Mathieu Allard's blog

Joelle and I going to see Cirque du Soleil Saltimbanco today. This show is advertising some pretty incredible stuff, including people flying 30 feet in the air to land on their feet. The show came highly recommended by my brother Dominic. The show looks to be a metaphor for modern ubran life. The Cirque offers the opportunity to preview some of the show's music.

I started studying Spanish when I started learning back in December 2006, back when I got married in Cuba. I found myself fascinated with this language that was so close to French, yet wasn't French at all. French is my first language which was a real gift from my parents and my minority French speaking community. Growing up in Winnipeg, English is learnt more easily growing up here as it is the most spoken language. Learning is very different as I am learning as an adult. The adult mind is harder to train with languages as is the mind of a child.

I wanted to share the ressources and strategies that I have found useful in learning Spanish. The bulk of the ressources what I have used is media that interested me. This media includes books, movies with Spanish audio and subtitles, online radio, online news clips, online dictionnaries and other. Immersion is my primary strategy, though I did take a couple of weeks of classes in Guatemala to give me a bit of a formal base. Individual classes were ideal as I already had a base in the langugage and my teachers were able to adapt to my needs. I also used recordings where words are given to you in a language that you understand and repeated in the lanugage that you are learning, these I was able to find in Airports and able to borrow at the Winnipeg Public Library. The best practise of course is to speak it with a native speaker.

I try and expose myself to the language as much as possible. Some of the strategies that have worked for me have included listening to Spanish recordings in the car and listening to Spanish recordings when I have a spare moment on my portable audio player while walking the dogs or while doing household chores. I have also found that reading out loud is good to practise pronunciation.

There are many ressources that I have used online to learn Spanish, including:

News: bbcmundo.com, http://ca.news.yahoo.com/, http://www.cnn.com/video/#/spanish, http://news.google.es/
Potcasts: spanishpodcast.org
Dictionnary: wordreference.com

Found a good picture of our first family dog. Her name when she came from the breeders was Crystal. She was then name Réglisse by the family but her name eventually changed to Arf as we thought that was a more interesting name. I realise that I've almost always had a dog at home. Please click for a bigger picture. Arf was a Cocker Spaniel Poodle Cross.

I was going through some old pictures. Please click on picture for bigger image.


On the left is my great grand father Theobald Hebert and on the right my late grand father Georges Hebert. My great grand father was Alderman for the City of St. Boniface and my grandfather eventually became head of the then Research Department of the City of Winnipeg. George started his career as a secretary for City Transit in Winnipeg and working his way up.

Just found out today... Due date looks to be some time in January. Joelle and I are very excited! Joelle's horoscope today read:
Aquarius: Good news, at last! It's been nothing but bad news lately, but that tide is about to turn..
We have to wait 10 weeks before we can see if it's a boy or a girl.