Seeing with your ears

We've talked about 'shadowing' and the dangers that this method represents when working between different families of languages. Remember that Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese are fairly close to one another but English and German are radically different from Spanish, in structure and mental frame. We have been working on 'visual associations', of 'seeing' the sense of a text and moving from words to images and back to words.

Practise recording a documentary, either in Spanish or in English, for example, on climate change. Play the recording back and listen to the commentary without the image first. Then rewind and turn down the volume, giving your own commentary to the images and seeing how much they correspond to what you had imagined. Then do a CI (Consecutive Interpreting) of the documentary. Re-construct 24 hours later and record your re-construction. The try to do an SI from your taped re-construction. If the vocabulary doesn't stick that way, it never will! Have fun practising! Remember - what isn't fun, doesn't motivate and we need motivation to learn. Back tomorrow with more. Check out the climate change speech hung on the Moodle by Goretti. It's a good speech although certainly full of easyspeak.