Sometimes, you work and work at your Spanish, and you begin to wonder if you're actually making any progress.
If you don't have anyone to practise with, there's often no way of testing yourself.
Watching Spanish language TV on cable, satellite or the Internet is fine, but it's nice when mainstream TV air an episode of a popular show, which has quite a large amount of Spanish content.
What's nicer still, and a real confidence booster, is when you read the subtitles (after translating for yourself, of course), or listen to one of the other characters translate, for the benefit of the monolingual hero and his sidekick, and realise just how much you do understand!
I had just such an experience, the other night, watching the 9th episode of season 2 of Grimm.
The episode is called 'La llorona' (the crying woman) and makes reference to a South American legend about the ghost of a woman who drowned herself and her children after being abandoned by her lover (or husband in another version)
Ironically, I actually knew this story, as a lot of profesora Ximena's lessons include work on South American culture, as well as language.
Right from the start, there is conversation between a hispanic man and his young son (without any translation, so you're on your own here)
Later the same man talks to the police, and other Spanish-speaking characters join the action. There's a mixture of subtitles and verbal translation, but most of the dialogue is fairly straightforward, without being too simplistic, and takes place at an average pace.
My better half ( that's 'media naranja' in Spanish vernacular, but I digress) was about 20% impressed by my translation, but 80% annoyed that I kept pausing the recording to do it :-p
If you want to check out the episode, and prove to yourself that you're actually making progress in real-world Spanish, you can do the following
1) if you're in the United States, just search for Grimm s2 ep9on NBC, Hulu, or Xfinity
2) if you're not in the US, try http://www.tvstreamingworld.com/2012/10/grimm-season-2-episode-9-la-llorona-2/
WARNING!!! ensure your pop-up blocker is active, this site does generate advertising pop-ups, one at least is Adult oriented. Another is for a site called Zedo.com which has big 'Download' and 'Play' buttons on it - DO NOT click them, if the page opens, just close it.
On the page, scroll down until you see a window with several tabs, marked Video1, Video2, Video3, Extra Video.
DO NOT click the link, which looks like a video player, saying 'your system doesn't support this video file', it will just try to get you to download the iLivid player, and other associated junkware, which you DO NOT NEED to view the episode.
Unfortunately, what you DO need is Flash player so if, like me, you have an Android tablet, it's back to the PC for this one.
So, next, click on the Video2 tab, type in the words shown in the window (you may need to click the 'new puzzle' arrow before they appear) click 'submit and continue to video', click 'hide ad and play video' and you're off.
I know this might seem a bit fiddly but it's worth it, even if you're not a Grimm fan.
Of course, there's always the option of searching the torrent sites, but they're even more prone to inappropriate advertising and spurious downloads.
¡Que lo disfruten!
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