Guide To The Spanish Language
An introduction to Spanish without the grammar - A new and fresh perspective with some interesting items on
language and the similarities between Spanish and English
The other good news is that once you are able to engage in a basic conversation your progress suddenly starts to accelerate, you begin to learn
more from usage than from study. I don’t know about you but I find classroom study to be tedious and a real chore, I much prefer to learn through live
conversation, it’s much more fun chatting with the locals than sitting in a classroom studying how to conjugate.
There are some other interesting points on the subject of language that we should consider, for example how language changes. Think how different is
the language we use today to that used just 40 years ago? Have you recently heard any of the old “Pathe News” or “BBC Radio” broadcasts from the
fifties? It is striking how the English language has changed. The changes are not only in the way the words are pronounced but also in the actual words
used and the structure of the sentences. This is a continuous process and within a single lifetime language can change dramatically. The point is that
“language is very dynamic” and as students of language we need to appreciate this very important fact.
Language is continually evolving and changing. If we go back more than 40 years or even much further, although we do not have radio or TV recordings
to rely on as examples we do have books and with these books we can clearly see how the writers of the time used the English language.
Read Shakespeare and Dickens and see how much the English language has changed and evolved.
There is another reason why it is very difficult to be too pedantic about grammar this is the fact that it is perpetually the subject of debate amongst
academics and proponents of correct use of language. What we really should concentrate our energies on is not debating grammar or the correct use of
language as defined by old pseudo academics stuck in the past but on being understood and being able to communicate. Let’s first get a basic knowledge
of Spanish and have some fun actually using it.
Each new edition of the English Oxford Dictionary adds new words. The interesting point is that these new words are not developed in universities by
academics or linguists. New words are created on the streets, mostly by the younger generations. I wonder how many of us over the age of forty know
what some of the latest entries in the Oxford English dictionary mean, words like “bling” "jiggy," "breakbeat," or “bahookie” “crunk” and a “twonk” for those
who are stumped; see the internet “Ask Oxford” web page for some help. http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/newwords/?view=uk
