I have found an interesting way to continue learning the foreign language. Odd to say it that way for the language is foreign to me only because my first language was English. Perspectives. The new way involves the use of comic strips, the daily comic strips, which have always delighted me.
First, I have a subscription to Go Comics which allows me to receive strips of my choice in my mailbox everyday. I also have a subscription to both local papers, the Richmond Register and the Lexington Herald Leader. I still get the soft hard copies, so to speak.
The excellent thing about Go Comics is that I can get comic strips in both Spanish and English. Aha. So for Spanish, I cut out the English version from one of the papers and then copy the Spanish version of the same comic into my Fat Li'l Three and half by five and a half notebook. I look up words I am not familiar with, study the verb forms and idioms, as well as the unusual structures. In copying the Spanish I must say it to myself or out loud. And so on. I also have taped a TV series on the Spanish channel called Como Dice el Dicho, or "as the saying goes." Yesterday I watched two episodes: "en el país de los ciegos, el tuerto es rey" and "ver para creer." My understanding is getting better though it is still not good. The first episode has a wonderful title: "in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Gullible young girls were being seduced and then kidnapped by means of the Internet. Seduced by the language from the Internet caller, and then kidnapped when "she" went out to meet the new boyfriend. (Sigh or suspiro). The second episode, which means "seeing is believing," maybe, for I don't understand the use of "para" there. In any case that title was apt in so many ways, for at the center of the story was a heavy-set young man, not the brightest person in the city, perhaps, who became convinced that he was pregnant. He told everyone. His mother was kind and loving, amable y amorosa. His neighbors, however,i thought he was possessed, dragged him from his home and beat him up. He woke up in a hospital, his doctor put him in group therapy, where everyone giggled when he had to explain what his problem was. The doctor was a good person, however, and made everyone hug him. Well, long story short, the young man was cured of his delusion, fell in love with his pretty nurse, who fell in love with him; not only that, for the doctor fell in love with the young man's mother. Incredible as it sounds, I saw it and that was what happened. Or as they say in Spanish, ¡increíble!
The comic strip I go to regularly from the papers is Dilbert, enjoyable in either language, and a source where I find the most words I am not familiar with. In any case, with the notebook, I can do plenty of reviewing, which I do, for frequently my memory fails me. I also have available Garfield, Alley Oop, Big Nate, Perequita, and the Wizard of Id in Spanish, as well as Peanuts: "El bueno y viejo Charlie Brown," as it appears in the Sunday paper. Learning that involves pleasure and rigor is delightful, something I have known for quite a while. The best thing about studying Spanish this way, however, is that all the language used in the strips is conversation, which is the practical purpose for learning the language, or the final clause as we philosophers prefer to say. Ahem, ahem. Ver para creer.