Learn Medical Spanish on CD

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fozzy40

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Can anyone make suggestions on a good medical spanish series on CD? Also, would it be better to learn conversational spanish before incorporating medical spanish? Thank you.
 
pimsleur (sp?). check ebay for good prices. these are gold.
 
pimsleur (sp?). check ebay for good prices. these are gold.

God forbid all those criminals learn to speak the language of the country their invading and degrading.
 
I appreciate your input Durak. I'll definitely check it out.

fozzy40
 
God forbid all those criminals learn to speak the language of the country their invading and degrading.

what a narrowminded thing to say - i hope you go to med school in one of the few places in the country without a massive influx of immigrants. first off, there are plenty of legal immigrants who never learn english because they work, play, and pray within their own communities. english is a hard, illogical language. second, if you don't want to learn spanish, don't, but don't be rude when your colleagues try to do so - thereby making themselves more marketable to residency programs and/or employers. if you don't wanna deal with non-english speaking patients pick path or diagnostic radiology - otherwise accept that it's a part of medicine in 2006 and deal with it by either learning some spanish or relying exclusively on translators. either way, i don't see how you comment helps the original poster.

as to the original question, i don't think it matters when you start to incorporate medical stuff, since that's gonna be mostly nouns. learning the words is just memorization like anything else - learning grammar structure and then being able to 'think' fast enough to understand a patient's answer are the parts i find most challenging. seriously, try watching the news on the spanish channel once you get down some of the basics - just hearing it can help more than you'd think.
 
I've heard good things about Rosetta Stone...been meaning to try the Spanish courses myself.

yeah, I see these things being sold in airports all the time and I always wondered about them. Learning Spanish has been on my list of things to do since H.S. when I stupidly took French (of course, it helped during travels to Montreal, Q.C. and France, but that's about it).🙁
 
yeah, I see these things being sold in airports all the time and I always wondered about them. Learning Spanish has been on my list of things to do since H.S. when I stupidly took French (of course, it helped during travels to Montreal, Q.C. and France, but that's about it).🙁

I was a French taker too. Rosetta Stone is great and coupled with initiating speech with my Spanish-speaking colleagues (they still laugh at me), I have been able to make some headway with my Spanish-speaking patients in terms of doing a history and physical. I still use the translator phone for obtaining informed consent.

I am thinking that a three week trip to Barcelona could really get my Spanish skills up to par. I might be able to get my department chair to sign off on it. Umm...?😀
 
Durak,

What type of format are the Pimsleur tapes?

fozzy40
 
I have the Rosetta Stone Spanish CD's. They're pretty good with pictures, videos, etc. It's very interactive.

I'm planning a 4-week trip to Buenos Aires to study spanish abroad. 2 weeks of it as an elective and the other 2 weeks as vacation time. God I love my residency when I can get elective credit for a Spanish course! 🙂
 
I have heard good things about the Rosetta Stone series. I am not sure if I have enough time to devote 2hrs a night per lesson. I was thinking maybe an hour or so. Is it possible to do Rosetta stone this way?

fozzy40
 
I've got the Rosetta Stone CD program. I haven't gotten that far into it, but its broken up into short lesson blocks. You could do 5 or 15 minutes a night if you wanted to. I don't know what its like as you get more advanced.
 
I also love the Pimsleur series. They are audio only and each lesson is about 30 minutes. The recommend only doing one lesson/day, but you can repeat that lesson if you want to solidify things before moving on. Definitely my first choice in Spanish CDs. I'm at an intermediate level, so I'm currently using the Spanish II series and it's great.
 
There is no "easy way" to learn a language.

Pimsleur and RS are good introductions. But quit dreaming. You wont be able to speak spanish or any other language based on that alone. Learning a language takes years of hard work and regular practice. Tapes and CD's are nice but you need to crack open some books and slowly work your way through. Novice, beginner, intermediate, advanced, fluent, proficient, perfect. It's a long process.

I don't say this to discourage. On the contrary, anyone can learn a language provided they do the work involved. Most people who give up on a language do so because of unrealistic expectations of how much work it should take. Learning a languate is never easy, but with patience and practice it's very doable.
 
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