11 Febrero 2005 (viernes)

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Tarea

Ejercicios 9-1, 9-4
Pagina 294

WebCT Note: Professor Tarazona said that she is delaying collecting the WebCT exercises until next week. If you did not do them, you have a small reprieve! Remember, after doing the exercises (see entry for 9 Febrero below for the assigned exercises), you must print out the assessment scores and turn it in. She is NOT checking online to see if you did them, you MUST turn in this printout!

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Examenes

Our next test is two weeks from next Wednesday, on March 2.
We have another in-class composition in the class before the exam, on February 28.

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Notas

¡Hoy tuvimos nuestro primer examen!

I hope you did well. It was pretty straightforward, covering stuff we studied in class. I was a little surprised that some stuff didn't make it on the test, such as ordinal numbers. Oh well, I am pretty sure we will definitely be seeing them again, so I hope you did bother to learn them.

My personal opinion of the test was that it was pretty easy. There were three parts that gave me a little bit of trouble, though. First was the listening exercises, which I am betting that everyone struggled with. Those Spanish-speaking folks talk so fast! If you had a lot of trouble with this, I suggest doing the lab manual exercises in WebCT more and taking a little time to watch some Univision (channel 34 in Atlanta). Yeah, you won't understand everything on tv, but it will at least help get you used to listening to Spanish as it is spoken at a natural rate.

The second part that gave me a little trouble was the section on indefinite pronouns (algún, nada, etc.). Not because I didn't understand it, but mainly because it took me several minutes to figure out what the paragraph was supposed to be saying. (You never study? You study nothing? Nobody studies?) After several minutes, I think I finally hacked my way through and got answers that made grammatical sense.

The third part, the one that I was really scratching my head on, was the sentence that went something like, Por una colega a quien le gusta muchísimo este deporte, (?) de un partido a las cinco. (That's my best recollection of the sentence, it was probably actually a little different.) We had to fill in the preterit form of a verb. After working out the rest of the section, I settled on the verb saber. I think the literal translation is something like, From a colleague to whom this sport is very much pleasing, I found out about a game at 5:00. Yes, in English, that syntax is a little awkward. The semantic meaning would better translate as something like, I found out about a game at 5:00 from a colleague who really likes the sport. If I am right, the correct verb form would be supe, and the thing that was really throwing me was the use of the word Por to mean From instead of For. I guess we'll see on Monday!

Well, that's about all of my thoughts on the test. I hope everyone did well on the composition Wednesday and the test today. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them below or ask away in class on Monday. Get ready to dig in to chapter nine, which covers vocabulary about traveling, as well as one of the things I'm having a really hard time with: the difference between para and por. And if you thought that this mess with the preterit and imperfect verb tenses was difficult, just wait until you get a load of the nightmare of what's coming in the second half of chapter nine! :-) Don't worry too much, I've got some information that I will post here later that may help, and if you haven't already, I would HIGHLY suggest you consider buying the book Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish and thoroughly digesting chapter 6, "The Twilight Zone". (It's money well-spent, this is the same book that has the Spanish cuss words in chapter 10, "Invective and Obscenity".)

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There was no homework assignment Wednesday, and the WebCT assignment was not collected at the end of class.