The weather in Spain is usually nice and pleasant, but in autumn or winter rain is more frequent in the region. If you are a student of Intensive Spanish in a group in Madrid, you can take advantage of the rainy days to learn more about the different aspects of the course: grammar, vocabulary, oral comprehension, and you can even practice your pronunciation in front of the mirror or record yourself.
What you will need for this journey: a highlighter, stationery and your book of class. Buying some sticky notes is also a good idea, to write on them key words or concepts you need to remember. If you feel the analogic way is too vintage for you, and you prefer having technology as an ally, you can download an app with memory cards where you can create your own memory game to learn Spanish vocabulary.
What to do on rainy days?
If it’s too cold to go outside, you can start by revising your notes and marking the parts that you find more difficult or challenging. Remember that it is normal to have doubts during a learning process, and for your teacher is better to have a list of all your queries together, to assess what kind of practice you need to improve.
Once you have freshened up last weeks’ contents, you can move to a specific Writing Practice: writing a formal letter; a work e-mail; a Cover letter; a piece of news, and even a short poem are all good practices to create mock writing pieces you could find in the real world.
Then, you can exercise your Hearing: you can move from the less complex (listening to a song a couple of times and trying to sing along with karaoke lyrics) to the more challenging exercises (hearing people with different accents, from all parts of Spain and Latin America).
To continue, you will need to give some attention to your Reading competence: to do this, select a local newspaper and pick a section of your interest (Sports, Police incidents, Horoscope, or Celebrities gossip). Print or create a Word document where to copy and paste that piece of news and read there times: one to get the general meaning, another one to understand the specific idea behind each paragraph, and a third one to detain in every word you don’t know, and look it up in the dictionary. If you wish, you can even create a small personal dictionary in which to write alphabetically all the new words you are learning in Academia Contacto.
