What Good Is Textbook Spanish in Real Life?
What Good Is Textbook Spanish in Real Life? Wednesday June 30, 2010#spacer{clear:left}#abc #sidebar{margin-top:1.5em}zSB(3,3) One of those myths about foreign-language study I have heard more than once is that it does little good to spend much time in formal study of another language because the textbook version of the language isn’t what native speakers use in real life anyway. I’ve never bought the argument, at least when it comes to Spanish. While understanding some of the colloquialisms and regionalisms of everyday Spanish takes practice, “textbook Spanish” is always understood if pronounced well, I have found, and usually doesn’t sound artificial. A native Spanish speaker from Bogotá, Colombia, who regularly participates in our forum for Spanish learners and goes according to the screen name SagittaDei pointed out recently that while some grammatical aspects of Spanish may be taught but seldom used (such as the vosotros forms in Latin
