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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5786 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 17 of 154 20 September 2012 at 11:19pm | IP Logged |
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I am a socialist and really wish you guys would please drop the subject now as it's
starting to get a bit upsetting having to read all this without replying. HermonMunster, I appreciate that it's your log, not a public thread and you can therefore write what you want, and I'll buzz off if you want; but I was actually rather enjoying this log until the last few posts (and even large parts of those posts) and would rather avoid the need to stop following it, if possible. It is a really nice log. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| HermonMunster Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4636 days ago 119 posts - 211 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 18 of 154 20 September 2012 at 11:52pm | IP Logged |
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You are right. I will leave economic policy out of it. That debate is for a different forum. I'm pretty passionate about it so it tends to creep into everything I do.
I really appreciate you saying something because I don't want to put off any language learners. My main 2 goals are to have a personal record of my progress and to give hope to people who will be starting their journey in the future. Some day, years from now, when people ask me how I learned Spanish I will be able to answer "day by day" and give them a link to the log. Not that my log will have to power to make or break a person's language persuits, but I imagine that over time I will have some pretty unique/helpful insights, or at the very least make them postpone quitting by one more day. Wouldn't want to push someone away with my political leanings. Thanks again Edited by HermonMunster on 20 September 2012 at 11:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 19 of 154 22 September 2012 at 12:59pm | IP Logged |
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Yes, randomreview always has very valuable input and seems to have tried almost every Spanish learning resource. He has offered me some great advice in my Spanish studies. I was certainly not trying to offend anyone, in fact, my conclusion has always been to simply avoid political discussions with people from other countries for this very reason.
Anyway, due to your interests, I simply must suggest to you that you check out the "new media" site at UFM.EDU. It is awesome for people who are interested in both Spanish and free market economics. http://newmedia.ufm.edu/gsm/index.php/New_Media_UFM There are some awesome courses, seminars and conferences available to watch at that site. The history of the University and its founder Manuel Ayau is extremely interesting. The collections link has great material. There you can watch a 12 hour video lecture series by Manuel Ayau himself on an overview of economics (proceso economico). The really cool thing is that they have a transcription of all the courses so you really can learn the language as you watch. You can also watch all 10 Milton Friedman "Free to Choose" videos in Spanish (libre para eligir) with transcripts. I also like the 30 minute public TV special Manuel Ayau produced called "Como mejorar el nivel de vida." There is some cool stuff there. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| HermonMunster Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4636 days ago 119 posts - 211 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 20 of 154 23 September 2012 at 8:04pm | IP Logged |
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Ohh wow. Thanks for that information. Nothing better than a 2 for 1 learning. I really think that's the key for someone who hasn't caught fire with learning a language and is more or less ho hum about the whole process. Combining something that you already like with the language is kind of "the teaspoon of sugar that helps the medicine go down."
Speaking of catching fire for language learning. I think that it has been long enough since the incidient to post about it... In an earlier post I mentioned how my motivation came from having a bloody nose in Durango,MX and not being able to find the right nasil spray in Walmart. Well, while I was there something else happened that really made me want to learn ASAP. My lesson learned from the incident is that if you have an opportunity to hang out with people in another country and a both a young person and middle aged person offer to take you out, go with the older person if you don't know the language. Ok, time for the story I, of course, chose to hang out with the young people. 1. beacuse he asked me first and 2. becuase I thought it would be more fun. So my coworker comes to pick me up from the hotel in a big ole Dodge Durango. I thought that it was a really nice car for a guy right out of college, in Mexico, but I figured, "there are people with money everywhere in the world. No big deal." We stop for a moment to pick up his girl friend and then right to the bar to meet up with their friends. At the first bar we are just having a good time. Everyone is asking me questions, trying to teach me some Spanish and just having an overall great time. We have a bunch of Michiladas (I think I murdered the spelling of that), which are beer with spices mixed in. It's a very good drink. (Aside: I found it very interesting that most of the folks I was hanging with do something to their beer, put spices in it, lime, salt, or something. I was the only one who was just drinking straight up beer, until I noticed them doctoring theirs up and started doing it too) All is well and we decide to go downtown on, I believe, constitution bld. Basically it's the main strip of downtown Durango. It very beautiful there and you really see the Spanish/Arabic influence on the architecture. We're just walking along,stopping to take pictures and enjoying ourselves on the way to a Maricahi bar. When we arrive the place is jumping. People are dancing, drinking, singing, the band is jamming and there's a bachelorette party that's raging in the front. We get a table and pick up where we left off, drinking, telling jokes, people watching. I think we all stayed about 2 hrs there before my ride's girlfriend started getting sleepy. So we tell everyone goodbye/see ya tomorrow and leave. This is when things get crazy. Being a colonial city, the streets of Durango and very narrow. I guess they couldn't forsee Dodge Durangos when making the roads a few hundred years ago :-) Now on top of the narrow roads, car are parked on both side of a street so that when you get to a corner, you really have to drive out into the street before you can see if any one is coming. To top if all off, there aren't stop signs on a lot of the side streets, I guess they figured you don't want to get in a crash so you'll drive slow. Unfortunately that's not the case. We were going alittle faster that I would have liked and we crashed into a lady in a old Volkswagen beetle. Basic momentum transfer lets you know who absorbed most of the impact. The beetle then crashed into a building. So there I am, in Mexico, I have no clue how far away from the hotel, in the backseat. Come to find out, the SUV we were in belonged to the girlfriend's brother. She is screaming at her boyfriend in Spanish, he is yelling something is Spanish, the equivalent to "I can't believe this," and the lady who we crashed into gets out her car crying and holding her arm. I was just sitting there in shock for a couple of seconds. Then i do a quick body inventory and knew I was ok. It seems like the two in the front were ok. The guy and his girlfriend get out to look at the damage and that's when his girlfriend really flips out and starts hitting him and screaming. About a minute of that happening and then the guy gets into the back seat with me. Now I start getting alittle worried thinking, "Why is this guy getting in back with me." That's when he told me something that I will never forget. In kind of broken English he told me, "Hermon, I am F$#%^-ed. This car... It might be stolen." "WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NO, THERE IS NO MIGHT BE!!!! IT IS OR IT ISN'T!!! WHICH IS IT!!!" "I don't know man. ohhhh i'm F@$%-ed" (in hindsight the way he was saying this is kind of funny because he said the profanity, then the -ed like as a seperate word. Too bad I wasn't in a laughing mood then.) Wew wew wew. I thought,"Awww here we go." The police show up. Unfortunately Durango has a fair amount of drug violence so it's not exactly officer friendly who shows up. Nope, it's a guy in uniform, ski mask, and an M16 machine gun. Now i'm thinking that this really can turn ugly. So the driver is still in the back seat with me kind of crying saying, "Aye Hermon I'm going to jail!! What should I do?" Being the oldest in the situation and the oly one not screaming at the time, I tell him to calm down, call his dad, and that this wasn't the end of the world. I had the quivalent of $75 US in my wallet and gave it all to him. He gets out of the car and begins to talk with the officer with his girlfriend. A minute or two go by and his girlfriend opens the door and in her most serious voice says, "You need to get out of here NOW!" "Ohh sh*t", I had been keeping my cool the whole time but this is what really made the blood get flowing. I open the door slowly and get out. Unbelievably, there was a cabby right on the corner. He told me that he's basically an ambulance/police chaser. I hopped in the cab, told him the name of my hotel and we zoomed off. When I arrived at the hotel, after leaving a huge tip from my emerency stash in my other pocket, everything that just happened finally sunnk in and I got extremely scared. I couldn't even sleep that night between replaying everything in my head and wondering if the guy was in jail and for how long he'd be in there. The next day I get a slow start at breakfast and for obvious reasons wasn't to talkative with my other coworkers who were staying in the hotel with me. When I arrived in the offfice I went straight to the guy's seat and to my surpise he was sitting there looking at drawings. I was soo relieved. He was busy and so was I most of the day so we didn't get a change to talk until after lunch. His first question was, "did you tell anyone?" I replied, "About what?" Then I winked at him. He ended up spending a few hours in jail and then lady we hit didn't want to press charges, just get her car fixed. Ohh yea, all this happened on my second night there and I had 8 more to go. If that didn't inspire me to learn Spanish, I don't know what would have. Edited by HermonMunster on 23 September 2012 at 8:24pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 21 of 154 24 September 2012 at 2:24am | IP Logged |
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That is a hilarious story. It sounds like something I would have gotten myself into at one point in my life. It is funny how I can relate to some of your experiences. One of my turning points in deciding to learn Spanish was when I was in a big US city on a trip and I needed directions when I was in the subway and nobody could speak English, only Spanish. That was what finally kicked me and made me actually start studying Spanish.
I also am motivated by reading/doing things in Spanish that I would do in English... like read certain books or watch online classes. When I was staying in Santo Domingo I stayed with a 20 year old VERY nice guy... but he was a CRAZY driver. He too drove an SUV. We would drive through these crowded neighborhoods where there were tons of "four way stop" intersections and the buildings were so close to the intersections you could not see the other roads unless you were right at the intersection... but he would never stop... he would just lay on the horn about 10 yards before the intersection and hope nobody was coming the other way... and if there was someone coming they would, hopefully, hear his horn and get out of the way. The problem is that everyone else in in this neighborhood seemed to do the same thing. I can only imagine what would have happened if there was an old lady in a VW coming at us! Luckily we never crashed. Anyway, thanks for sharing your story. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| HermonMunster Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4636 days ago 119 posts - 211 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 22 of 154 26 September 2012 at 9:37pm | IP Logged |
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James 29,
That was a great story. I had a similar experience while I was in Guyamas, MX. I figured it would be best to just ride with my eyes closed, so the last few moments of my life could be peaceful. I'm currently on lesson 36 of platiquemos. I find that lessons 34-36 are pretty easy. I just listen to them 4-6x and then go through the lesson once, adding any new vocab to my anki. I like that the readings are incorporated at the end. It's nice that the new vocab is in some sort of context. When I hear of people buying 10,000 Spanish words and just plowing through them it doesn't really make sense to me. Doesn't matter if you know all the correct words if you can't put them all together in a coherent sentence. That was one of my earliest motivations for learning. I had a bunch of instant messages going on with my Mexican co-workers. They were all using correct English words, but none of the sentences made any sense. "Moon cat apples saturday car screen no because for it's day shoe please." Well it wasn't that bad but you get the picture. (funny aside, my wife and I had the opportunity to go to Japan. We were staying with a family and asked the mother through her daughter, what did she know in English. She replied, "hello, goodbye, Michael Jackson, breakfast." We all about died laughing) I have 812 known words in my anki and plenty more that I know so well I didn't need to add them. Looks like I will accomplish my goal of finishing platiquemos by the end of november and I should have well over 1000 works in my anki. I was thinking about my progress today, and I think I know why I have been able to improve so quickly. 1. Because I want to. 2. Because I work w/ Spanish speaking people, at least remotely. Now I try to write all my emails in Spanish unless there are some non-speaking people on the distribution. I need to speak alot more but the good thing is that writting is kind of like speaking, at least it is to me. Every word I type is said in my head. Today I kind of surprised my self by cranking out the following two emails with relative ease. "Hello Everyone, There are more problems than what you found. I spoke with the engineer this morning and he told me that there could be more things wrong with the drawing. He is going to check with other engineers and if the probelms are too difficult to fix, he's going to write a deviation to make the other part number that was have made before and didn't have any problems with. I should have an answer today." "Thanks Elizabeth, We are going there to check the parts for 2013. Also this is the last time to check all the parts before we start to build all of the 2013 parts. Our contact will be Dagoberto. If there are any problems with the parts we will fix them this week. Below is my flight schedule. Josh is not going to start from the same place as me, but we will be on the same flight arriving and leaving Mexico. My rooms should be paid by the company. Josh will pay for his room." Weeeeeeeeee. The best part about it was that the admin forgot who I was. She just replied back to me in Spanish. So there you have it... I tricked her. I wanted to say, "This is Herm, the guy who couldn't say he had a bloody nose, or please don't shoot me officer 6 months ago." I am by no means fluent, make tons of conjugation/tense mistakes and have kind of halting speech, but I'm much better than before. I'm very excited to try out my new language skills. In Feburary I tried to go shopping to buy some clothes for my wife. It was so hard. I couldn't say, arms, legs, size, or anything. I just kind of had to point. Now I think I would be able to actually be able to take some advice from a sales person. Learning a language reminds me of Edgar Guest's poem, "It couldn't be done." One section I really like is, "So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin On his face. If he worried he hid it. He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn't be done, and he did it." Edited by HermonMunster on 26 September 2012 at 11:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| HermonMunster Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4636 days ago 119 posts - 211 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 23 of 154 03 October 2012 at 5:15pm | IP Logged |
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I’m still working my way through the readings and vocab of lessons 35-37. I’ve listened to lesson 37 twice and I’m hoping to get through lesson 39 by the end of the week.
Last night I had my Spanish/English exchange. It was the best one to date. We had almost a 50/50 split between native speakers and learners. It was great because I actually got to help some folks with their English. It doesn’t really feel right to always be taking from the non-natives that know Spanish and never being able to offer anything in return. Last night I was able to talk with 2 Mexican men, a lady from Venezuela, and a lady from Honduras. I was also paired with a an American whose Spanish is very novice level, but he knew how the play the game. If you can’t say anything, just be quiet and try to follow what’s being said. It was good for me because I was able to act as his translator. They say that you know that you know something when you’re able to teach it. The lady was surprised when I told her in Spanish, “he doesn’t know a thing that you’re saying.” He was just smiling and nodding while she was telling a long story. Lol Speaking people from different cultures makes me realize how fortunate I was to be born in the US. The US has some major problems, but as long as there is immigration, it has to be better than other places. I kind of put my foot in my mouth when talking to the lady from Honduras. She’s been here 12 years and her English is ok, but she still has the heavy accent and says the typical “es” infront of every work that starts with an “s”. Es-steak, Es-snake, es-special etc. I asked, “Why did you wait so long to begin putting serious effort into English?” “Because I didn’t have time, when I got here I was working 3 jobs.” :-( that shut me up. She wasn’t offended by my question or anything, but it made me think that I have to be more conscious that there could be good/difficult reasons why a person is where they are in their language studies. We did some drills with her so she could pronounce War, Word, and World differently. At the beginning they all were sounding the same. She would say the word and we would reply with what we heard. Everyone was a good sport and cheered for her when she got it right. I met the person I have been waiting for last night. There’s a guy from Mexico who works as a photographer. He does weddings and quinceraneras and is looking to expand his business outside of the Hispanic community. First, he feels that he needs to improve his English (he’s right). I finally have someone who is a native and would probably have as much hustle with learning English and I have with Spanish. He’s single so he won’t have too much trouble getting away on the regular to talk to me. I have about 2hrs free about every night because my wife is taking night classes. I really hope he contacts me and we can become language buddies. He probably knows alittle bit more English than I do Spanish, but not by much. He didn’t know the word for daughter or his/her. The Mexican guys were letting the Spanish flow full force and for the most part I was keeping up. I had to ask them to repeat several times but the conversation was flowing. I think there are 3 of us that will be our own little renegade meetup next week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| HermonMunster Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4636 days ago 119 posts - 211 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 24 of 154 08 October 2012 at 7:46pm | IP Logged |
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Short update:
Lessons 36-38 have been full of new vocabulary. I'm averaging about 85 new word per lesson and most of them are coming from the reading at the end of the section. This is making my anki reviews much more difficult. It's hard to learn 200+ words per week. Learning new words isn't the most fun thing in the world but I know it's necessary. If the program continues at this pace I should be at 2500 known words by the time I finish. I've spoked with a few folks from this site and I have a pretty good idea on how I'll continue after plati. I've kept a list of all the things that I don't quite understand + need to drill. I'll knock those out first then on to Assimil Advanced. I listened to a sample and I could understand just about everything. I really like the accents and the pace. After that I will move on to working the notesinslowspanish website. (a while back i signed up for a month and spent the whole month archiving). This should keep me busy until about May of 2013. Hopefully I will have an in-person language partner soon and I will focus on reading more. I'm still having fun and dreaming about the day when I can say whatever I want with ease. Ohh yea, I was getting a new tire and there was a Mexican convenience store next door. While I waited a wandered over and grabbed some chips. While I waited in line behind one lady her young daughters were running around, dancing, and just being kids. At one point, one of the girls ran behind me and was making faces and just acting silly. I really wanted to say, "I know what you're saying." But instead I found it more fun just to listen. I tried to think of something witty to say to the cashier and show off my Spanish, but I drew a blank. I didn't even know how to say chips. Soon I will be able to have some fun with folks that don't know I can speak/understand. After thought: If anyone is reading this in the future, I think you are doing a great disservice to yourself if you only do the audio of platiquemos. There's great information on culture, grammar, and spelling in the readings. Also tons of vocab words that have context for easier learning. I'm kind of drowning in vocab now because I only try to learn 30 words per day but the lessons and trying to live my life in Spanish are yielding ~50 words/day in addition to normal reviews. I know it's easy to listen to the lessons in the car, but if you really want to learn, it's important to do the full program. It's really the low hanging fruit on the language tree. Edited by HermonMunster on 10 October 2012 at 5:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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