In Lesson Four of Fluenz Spanish, you continue in a restaurant as in the last lessons. This time you are learning to ask questions, and Sonia Gil comments that this is not typically taught so early in Spanish languages courses, but it has been put here because if you are traveling in a Spanish speaking country, you will have many questions.
As usual, the lesson begins with a dialogue, in this case between a waiter and a woman customer. I am getting very fond of the way Sonia Gil then goes through the dialogue and uses it to explain how Spanish works. For example, in this lesson, she talks about the genders of they and us, and the plurals of nouns and adjectives. You also learn that adjectives follow nouns in Spanish, unlike in English.
The workouts include:
- Listening to a word and repeating it
- Matching words and phrases in two columns, one for Spanish and one for English
- Choosing the best image for a word
- Seeing a word in English on your screen and writing it in Spanish, then doing the same with phrases
- Writing words and then phrases that you hear
- Typing conversation you hear
- Recording your own pronunciation if you have a microphone enabled, and getting feedback on it.
All this is done in an interesting and attractive way, and you can see how it gets you using your mind in various ways, both passive and active. By the end of a lesson, you’ve done a lot of drill. Then the next day builds on what you have learned.
Challenge Mode: Your Choice if You Want to Learn Accents
In the exercises where you type words into the program, one of your choices on the top of the Fluenz Spanish software screen is that challenge mode can be on or off. I checked that out during this lesson and it refers to whether you type in accents over letters such as ñ or ú. Their thinking is that since the accents aren’t essential for a beginner to be understood, they could be optional.
Here I have just used this feature to type in the Spanish word for small:
I’d suggest that if learning to write good Spanish is one of your goals, then do use the challenge mode right from the start. I have worked much more on my spoken than on my written Spanish, specially in the past few years here in Mexico, and I turned the challenge mode on. I blush to admit I still made a few mistakes on accents when typing words into this basic lesson.
The Fluenz help file tells you some very simple ways they have created for the program that you can use in typing the characters in. It’s characteristic of their attention to detail that these ways correspond to the Spanish language keyboard. So if you use that in the future, you’ll have a head start.
To find out more about Fluenz Spanish, see my review or here’s a link to the first level at Amazon.com. (If you get interested in getting it, click on “other products by fluenz” on that Amazon page to compare prices for packages with more levels.)
