Spanish dictionaries

We all need to use Spanish dictionaries all of the time to improve our vocab. I use three: two online, and one on my mobile phone.

My main dictionary is the Concise Oxford Spanish Dictionary, which I have loaded on my mobile phone (SonyEriccson W950i), and which previously I had on various P900 models. It's available for the variants of the Symbian operating system for smart phones, so will work on many of the Nokia smart phones. You'll need to know what operating system is running on your phone to get the correct mobile version. A good starting point would be here. I'll look at this in a subsequent post, and explain why I like this dictionary so much.

Online I use WordReference.com - this is a fantastic resource, which has the added benefit of a very active forum through which you can get answers to questions about definitions of phrases, spanish useage etc. Again, I'll cover this in detail in a forthcoming post.

Finally, I use the Diccionario de la Lengua Española from the Real Academia Española, which is the official guardian of the spoken and written spanish language. I use this to look up definitions of word in Spanish - there is a school of thought which says that one should try and use a Spanish dictionary (not bi-directional English-Spanish) to look up unfamiliar spanish vocab once you have reached the intermediate stage of learning. This works for many words, but for those with many different meanings (try looking up 'echar' in it and you'll see what I mean) I find I need to revert to the tried and trusted bi-directional method).

Instant translation - word by word

A useful translation feature available from google allows you to translate any english word on a web page into spanish. It allows you to use your mouse to hover over a word causing a spanish translation to appear:

I must admit that I don't happen to use this a lot, but I can see that it would be super useful for some people. And it does no harm to have it available. So the next time you idly wonder what is the spanish for ferret while reading your favourite blog, you don't have to type it into an online dictionary, or pull out your battered old dictionary.

How to do it....
First of all you should install the google toolbar from here

Once you have this running, click on the green Settings button on the right hand side of the toolbar, and choose the Option menu item. By default the Features tab should be visible. Tick the Translate menu box, click the 'Translate Settings' button and select Spanish from the pulldown menu. Click OK to dismiss the dialog box.

Then look for the Translate button in the toolbar, click it and enable the word translator.

Conjugating verbs

Yes it's hard work.... for people who dislike learning grammar, the mountainous landscape of the irregular verbs and their conjugations hold many fears (although I get a kind of satisfaction from from engaging with them). Sad, I know, but there it is. So all of us spanish learners carry around our little verb books which rarely we can be bothered to retreive from our pockets and bags, covered in lint or sticky stuff from snacks, to pore over the pages to find a verb that's similar to the one in which we're interested. Much better to look up the little blighters online from the comfort of our chair in front of our computers.

This is where the joy of the Compjugador comes in - it's an online database of over 10,000 spanish verbs containing the full conjugation of each. I use it the to look up verbs if I'm not sure of where the irregularity will crop up or if I've forgotten a particular verb tense. One of the things I really like about it is how it highlights in bold where the irregularity in the verb is to be found. Try typing rogar into the search box to see what I mean. (I bought one of the aforementioned little books once, which did not highlight the irregular verb elements and consequently it never got used, although I did shout at it rather a lot).

The Compjugador tool is created by Daniel M. German, an assistant professor at the University of Victoria, but is based on a database compiled by Jaime Suances-Torres who's site has masses of additional information for those obsessed with Spanish verbs (I'm not quite in this class yet, but am showing worrying tendencies...)

For example, this 'Los 101 modelos de conjugación en español' looks particularly intersting - I just wish I knew what it really all means...think I'll put that project off to another day.

Setting up your browser to aid learning

Your browser is your friend and it can help you in several ways. This post is about having some useful tabs set as your part of your homepage. I currently have few work tabs at the front (office diary, google mail, twitter, scrybe) followed by el pais, el mundo, and diccionario de la lengua español

The news sites mean that you have spanish news reading material ready to read at your fingertips any time you get a spare moment. I found that having the facility to scan spanish news stories every day (particularly the international sections) really helped improve the speed of my spanish reading - because you'll probably have a reasonable grasp of the main international news stories in your own language, you'll not need to look up so much vocabulary.

While I was learning the irregular verbs and the verb tenses I also had Compjugador set on a tab. This is a great resource for checking verb conjugations (it has over 10,000 verbs) - I'll post some more about this later.

To set a multitab homepage in Firefox simply set up you r browser tabs how you want them, and then go to Tools-->Options and click the 'Use Current Pages' button

Using the spanish keyboard in Windows (2)

Following on from yesterday's post, here is a spanish keyboard map:



A larger, printable version of the keyboard can be found here - print it out and keep it near your keyboard. I found it really useful writing up my notes from classes using the spanish keyboard, and it doesn't take long to get used to using the accents, brackets etc.

Here's an explanation of how it works:

In the diagram, the small (red) characters at the top left of each key is the symbol you will find on the PC's key itself. The larger (blue) character shown on the key in the diagram will be shown on the PC's screen when that key is pressed.

Here, the Q key, at the top left of the keyboard, will produce the letter q and the key that is marked ; will produce ñ.

Normally holding down the Shift key when a key is pressed will produce a capital letter, in the two example mentioned Q and Ñ. (The Shift keys are coloured yellow in the diagram.) When this is not the case the shifted form is shown in the diagram (in black) above the "normal" character. For example, if the shift is held down when the digit 5 key is pressed the % will be displayed on the PC's screen. Another example is the = key which will produce the characters ¡ and ¿.

In some cases you have to press two keys consecutively to generate an accented letter. We have already seen that, when we have selected the Spanish keyboard, by pressing the ; key we generate a ñ. If you want to include a é while using the Spanish keyboard you will have to press the ' key and then the e key. In the diagrams keys used in this way to generate accents are shown in purple.

Some keys can generate more than two characters. The additional characters are shown in green in the diagrams. An example on the Spanish layout is the key marked 6. This produces a 6 or, if you use the shift key, the & character. If you hold down the Alt Gr key (which is to the right of the space bar and is coloured pink in the diagram) when pressing the key you will produced the ¬ character. Another example is the # key. This can be used as normal to produce ç and Ç. It can also be used with Alt Gr to produce the { symbol.

Using the Spanish Keyboard in Windows (1)

One of the first things a learner should do when using a PC to aid language learning is to work out how to change the keyboard. It's tempting not to bother, and to not worry about accents when typing word lists, but you'll soon find that you'll never be able to remember whether to use the accent or not when you're writing in spanish.

To make Spanish Keyboard available in Windows

1. Go to Start-->Settings-->Control Panel-->Regional and Language Options
2. Click on the Languages Tab and then click on the Details button
3. Click on the Add button
4. Using the pulldown menu select Spanish (Traditional Sort)
5. Click the Apply button
6. Click OK until the dialog boxes are dismissed.
7. If you look at the bottom right hand corner of the screen, you should see a blue square with the words EN inside – this is the default language for your keyboard (English).
8. If you click on the blue square you will get a short menu where you can select ES (Español) as the input language for your keyboad.


9. To set it back to English go to the blue square again which will now say ES, click on it to get the menu, and select EN.

Welcome

I've been learning spanish for a couple of years now and I'm starting this blog to share my thoughts on the process, and particularly how to leverage web technologies to enhance learning.

Because I spend a large portion of my day online through my work, I have many opportunities to poke around various spanish learning sites, and to experiment with the many tools that are available to help you learn.

In my own case I have used the tools as a supplement to a serious structured course which I have been attending at my local Instituto Cervantes