Viernes, mi día favorito

Question

Hello lovely people, it's Friday which means we get a new set of weekend workouts, literally my best part of the week.

Inma, I love the dictations, even though I'm not very good at them yet, however I have two general questions about them, and wondered if you could help.
1. Vocabulary - When I listen to lessons, even lessons A1, I encounter vocabulary that I don't know. When the dictacions are written, are you using this as an opportunity to expand our vocabulary, or are you writing within what you expect us to know? I don't mind which, I just wondered if my vocab is weak. I use it as a learning opportunity!

2. English translation - I believe that the dictations are the only place where we don't see an English translation of what was said / written. Is this intentional? As per my point above, I sometimes don't know the words even when they are written, and I use SpanishDict to translate. This has some disadvantages, for example in today's A1 exercise, Spanishdict translated "partes" meant as anywhere in your text, to "private parts", as in on a human :-)
Thanks, now back to work.

Answer

Hola Paul,first of all, we love hearing that you look forward to our weekend workouts! I will pass your comment to our dictation creator, Ana Matilla. The dictations are created by level, like the other exercises, and we try to stick to a range of words that suits that specific level, as well as verbal structures that are appropriate for that level, but at the same time, we also need to include other words that are related to that specific topic in the dictation, as we need to create a variety of topics to make it more interesting. This means that there will be unknown words for the student but this will also give you the opportunity to extend your vocabulary. This is why, when introducing a dictation, we offer the student to look some words up in advance saying: "Some vocabulary you may want to look up before or during this exercise: ..... "You may, as you were saying about the word "partes", find different definitions in the dictionary sometimes. I will speak to the team to see if we can do something about that. So, you are not expected to always know everything that is included in a dictation. That shouldn't put you off at all.The translations in dictations are not included because this is a "listening" exercise, and the skill we want the students to develop here is recognising words in Spanish when being said, not by seeing them written. If we included translations they would become translation exercises and that would defeat the purpose of the dictations. Saludos cordiales,
Inma

Answer

Thank you very much for your detailed reply, all is good now. And three more days to Friday