A Cyclist's Life in Tenerife (Canary Islands)

 

Learning Spanish:

A very good program to watch when you are learning Spanish is «Karlos Arguiñano en tu cocina» (Karlos Arguiñano in your kitchen) currently aired on channel 5 (telecinco) at 1:00 – 2:30pm weekdays. He well-renowned Spanish chef, known for three things: his ability to cook an extremely wide range of authentic Spanish dishes, his cleanliness around the kitchen studio is second-to-none and his reputation for telling bad spanish jokes.

Carlos Arguiñano is the best cook, and I learned Spanish in the beginning watching his episodes… I think that it’s a very good way to learn, because there are always simple prompts shown, like for example: carrots, knives, water, parsley, meat… They always use the same 1st person plural verb, in past present and future tenses: «let’s add», «let’s cook», «we’re adding salt», «we put the oil», «we will ignite the flame» ….. and they repeat a lot too.

Carlos Arguiñano es el mejor cocinero, y amprendí español en el inicio viendo sus capítulos… creo que es una manera buenísima para aprender aqui, porque siempre hay cosas sencillas mostrados, como por ejemplo: zanahoria, cuchillos, agua, perejil, carne… Siempre usan el verbo ‘nosotros’ como «vamos a añadir», «vamos a cocinar», «ponemos la sal», «pusimos el aceite», «pondremos el fuego»….. y también repitan mucho.

Subtitles & language preferences:

The good thing is that if you have a TV with teletext (we don’t, at least not now), a lot of the movies have spanish subtitles for the hearing impaired. To enable subtitles, select page «888» from the teletext menu. I’ve found that when you get quite good at Spanish, as far as learning goes, it’s better if you whack the subtitles on in Spanish too (not English). In my opinion, once you have a base vocabulary, it’s better to set the subtitles to Spanish as you can pick up on the spelling of new words that are repeated often. It’s just easier for adults to read new spanish words than hear them. If you watch a DVD in English, put the subtitles on in Spanish also. You’d be amazed at how much you look & try and read them!

There are some very good and some very bad subtitlists out there; you’ll easily recognise a bad translation when you see it: «Hey! He didn’t say that!». But for pure viewing pleasure, I always prefer to watch the movie in the original language. English for the majority of our DVDs and Spanish for the odd award-winning spanish flick.

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