the goose

I’ve only taken 8 weeks worth of Spanish lessons while in my life.  At that is was mostly because the teacher was hot and my pubescent mind hadn’t figured out that hot 30something spanish teachers are never gonna fall in love with a pimply teenagers.  It’s kind of ironic that Benos Entonces offered a bunch of expats a free ride on their series of
Spanish learning videos in return for a review.  I say ironic because they have cunningly figured out that the horny teenager in us all never really goes away and using sex to distract you from the fact you are learning a language is a winning strategy.

The series comes in a variety of formats but I went through the lessons on my ipod.  This was pretty easy to do – I just dragged them into my itunes and low and behold 30 odd innuendo filled episodes were ready to roll.  I had in my mind that I’d zip through them over a spare weekend but as it turns out they are fairly hard work.  Thankfully, the protagonists, an English bloke and his hot Argentine professor manage to keep your interest with a selection of vaguely titillating topics while still covering the basics.  You could in fact be excused for thinking it was a primer on how to deploy pigeon-Spanish chat up lines to the fine art of getting you leg over.

Each video consists of a ‘magic white board’ which offer a kind of subtitling system on steroids.  The teach, Jimena, speaks only in Spanish and her words are displayed on screen with English subtitles underneath.  I really don’t have much Spanish at all and from the get go it was tricky to keep up.

Between the ‘magic whiteboard’ and the questions asked in English by the English bloke I managed to figure most of it out.  Having said that, it takes a while to get used to reading the Spanish and listening at the same time.  It’s bloody tricky to read the Spanish and English and still pay attention to what is going on at the same time.

I guess this is how the Argentines speak in the wild so it is probably no harm to just push yourself and try to keep up with the lessons.  By the time you get to lesson 9 or so you can pretty much get everything that is being said.  The magic whiteboard also colour codes the text so that you can easily see which are verbs, nounes etc.  Again, you don’t really get the hang of this at the start but eventually it becomes kind of handy.

I would certainly recommend the series to anyone seeking to improve their aural understanding of Spanish while covering basic concepts.  It is a lot less boring than a text book, probably more fun than your own interactions with a Spanish tutor and at the very least you’ll brush up on your pickup techniques.