I just started Spanish lessons with ChatGPT and my Babbel app. Babbel starts off by putting you through a multiple-choice placement test. I scored "B1," which is apparently low-intermediate. I'm pretty sure I cheated by using my knowledge of French and some higher-than-beginner insights I have about Spanish (I can't form the past tense, for example, but I can recognize it). Also, as I point out in my book, multiple-choice tests are the worst kind of test because any idiot can guess his way through them, and I'm pretty sure I got lucky on some of those questions.
ChatGPT, meanwhile, started me off with mini dialogues. I won't be doing any verbal work on ChatGPT until I set up the app on my phone because the desktop interface has no voice feature. Weird. Meanwhile, I need to set up the Anki spaced-repetition flashcard app so I can start piling on the Spanish vocabulary. I'm a lot older now, so learning Spanish, despite my French background, isn't going to be as much of a breeze as learning French had been when I was but a young hominid. Maybe in a few months, I'll be good enough to start writing some blog entries in basic Spanish. We'll see.
That semicolon next to the "l" on the keyboard got you. Happens to me al; the time.
ReplyDeleteEnjoy your petty victory! For every one of your mistakes that I highlight, there are five more that I pass over.
DeleteAnyway, the typo is fixed now. Thanks.
Glad to be of service. The difference is that my mistakes are rarely typos.
ReplyDeleteTe habla Espanol solomente un poco. (That's from memory, so pardon me if it is wrong.) Spanish was my choice for the foreign language requirement in college. I somehow managed to pass. I recall one of my teachers was a young blonde woman from Spain, and a lesson I'll never forget was when she explained that "hace calor" and "tengo caliente" both mean hot. One was about weather, the other about the person. I thought she was hot and I had the hots for her. It's funny the things you remember.
Te habla Espanol solomente un poco.
DeleteHe speaks only a little Spanish to you.
Te = to you
habla = he/she speaks (I speak = hablo)
Espanol (should be español, lower case) = Spanish
solomente (should be solamente or sólo) = only
un poco (the only correct part, but in the wrong place) = a little
RIGHT: Sólo hablo un poco de español. I speak only a little Spanish.
Good job! Already better than me at español, although that's admittedly a very low bar.
ReplyDeleteAnd it took me only a single lesson to reach this level!
Delete