The Deletist

After years of talking about learning Spanish, and two failed attempts at teaching myself with an app, I finally registered for Spanish 101 this semester at a nearby college.  In the first class I was pleasantly surprised to see the teacher writing on a Smartboard, which was used later in the class to play videos and project course content.

The class is taught using a variety of methods in different formats.  We take our quizzes on tablets, provided to us by the college if we don’t have our own.  The audio learning, something critical when learning a foreign language, is vastly improved from my childhood experiences.  In elementary school I distinctly remember straining to hear a gravely, scratchy sounding tape from a cassette player in the front of the room.  During our last quiz we could listen with our headphones to the audio portion at any time.

I’m almost halfway done with the course and I’m still trying to assess if I’m learning better with the new methods, or if I’m only learning how to become more dependent on them.  For example, during the last quiz we had to fill in the right form of the verb “to be” based on the sentence.  I used to have to memorize that kind of stuff, mostly through flashcards and writing it down repeatedly.  However, on the quiz, I was often offered dropdown menus of possible answers.  This meant instead of memorizing it, I only had to remember how to recognize it.

For our homework assignments, we log in to Supersite, a learning centre included with the textbook.  In addition to the textbook, the Supersite offers video tutorials and practice sets for writing, listening, and speaking.  I often do the practice sets from the Supersite, but I’m never sure how much it improves my learning.  On the one hand, as mentioned above, it provides me with options for an answer instead of requiring me to have them completely memorized.  But on the other hand, the answers are graded immediately with the errors highlighted.  I find the instant feedback really helpful.

Overall I’m enjoying the experience of learning Spanish through so many different methods.  Even with all the technological advancements, the best part of the experience for me is having a teacher who is a native speaker.  The kind of thing that is sometimes missing from the software.

I can’t help but notice how common it is to use emoji (maybe even instead of punctuation, gasp) to express emotions, along with a whole host of other things.  The Merriam Webster online dictionary defines emoji as:

“any of various small images, symbols, or icons used in text fields in electronic communication (as in text messages, e-mail, and social media) to express the emotional attitude of the writer, convey information succinctly, communicate a message playfully without using words, etc.”

I remember first using emoji in the early 2000’s at a temp job.  My co-worker and I had downloaded something called a “hotbar” which allowed us to put fun little faces into our emails.  The IT department shut it down when they discovered it interfered with a key reporting program.  However, I was hooked on the funny little faces expressing angst, humor, or my favorite, the one repeatedly spewing a green glob of vomit.  Perfect for the office.

Over the years, options have grown becoming more nuanced and detailed.  I often find it’s not so easy to tell the difference between similar, but yet totally different expressions. It’s a new language.  Apparently, I’m not the only one who is sometimes confused, check out this article “16 Emojis You’ve Been Using All Wrong.”

It never fails to impress me how accurately some people are able to convey emotions and expressions through one tiny emoji.  I’m fairly useless at this.  When I try to reply with emoji, I find myself scrolling through pages of options totally baffled at what emotion each face is trying to convey. Eventually I give up and put in something random thinking surely the person at the receiving end will know exactly what I meant by each non sequitir emoji.Here is the first page of many from my phone’s messaging app:

 

 

Some are obvious, but others elude me.  I underlined the 11 different faces smiling and laughing.  They can’t all be expressing humor.

Recently I took a Body Language Quiz that aimed to assess how well I read other people.  Based on my inadequacies with interpreting emoji, I figured my score would be in the lower range.  Much to my surprise I scored a 15/20.  Take the quiz here.

 

I’ve now added an emojidictionary and emojipedia to my collection of links to help me with translations.