Category Archives: Language

So much for the January blues…

Wow. It’s been a busy (but good) month. After a really good Christmas break, January started off getting back into the swing all things OuterArc. We launched Telewatts about two weeks ago, our web-based renewable energy display, aimed at the promotion of energy generated from solar panels and wind turbines. A big thanks to everyone that helped critique the site once it went live.

I also did a video interview (see below) with Nottingham based social media guru Phil Campbell. We talked about Telewatts and the background of OuterArc. Phil is a cool guy who’s involved in lots of different things including fibrecamp and his one year, live-in social media experiment, the living ark. Check them both out, you can also follow Phil on Twitter here.

What else have I been up to? Well, I’m continuing with my Spanish lessons and I’m really enjoying it as something different to challenge myself with. I’ve found a little bit of practice/study between the lessons has really helped as well as listening to the Rocket Spanish audio lessons.

I also went to the Escape the City Winter Party in London. It was a really entertaining night, all the speakers relayed the difficulties they had faced during their journeys and underlined the importance of persistence and never giving up. You can seem a summary of the points they made in this post on the Escape the City blog.

I took another trip down to London to catch up with my fellow first footers from Tribewanted Sierra Leone. It was great to see everyone again and catch up with Susan before she ventured back out to the shores of John Obey. Unfortunately Susan wasn’t able to take the football kit I lugged down on the train to donate to the village boys but, I’m assured it will be heading out there with Cally and Mike in April.

After a day with the TribeWanted guys, I caught up with some old university friends who I hadn’t seen in ages. We had a good laugh and a catch up, it’s was interesting to hear how the guys are getting on in the big corporates while I’m beavering away in a small start up.

Hablo espanol un poco

Or rather, “I speak Spanish a little.” (I haven’t fallen at the first hurdle, I know it should be español in the title but WordPress doesn’t like it)

Hola - "Hello". Photo by Pablo Zárate (ddac on Flickr)

Hola - "Hello". Photo by Pablo Zárate (ddac on Flickr)

Before Christmas I enrolled on a course to learn Spanish, it’s something that I’d wanted to do for a while but the time never seemed right. I decided to just take the plunge and take a beginner level 6 week course (a one and a half hour lesson per week). Progress was halted somewhat by missing the first lesson (before Christmas) through illness so I’ve been doing a bit of independent study this evening to try and ensure I can catch up quickly with the others.

I’ve never studied Spanish before but I’m interested in the both the language and the culture so hopefully that should stand me in good stead. So far I’d say I’ve invested 30 mins (this evening), listening to the pronunciation of the 29 letters in the alphabet and some basic phrases – all in preparation of the second lesson, tomorrow evening.

My goal is to be able to have a two minute conversation with a football team mate of mine (a native Spanish speaker) by the middle of March – being able to exchange pleasantries, ask questions and respond

Here’s a list of resources I plan to utilise on my linguistic quest:

I’ll try to keep an up to date account of how I’m progressing on here, not least because it will hold me accountable to myself (and anyone else that reads this and asks “How’s the Spanish going?”).