Es blood hard Para Mi

I am learning Spanish on my ipod and it’s not going particularly well.

That’s not entirely true. I mean it’s fair to say that it’s not going particularly well in that I’m not exactly learning any Spanish but, much to my surprise, I am having fun. The reason for this is that, purely by chance, the Spanish language lessons course I downloaded is a fantastically naff one presented by a dude called Michael Thomas.

Not only does Michael Thomas have a voice that makes him sound like he’s having a stroke after every third of fourth word he also gives the impression of making it all up as he goes along. Lessons trail off into “and if I remember anything else I’ll mention it later” or long, weird anecdotes that end as abruptly as though he was just killing time while waiting for a bus, which has since arrived.

More importantly he has an awesome learning technique that, he assures me, will mean I can have a practical use of Spanish in 10 to 12 hours.

Hmm. Quite.

Anyway, this technique involves tips such as “never review anything you have learned” and “don’t try to remember anything” and he is dead-set against any kind of practice or homework.

The idea – from what I can gather – is that instead of treating the language as something you have to grapple with you just sort of immerse yourself in it (or something). In theory it makes great sense and appeals to my sense of laziness. In practice, however, I keep drifting off and/or replaying the bit where he talks about the different ways to pronounce the word “calzone” (which is surely Italian anyway, no?)

God I suck at learning languages. For all I can tell poor old Michael probaly had an actual stroke three minutes into Lesson One and has been calling for help in Spanish ever since.