I have just started a new job where a substantial chunk of the patients I see don’t speak any English. Right now I am using nurses to interpret or the phone interpreter service, but that is very cumbersome and time-consuming. I know a very, very little Spanish, and I would like to learn, but my priority is learning medical terms. Also, being an intern, I am fairly short on time.
Any tips/resources that you would recommend for learning medical Spanish?
Make damn sure you know what you are saying before you say it.
Also, to clarify, I don’t think resources that just list many phrases are what I am looking for. Rather, I would prefer an approach that teaches Spanish properly (including grammar), but with a medical bent. I have tried Pimsleur, and it seems like a great approach, but the issue is that I don’t really need to say, “did you enjoy the movie?” or “what’s your favorite food” very often. So, the perfect solution would be something like Pimsleur or Rosetta stone, but where the vocabulary is medically-oriented.
If you know medical terminology in english, you’re half way there. Learn some stock phrases and swap in verbs as needed.
Saying things in rehearsed form is much easier than understanding what they say back- be prepared to explain that you ‘talk above your level’
Check out classes at your local colleges; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a packaged “medical [insert-language]” course that didn’t assume the students would be at least at the lower end of intermediate.
Start learning general Spanish; that will teach you the structure of the language, and the “medical” part is vocabulary. Many Spanish medical terms are similar to their Greco-latin English equivalents, which as aNewLeaf pointed out can come handy, but understanding podólogo won’t help you if you don’t understand whether they visited one or are looking for one. And don’t diss “what is your favorite food?” - I really wish more doctors and dieticians would ask things like that before handing Generic Diet Number 11 to their patients!
There are lots of phrase books, dictionaries, and audio courses out there – Amazon.com searches on both “medical Spanish” and “health care Spanish” threw thousands of hits.
You could check a few candidates out of a library for a test drive before settling on one to buy. If you buy a phrase book – tote it around with you, so that the patients can also look up stuff in it, too.
Community colleges sometimes have specialist medical Spanish language courses, sometimes requiring minimal proficiency in Spanish. Your own hospital may have some such classes available.
There are many smartphone and tablet applications for language translation out there, plus dedicated translation devices.
Ask more senior staff what they have done in dealing with this.
Good points. Unlike English, which is a Germanic language from the Barbarians of the North with a heavy vocabulary influence from Latin (both directly and via French), Spanish is derived from Latin with influences from Arabic. In essence, Spanish (and also French, Italian, and Portuguese) is Latin in a similar sense to the relationship between Modern Greek as spoken on the street today in Athens and the Ancient Greek of the classical Mediterranean world.
If you know basic Spanish grammar and have a good grasp of scientific and medical Latin, you’re already halfway there, if not more. Say you want to tell a Mexican patient to apply hydrogen peroxide to a wound but you don’t know the Spanish word for that substance. Well, these are Greco-Latin terms, and you could try to apply basic Spanish word order and phonology to guess that it would translate as “peroxido de hydrogeno”, “peroxido hidrogeno”, “peroxida de la hyderogeno”, or something like that. Google Translate claims the answer is “peróxido de hidrógeno”. In realty, any of those answers might be good enough, as much as if someone without a fluent command of English told you to use “the perroxide of the hydrogene”.
I seem to recall a SF book that involved an American astronaut who ended up in some sort of time-travel scenario and had to work together with a soldier from Ancient Rome. The astronaut used his knowledge of Spanish and Classical Latin to figure out how to communicate and adapt to the soldier’s dialect, which was somewhere in between the high literary language of Caesar and Cicero on the one hand and modern Spanish on the other.
Oh, and be especially damn sure if you are talking about someone’s mother. Saying “tu madre” might get you stabbed.
Just as a starter, you can go to Barnes and Noble. They sell a Spanish Medical Conversation pamphlet - it’s a plastic fold-up pamphlet that translates a bunch of common medical terms.
I have an app called “Medical Spanish” that has things organized according to medical history, ROS, physical exam, prescriptions (instructions, side effects, etc.). I actually don’t use it that much, but that’s just because if I need to say anything beyond what I can communicate with my really bad Spanish and pantomime, I’ll break out the translator phone. Also, I think that listening to the interpreter is a great way to learn a language, because then you hear how things are actually said/pronounced.
love
yams!!
Edited to clarify: I don’t use it that much, but it seems like a really nice app, and I keep it on my phone because if I was ever in a situation without translator phones, it could come in really handy. The downside of apps, of course, is that this one, at least, doesn’t translate the answers you get to your questions.