P​re-Conversation:

• What will your topic of conversation be? 
  

My topic will be whether the criminal activities that are portrayed to be a major part of the Spanish community are truly as bad as they seem. 

• What are 5 questions related to your conversation goal that you can think of ahead of time to ask your partner?  (This will be useful to have on hand if you get nervous and
  

•  What country are you from?
  
• Are there a lot of criminal problems there?
• Are the problems isolated to one area?
• Are the problems as bad as they are portrayed?
• Do you feel your country is safe?
• 
  

• How do you anticipate your partner will respond to your questions? 
  

• I anticipate them being open to speaking about their country.
  

• What are you looking forward to about this conversation?

• I'm really looking forward to learning about many countries.
  

• What are you nervous about?

• I'm nervous that they will feel offended by my topic.  
  
  

  • Who did I speak with and why did I choose that person?

  • For my first post I spoke to Natale Sanchez because she was from Puerto Rico and is a native Spanish speaker.
    

  • What did you learn about them? What did you learn from them?

  • I learned that there is a wall in the city between the drug area and the normal area.
    

  • How did this interaction help you move towards achieving your personal goal?

  • the interview helped me learn about one of the countries.
    

  • What specifically did you do well according to your goals/expectations?

  • I talked about how the drugs are seen comparison to how they are.
    

  • What specifically do you need to improve on? (Quote specific things you said or did and what you would have done or said if you could do it again I need to work on keeping conversation.   to Find Conversation Partners:

  • 
    

Cyndi Lynn Sheridan
El 23 de Abril
D - Español 3

Antes de Conversación:

What will your topic of conversation be?
My topic will most likely be about animals and their habitats.

What are you looking forward to about this conversation?
I am really looking forward to enhancing my spanish speaking abilities, and understanding what the culture is like in different countries.

What are your nervous about?
I am really nervous that my grammar and spelling will be inaccurate.

Después de Conversación:

Who did you speak with and why did you choose them?
I honestly spoke with a random native speaker on the internet.

What did you learn about them?
I learned that the two people I talked with both liked animals and both of their favorite ones were dogs.

How did this interaction help you move towards achieving your goal?
This interaction increased my confidence with speaking spanish.

What did you do well according to your goals?
One thing that I did well according to my goals was keeping a conversation going.

What specifically do you need to improve on?
I specifically need to improve on my conjugating.

I've assigned myself to multiple people that matched the description of the people that I wanted to socialize with and could help me out properly on the website Conversation Exchange.  Luckily I chose people who get on the site regularly and responded back to me quickly but many of them required for me to have skype which doesn't work well on my computer. So I had to ask to either do email or ichat. Not many of them were able to get back to me except for 2. Edward, and Kleber. For both people, they help me out with my Spanish and I help them improve their English. So it's kind of like a win-win situation.

For the conversations that I had with both of them were mainly introductory things and helping out with little things. Below is the first screenshot I took of Edward and I's first conversation. The second is a screenshot of the email Kleber and I are sending each other.

My goal for week 1 was to learn the correct order of a sentence. What goes where because I get confused and forget sometimes. 

I picked my friend, Isa because she is a native speaker. Below is a screen shot of our conversation that we had so I could further and better understand the correct order of a sentence. 

This helped because now I know I am typing and saying the Spanish correctly. I don't want to be in another country talking spanish incorrectly. This will also help me with my next couple weeks of goals.

    Para mi Español tres benchmark, yo asignada un proyecto adónde yo hablar con un natal Español dora. Para el proyecto, yo trabajo con website livemocha.com, adónde contactar un natal dora. ésta semana, la pregunta es "How to know when to use accents when writing the language."

Antes la pregunta es respuesta, yo tener un compañero a hacer conversación con. Para ésta, yo registrar un compañero en livemocha.com. Mi compañero en conversación es a niña de nombre Yuna-Chan. Yuna-Chan es un natal español dora quién España. Nosotros decidir a enseñar una otro natal lengua. En canje para saber Español, mi compañero voluntad Ingles.  

Me: The first question is just about when I should use accents when writing Spanish.
Yuna-Chan: could it be, for accents, you mean acentos?
Me: Sí, acentos. Mi Español es maso o menos, ahí es pieza para mejora.
Yuna-Chan: I get it now, I get it haha :D
I can explain that to you. ^^ But I'm more comfortable explaining it in Spanish, so if you don't mind.. sorry >_<

En palabras agudas (con la sílaba tónica al final de la palabra), se acentúan las palabras que acaban en vocal, vocal+n, vocal+s. Ejemplo: mamá, camión, detrás.
En palabras llanas (penúltima sílaba tónica), se acentúan las palabras que NO acaban en vocal, vocal+n, vocal+s.
Las palabras esdrújulas (antepenúltima sílaba tónica) se acentúan siempre. Ejemplo: álgebra, sábana.

Estas reglas pueden variar, debido a hiatos (vocales seguidas en diferentes sílabas, para separarlas hay que acentuar, como por ejemplo-> vacía)  y a acentos diacríticos (para distinguir unas palabras de otras, como más y mas).
Hope this helped you!(:

Me: Ah, tan hacer acentos ayudar en creación el consejo más distinguido?


And that was the conversation. Though I did learn a lot from this girl, she unfortunately never replied back to my other message, and I'm suspecting I'm going to have to find another partner for this week's question.

​My goal is to learn moderate insults. I wanted this as a goal in case I was in a foreign country and I was confronted by an unwanted person. 

I chose my friend Maria because Spanish is her first language. I thought that if I could learn from a native speaker, my insults could be slang instead of formal.

Well, since she's my friend, there wasn't much to gain from the conversation that I already don't know.

It helped a lot because I've noticed I learn better when I'm orally taught by a friend.

When I was being taught different moderate insults, I needed help spelling and saying the phrases in an angry voice. I had explained that I can say Spanish in a monotone voice, but not in any other expressions.

I learned:
"Te puedes ir." - Go away.
"Vete no quiero hablar con tigo." - I don't want to talk to you.
"Porque me estas gritando." Why are you yelling?
"Porque estas en mi cara." - Why are you in my face.
"Estoy jugando." - I'm kidding.

Cecelia, Tyler, Kim, Aidan

For my fourth quarter, I have been given an assignment where I have to look use social media to communicate with a native Spanish speaker, in order to improve my own fluency in Spanish. For this, I will be using Livemocha, with the possibility of using Twitter as well to reach out to native speakers. Livemocha is quite an interesting outlet for learning Spanish. Using the website, I will be able to find a native Spanish speaker that wants to live English, making it a mutually beneficial relation. The three goals I have constructed for myself are below-

-How to know when to use accents when writing the language.
-Shortcuts to knowing how to use past and future tense and the differences between them.
-Terminology for architectural terms. Architectural ideas.

As well as having three goals from this project, I also have an essential question, which I am hopeful to find an answer to at the end of this project – By using social media, how can I, as a student benefit from using these social tools to communicate with native speakers understand the language?