Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish


Book Description

Many language books are boring—this one is not. Written by a native English speaker who learned Spanish the hard way—by trying to talk to Spanish-speaking people—it offers English speakers with a basic knowledge of Spanish hundreds of tips for using the language more fluently and colloquially, with fewer obvious "gringo" errors. Writing with humor, common sense, and a minimum of jargon, Joseph Keenan covers everything from pronunciation, verb usage, and common grammatical mistakes to the subtleties of addressing other people, "trickster" words that look alike in both languages, inadvertent obscenities, and intentional swearing. He guides readers through the set phrases and idiomatic expressions that pepper the native speaker's conversation and provides a valuable introduction to the most widely used Spanish slang. With this book, both students in school and adult learners who never want to see another classroom can rapidly improve their speaking ability. Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish will be an essential aid in passing the supreme language test-communicating fluently with native speakers.




Spanish Conversation


Book Description

A study guide to Spanish conversation is a good start to studying the language when you lack a way to practice it in with another speaker. Since it takes time and repetition to learn any language, you can look over the common phrases throughout the text in order to build up your vocabulary. After several months of practice, combined with practical application with Spanish speakers and structured conversations with someone else reading off of the book, you should soon gain a basic grasp of speaking Spanish. Notably, the grammar of the Spanish language is relatively easy for English-speakers to grasp.







Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Conversation


Book Description

Practice the Art of Conversation in Spanish! Want to strike up a conversation with a native Spanish speaker but nervous that you’re not ready? This book helps you overcome that obstacle and before you know it, you’ll be speaking comfortably in your new native language. Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Conversation is organized around twelve units that present realistic conversational situations, from making introductions to giving opinions and from making a date to telling a story. Using these engaging dialogues as a starting point, each unit is packed with helpful instruction on correct pronunciation, syntax, and word usage--in addition to lots of conversation-ready phrases that you will find indispensable as your fluency increases. You will, of course, get plenty of practice, practice, practice using your new skills in conversation. Each dialogue is followed by a variety of exercises that not only give you the opportunity to put new concepts into action but also encourage you to construct personalized conversations. These lessons will reassure even the most grammar-phobic learners that they too can achieve a confident--and spontaneous--speaking style. Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Conversation will help you: Engage in dialogues that illustrate practical conversations Expand your vocabulary Get clarification of new concepts with numerous realistic examples Reinforce your new conversational skills through extensive exercises Before you know it, you’ll find yourself confidently speaking Spanish with your Spanish-speaking friends--or ready to make new ones!




Conversational Spanish Dialogues for Beginners and Intermediate Students


Book Description

It can be very frustrating when you cannot communicate with Spanish speaking people and trivial things can be a cause of major annoyance, especially when you cannot explain yourself using Spanish. The best way to improve your Spanish is by reading a book from which you can learn realistic Spanish conversation. This book contains 100 Spanish short stories for beginners and intermediate students and allows new Spanish speakers to hone their reading skills and learn dialogue and typical expressions used in daily life. This book is focused to learn Spanish conversation for beginners and basic intermediate learning level. The first 40 conversations are most suitable for beginners, the Spanish conversations are casual, and each story is followed by simple learning questions.The next 40 short stories based on dialogue are more for intermediate students and those who are interested in reading good short stories with entertaining content. The last 20 short stories are longer and are more for advanced students and those who need to expand their Spanish vocabulary. The book offers the best of both worlds, combining a conversational Spanish learning book for beginners and an entertaining Spanish short story book for intermediate students. Learning Spanish dialogue and conversation has never been more fun! Get you copy now! LEARNING SPANISH DIALOGUES THROUGH CONVERSATIONAL SHORT STORIES 100 SPANISH CONVERSATIONS AND SHORT STORIES INCLUDING LEARNING QUESTION AND VOCABULARY TRANSLATION SPANISH SHORT STORIES FOR INTERMEDIATE LEVEL LEARNERS WITH ENGLISH PARALLEL TEXT




Varieties of Questions in English Conversation


Book Description

This book examines relations which hold between morphosyntactic form and communicative function in discourse by examining form-function correlations of noninterrogative questions in ordinary English conversation. So-called nontypical declarative and nonclausal questions are identified functionally. The role morphosyntax plays in the production and interpretation of these forms as doing questioning is then considered. Speakers are shown to use specific patterns of morphosyntactic marking to enable recipients to interpret noninterrogatives as functional questions. Explanations for morphosyntactic patterns found in the data are stated in terms of discourse use.




Conversational Storytelling in Spanish-English Bilingual Couples


Book Description

For more than three decades, the percentage of people who married someone of a different race, ethnicity, culture, or linguistic background has been on the rise in the United States, but the communication practices of such couples have remained understudied. Combining bilingualism, gender studies, and conversation analysis, this book explores and describes the storytelling practices and language choices of several married heterosexual Spanish-English bilingual couples, all residing in Texas but each from different geographic and cultural backgrounds. Based on more than 900 minutes of conversations and interviews, the book offers a data-driven analysis of the ways in which language choices and gender performance shape the stories, conversations, and identities of bilingual couples, which in turn shape the social order of bilingual communities. Using a combination of methodologies to investigate how couples launch, tell, and respond to each other's stories, the book identifies seven main factors that the couples see as primary determinants of their choice of English and Spanish during couple communication. The use of conversation analysis highlights the couples' own practices and perceptions of their language choices, demonstrating how the private language decisions of bilingual couples enable them to negotiate a place in the larger culture, shape the future of bilingualism, and establish a couple identity through shared linguistic and cultural habits.




Using English from Conversation to Canon


Book Description

In this book, writers from a range of academic disciplines examine a wide variety of text and discourse: from everyday conversation to the literary canon.




The Nonverbal Shift in Early Modern English Conversation


Book Description

This is the first historical investigation on the nonverbal component of conversation. In the courtly society of 16th and 17th century England, it is argued that a drift appeared toward an increased use of prosodic means of expression at the expense of gestural means. Direct evidence is provided by courtesy books and personal documents of the time, indirect evidence by developments in the English lexicon. The rationale of the argument is cognitively grounded; given the integral role of gestures in thinking-for-speaking, it rests on an isomorphism between gestural and prosodic behavior that is established semiotically and elaborated by insights from neurocognitive frequency theory and task dynamics. The proposal is rounded off by an illustration from present-day conversational data and the proof of its adaptability to current theories of language change. The cross-disciplinary approach addresses all those interested in (historical) pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, cultural semantics, semiotics, or language change.




Epistemic Stance in English Conversation


Book Description

This book is the first corpus-based description of epistemic stance in conversational American English. It argues for epistemic stance as a pragmatic rather than semantic notion: showing commitment to the status of information is an emergent interactive activity, rooted in the interaction between conversational co-participants. The first major part of the book establishes the highly regular and routinized nature of such stance marking in the data. The second part offers a micro-analysis of I think, the prototypical stance marker, in its sequential and activity contexts. Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis and paying serious attention to the manifold prosodic cues attendant in the speakers' utterances, the study offers novel situated interpretations of I think. The author also argues for intonation units as a unit of social interaction and makes observations about the grammaticization patterns of the most frequent epistemic markers, notably the status of I think as a discourse marker.