read again and then again with the huge benefit of Lindsay’s guidance looking for example to reinforce that every letter is pronounced in Spanish with the only silent letter H!
Immediately before my Lesson 4, I had the pleasure of being in Gloucestershire with my products at the GBPRE Equestrian Show and in the company of Iberian discipline Equestrians and Judges from Spain and Portugal.
And courtesy of Mark of OAD Design in Llangollen I am delighted to have some lovely pictures taken with Iberian Classical Rider and Instructor Justine Armitage to present with this weeks Spanish Language Learning Blog!
Lesson 4 was enhanced through Lindsay correcting and emphasising aspects of the text I had created and as per the text presented above I immediately received my piece of text back to me corrected and with signposts to how this would be delivered in Spanish more beautifully next time on screen and this was in real time which is such a big plus! Unfortunately, I have never been beautiful when speaking French or German either!
