In early 2012, I walked 1700km across Spain on the widely publicised Camino de Santiago with a backpack. Armed with a Spanish phrase book and a ukulele, I set out to explore this wonderful country and it’s people.
The Spaniards are gentle souls and as much as I would have loved to exchange stories, the scope of my Spanish was limited to ordering beverages and food and asking for directions.
The Spanish book I carried to study the language was heavily regimented and at times I found it quite difficult to be inspired. That’s when I thought to myself “How can you make learning a new language more fun?”
With each step across Spain, I became more convinced that learning a language through telling jokes would be a fun and effective method. Everyone knows a joke or two off the top of their head. They are humorous and that’s the reason why we remember them, and when shared they bring joy to others. This idea would eventually precipitate into this joke book.
Jokes utilise colloquial language which is more helpful when travelling abroad because how we speak is different from what we write.
Once the joke is learnt in Spanish, certain adjectives or nouns can be interchanged to build-up one’s vocabulary. For example, in joke Number 4, instead of the duck getting it’s beak nailed to the bar, we can change it to the elephant getting it’s trunk nailed to the bar. Thus, I have offered a few suggestions and further learning for some of the jokes- these are typed in bold.
I hope you all find this book useful in your endeavour to learn and improve on your Spanish and have as much fun reading it as I have had compiling it.
Ermera
The Spaniards are gentle souls and as much as I would have loved to exchange stories, the scope of my Spanish was limited to ordering beverages and food and asking for directions.
The Spanish book I carried to study the language was heavily regimented and at times I found it quite difficult to be inspired. That’s when I thought to myself “How can you make learning a new language more fun?”
With each step across Spain, I became more convinced that learning a language through telling jokes would be a fun and effective method. Everyone knows a joke or two off the top of their head. They are humorous and that’s the reason why we remember them, and when shared they bring joy to others. This idea would eventually precipitate into this joke book.
Jokes utilise colloquial language which is more helpful when travelling abroad because how we speak is different from what we write.
Once the joke is learnt in Spanish, certain adjectives or nouns can be interchanged to build-up one’s vocabulary. For example, in joke Number 4, instead of the duck getting it’s beak nailed to the bar, we can change it to the elephant getting it’s trunk nailed to the bar. Thus, I have offered a few suggestions and further learning for some of the jokes- these are typed in bold.
I hope you all find this book useful in your endeavour to learn and improve on your Spanish and have as much fun reading it as I have had compiling it.
Ermera
