Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm starting to work with Mexico a lot at work and it would really help me if I could attend their daily performance meetings, which are all in Spanish. Has anyone got experience of learning a language using tools like Rosetta Stone or Duolingo? I'd love to hear if they've worked for anyone before investing time into them.

I started learning Spanish because it was a lot of my baseball team’s first language. I used Duolingo and it was pretty good - it gets you to speak and listen as well as write and understand written words and phrases. However I didn’t keep it up once I stopped playing. Unless you’re immersed in the culture and speaking it every day you’ll find it hard to become fluent as an adult, that’s just a fact sadly.

I would be happy to pick it up again and learn with you. We could have conversations during D&D where we say mean things about Zardoz

My friend at work when on assignment to Mexico a couple of years ago for 12 months and I was amazed how well he could speak Spanish when he got back. It would definitely be the easiest way to learn. There's no requirement for me to learn but I would love to be able to participate more in the standard meetings and when I visit it would be great to practice.

Why did you choose Duolingo?

It was free! And at the time there weren’t many app-based options tbh. This is going on 6-7 years ago. I’m sure a paid course with a tutor would probably be better, but I can’t advise you there.

Ask your mate if there is much difference between your classic Spanish ('Castilian' I believe) and what is used in Mexico? You might want to check first, so that if you go to the effort of learning a new language you get the 'right one' so that it helps achieve your objective.

I ask, because Lady T spent time honing her Spanish in the north (Pamplona) and then when we later holidayed in the south (Marbs, obv) they found the way she spoke to be somewhat troubling.

The grammar is slightly different depending on whether you go for classic Spanish or South/Central America usage, and the pronunciations are different too, but the verbs still conjugate using the same forms for each tense. Grammar-wise it’s the language that makes most sense as it mainly follows its own rules! Also 99/100 times it’s easy to figure out the gender of words too (as opposed to French where you have to learn them rote).

You should be able to learn one style of Spanish and understand the other, but again it depends on your level of fluency. And yes, dialects within Spain/Mexico/Bolivia/wherever will make things more challenging, but that’s the same as if someone speaking English as a foreign language went to Devon or Newcastle.

Tal vez le agrado a sdg porque hago que D&D sea divertido para ella.

A good point, although I think google will be more helpful than my friend. He learned by being there, I'm not sure if he had formal teaching and if he did I seriously doubt he asked any questions about what he was learning.

If you can I'd recommend listening to music/watching stuff with subtitles/reading etc... in the language you want to learn. That helped me at the start here. Immerse yourself in it as much as you can.

«Tal vez a sdg le gusto porque me burlo de D&D por ella.»

Lo arregle para ti.

Also make sure you learn a lot of cussing and industrial slang if you really want to fit in.

Reading this thread makes me realise how much I miss the diverse teams I worked with in London, and how fun it was explaining some of the curiosities of the everyday English language to our continental chums; as well as hearing about theirs (the Portuguese chap, for instance, had a huge problem with how Brazilians spoke)

el traductor de google es una puta paja

You jest, but industrial language is a point of concern - I'm going to be responsible for the improvement strategies of our distilleries and governance of the regional leadership teams improvement and productivity agendas so I'm already having conversations about agave, irrigation, propagation, ovens, waste water treatment etc. I can imagine there going to be a lot of terms that a normal language course wouldn't cover!
I think I said before that there's no expectation on me to learn, and I might not, but it feels bad to have them apologise for their English when it's already brilliant and I'd love to be able to take part in their normal meeting structure at some point.