Entry 5

 Dear Meowmeow,

Yesterday was our turn to go up the stage and give a presentation about how we learn Spanish together. We introduced an application called Learn Spanish, which contains some basic elements of the language. The whole app presents a complete Spanish program. It is divided into twenty-six courses and each of them holds different content. In the first class, we could learn how to pronounce all the alphabets in Spanish. Before this, I thought the alphabets in Spanish are the same as those in English. However, there are actually quite some differences. For example, in Spanish, there are an alphabet read “che” and another one read “elle.” These two are the features in Spanish. What’s more, although some Spanish alphabets may seem the same as those in English, the pronunciation could be totally distinctive. For instance, we have to flip our tongues in order to pronounce “r” in Spanish. This requirement indeed troubled many of my teammates since they don’t have the ability to do that. Regarding that even some Spanish couldn’t pronounce the letter accurately because of this inability, it is fine to pronounce it like “l.” The app also offers some services such as listening practices and examinations. Whenever we encounter a word we don’t know how to pronounce, we can just click on it and listen to it. After we finished the class, we can also take exams to test if we thoroughly apprehend the content. In the following classes, the content becomes more advanced and it sometimes talk about grammar, which I think of as the most difficult part in Spanish. When we were learning with the app, we actually found some drawbacks of the program’s design. First of all, the timespan of the courses is way too short. At first, the content is quite basic, so we could catch up easily. However, with the courses getting more and more advanced, we found it hard to keep up with the class. Therefore, we changed the schedule of the program so that we could learn Spanish without a haste. The courses were set to be finished within twenty-six days, but we finally changed it into thirty-five days. Second, some content is just too hard for the beginners. It could ruin the learners’ confidence and ambition in Spanish in some ways. Just like what I’ve mentioned above, some grammar in Spanish is too difficult for people who only learnt the language for under a month. Although this app contains many problems, it still helped us a lot with the basic learning such as pronunciation and some simple vocabulary. We even got to know some special words of food or animals in Spanish. Those things are actually related to the local culture in Southern America and Southern Europe. This feature reminded us again why we chose Spanish as our second language. A semester is still way not enough for us to acquire the language. I hope I can study Spanish further in the future and help more people with this ability.