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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4757 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 17 of 83 29 September 2014 at 5:22am | IP Logged |
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I finished Unit 8. It was too easy for seven repeats. I decided to do only 6 repeats for Unit 9. Of course after deciding this, I tried Unit 9 and found it very hard. I have a version of FSI split into 10 minute files. I decided to do some massed practice on this lesson repeating parts of the lesson 3 times one day and then three times the next day. This massed practice on drills that were just too fast for me cracked them pretty fast.
Only doing each Unit six times make the whole schedule for completing the course faster. Concentrating on one little section of the course at a time can make it easier, but it may reduce long term memory due to the whole massed practice and overlearning versus distributed practice and longer term memory effect. Of course I don't care about remembering the exact words of a given drill, I care about learning Spanish. One thing I've noticed about the course is that there is a specific skill to doing different types of FSI drills, that is separate from general language ability. I think this is what really throws me about some of the drills. If you don't quiet understand how the drill works, what strategy you have to use to get from stimulus to response, you can't use the Spanish in your mind to answer the drill. Not a very profound insight, but it never occurred to me before. Response drill are usually pretty hard, I think mostly because they are different from all of the other drills. I think they would be easy with a teacher pointing at the things being refered to, whether it is este or ese would be transparent. I've become dissatisfied with my 10000 sentences deck. I think I had too many easy sentences in it. I added a bunch of harder sentences in, and I hope this will keep me happy, so far so good. By the way, when I started the 10000 sentences deck, my best guess/calculation of my passive vocabulary was about 4000-5000 words, now it is at about 7000-8000 words using the same methods. I do read better, but I don't quite seem to be able to pick up and read a random novel meant for adult Spanish speaking adults. Close, but not quite. I hope to be there by the end of the year. Many people over in the superchallenge have suggested that it takes somewhere between 5000 and 10000 pages read extensively to move one up into the C1-C2 range. I got up to about 2000 pages before I stopped counting, but I felt like the extensive reading was inefficient. If it is simply getting 9000 words into ones head, there are faster ways than reading 10000 pages. I had great success with great big brutal vocabulary lists, memorized with keywords, back when I was learning Samoan, but these word lists were all from material I was actually in the process of reading. I wonder if making a word list, not a vocabulary list, memorizing it both in the L1->L2 and L2->L1 direction, reading the passage three times, and then remembering the words with anki wouldn't be better than "just learning interesting sentences". 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4757 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 18 of 83 04 October 2014 at 6:12am | IP Logged |
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I just finished Unit 9. I didn't like it much. In glancing back at my notes from the first time through this Unit 18 months ago, I felt the same way about it. I started getting wanderlust at about this point the last time I tried FSI.
This time through, once again, I tried repeating small sections of the Unit until they were perfect, and I started to feel the same frustration and boredom that I felt the first time through. I went back to doing the whole Unit in one sweep, and, well, I pretty well aced it on the 7th time through. I'm not sure what was hard about this lesson, perhaps my bad habits. When doing FSI drills, sometimes I find myself in a strange position answering the drill at the same time I am stressing that I can't figure out the answer. I hear "No busco casa". I'm supposed to convert it to present perfect. Part of my brain starts to go "OK, is this an _IR or an _AR verb, OK, _AR, so that means it ends ADO. Now what was the person and number? What is the right form for HABER?" At this point I'm almost out of time for the drill and in the middle of my thinking, my voice says, "No he buscado casa." before I have time to finish thinking through how to do it. Maybe the one of the main benefits for me with FSI will be to shut up the voice in my head that wants to analyze sentences before I say them. I've done some major changes to my anki deck. I've always equated being able to read Spanish at an advanced level with being able to read Gabriel García Márquez. I LRed a couple of his books to the point where I could understand them pretty well, but that was only temporary. In general, I understand about 85-90% of the words in his books, which is too little for enjoyable comprehension. It occurred to me that if I really want to read García Márquez, I should put his books into my anki deck. I've put a bunch of hard sentences from his books into my deck, and it has made my progress grind to a halt, but in a good way. The sentences all have at least one new word, and some have up to three. Some of them are long. All of them are hard, but after a few passes they start to get easier. It's hard, but it feels like I'm learning a lot. Some people warned me to stay away from Gabo until I get much better at reading intermediate material like Harry Potter. His books are full of vocabulary that native speakers have to look up. Much of his vocabulary is in words that appear once in his books, and then disappear. With anki, these words and sentences reappear until they stick. I suppose it is possible that learning a few thousand hard sentences from Gabo that are full of low frequency literary Spanish and Colombiaisms may not help me read other things. I doubt it however. I bet learning the sentences/words in Cien Años de soledad will have more of a positive effect on my Spanish that learning the sentences/words in Harry Potter. Especially if I don't care if I can read Harry Potter. I start Unit 10 tomorrow. I'm going to try to be patient and repeat the lesson until it sinks in. I suspect that FSI is going to explode in usefullness as I add in some new verb tenses and the like. I can't wait to get through FSI to the end. But that is 45 weeks off. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4757 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 19 of 83 06 October 2014 at 3:16pm | IP Logged |
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Unit 10 started out bad. I bombed out repeatedly the first time through. Big thoughts of failure and unworthiness filled my head...
The second time through, it was pretty easy. The third time through, I made few mistakes. I don't know what was wrong with me the first time through. I'm still enjoying my harder anki cards. Maintaining the right level of strain is important to making the 10000 sentences work. Too easy, it's boring, too hard, it's boring. I seem to have learned several thousand words in passive vocabulary this year, but I suspect that there are several reasons for this. First, I'm a lot better at recognizing cognates, even pretty distant ones, than I used to be. When a word appears to be a cognate, it usually is. I also am better at recognizing different forms of the same word. Many words have many variations that are closely related in meaning. I also probably just learned some new words. Edited by sfuqua on 06 October 2014 at 3:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4757 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 20 of 83 13 October 2014 at 5:50am | IP Logged |
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I finished Unit 10 and started Unit 11. Unit 10 was pretty easy after the first time through, although there were a few items that I kept fouling up. Unit 11 seems pretty easy. I've been having trouble with some of the translation drills. There is more than one way to translate a given sentence in English, and I have a tendency to do it differently than the answer they are expecting here. I've got to learn the way they want it in this lesson.
I'm getting better at just trying to spit out the sentences during drills, instead of falling into paralysis by analysis. I haven't noticed a huge improvement in my spoken Spanish yet, except when I'm using a structure that I've already covered. It is unsurprising that I'm not improving a lot yet, since I'm only 20% of the way through the course, and I haven't drilled my big weaknesses yet. I guess I sort of hoped that my FSI drilling would transfer into other parts of the grammar, just by teaching me to be faster, but it looks like I'm going to need to complete more of the course to get a big impact. This is not surprising, I guess, but I still keep hoping for the mythical magical breakthrough :) My SRS work has been aimed simply getting so I can read each sentence aloud, know what each word means, and know the overall meaning of the sentence. I've figured out that I do much better on the cards if I read each sentence aloud two times before I decide whether I've failed the card or not. Often the meaning of the sentence will fall into place on the second reading. I feel steady progression in my ability to read from this work. While the format is very different, it reminds me of the effect of the passive wave in Assimil -- a steadily increasing corpus of sentences that were incomprehensible, but now are easy to read and understand. I've been adding 20 cards a day recently; all the reading aloud slows down the process of reviewing cards. Using the old measure of 250 words a page to measure pages of a book, it takes about 17 cards to make a page. So by handling cards this way, I'm going to be trying to add a little over a page of hard sentences from Gabriel Garcia Marquez into my memory. This month I've been reviewing about 170 cards a day, which is the equivalent of about 10 pages read aloud. Reading each card two times takes a while. My anki settings are 20 new cards a day, 9999 max reviews (in other words finish the review even if you miss a day), and new cards after old cards (don't move ahead until the reviews are done). I've only missed a couple of days this year. I think I'm missing something with this current plan. FSI includes a bit of English in some drills. My anki cards have English on the back side. Anyway, I never use Spanish enough to get into a "flow" state. If I LR, read aloud, or shadow for an hour, my mind shifts gears enough that if someone speaks to in English right after that, I have to stop myself from answering in Spanish. I've been trying to listen to Spanish all the time I'm alone in the car, about 20 minutes a day, but it's not enough. I'm not sure where to add in another activity, I only have so much time. Maybe I can add in a few more minutes of listening while falling asleep. By the way, I recently switched podcasts, from VOA Buenos dias, America to Caracol's Noticieros del Mediodia. It's a little harder, not so much because of language, as because of my unfamiliarity with current events in Colombia. It's not always background knowledge however, that messes me up. I did an experiment this weekend; I listened to the same podcast, Friday's news, 3 times. By the third time, I could follow it pretty close to perfectly. Edited by sfuqua on 13 October 2014 at 5:51am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7197 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 21 of 83 13 October 2014 at 9:50am | IP Logged |
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It sounds like you're doing great.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4757 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 22 of 83 13 October 2014 at 11:35pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks Luke.
I'm trying to be patient and just keep grinding away until FSI is done. I still have a burning hunger to learn Spanish and get less clumsy in speaking it. I think I'm going to play around some on lang8 and see if I can get some good Shekhtman islands corrected so I can memorize them to help my fluency. I did some of these before, but I never followed through and completed the 10 to 20 of them you need to have to have a big effect on fluency... I'm still looking for the big breakthrough, but I think the "islands" might actually have that effect, not to actually improve my Spanish, but to make it seem like it's better. I can do this while I continue my FSI/SRS grind... FSI really isn't that bad, it just takes time and work to be effective. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4757 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 23 of 83 20 October 2014 at 5:33am | IP Logged |
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Unit 11 down, Unit 12 started.
After 2 times through unit 12, I still find it a mess. I don't get the point of what the main focus of this lesson is. I get that there is a big section on intonation; OK I guess, but not terribly useful without a native speaker to try them out on. I know that there was a section on verbs after phrase relators. I find the recordings just blurry enough that I have trouble understanding them. I may try to do it twice tomorrow... Despite my whine about Unit 12, it isn't really that hard. I need to concentrate and try again. I've been posting to lang-8, trying to build up a bunch of texts to use as "islands". It seems to be going smoothly. The number of "dumb" errors I make in writing is humbling. I make mistakes on things that I know very well. I think it will be a good thing to keep up while doing FSI. Until I hit Unit 12, I had been planning to announce that I feel like the whole FSI and SRS process I've been doing it starting to snowball. I do feel that I am stronger in speaking and reading. I'm starting to see what FSI will do and what it will not do. García-Márquez is starting to wear me down as the harder, longer reviews start to pile up. I think it is good for me, though. There are new words in almost every sentence. I tried reading one of GGM's nonfiction titles, with the idea that it might be easier than his novels. I was sort of shocked; I had a pretty complete understanding without getting out the dictionary. Something is working. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4757 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 24 of 83 24 October 2014 at 6:24pm | IP Logged |
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Learning is a funny thing. The first 2 times through Unit 12, it was terrible. The third time I hardly missed a thing. These last few times, I'm just trying to straighten out the few items that don't seem to flow out of my mouth fast enough fit in the space before the next item. Some of the structures here seem odd to me, and are things I would never say. This probably means I'm learning something.
Unit 13 is the famous sexist party where the guy is thinking about dumping the "gordita." I can't wait. I'm looking forward to the lessons where they will go over the past tenses. I've found from lang-8, that even if I can accurately produce the form of the tenses, I don't use them very well. I stopped adding hard sentences from Garcia-Marquez in anki, and I'm doing some sentences from articles from the newspaper. I'm still reviewing the hard sentences I got from his books. I'm in the process of a huge breakthrough in reading comprehension. I believe that I may have finally reached the point where I have enough vocabulary to read extensively without too much pain. My reading still tends to be "semantic processing." I don't think that I do too much processing of tenses, agreement, and other (often redundant) features of the language. I can get lost if there is an odd connection construction of the sentence. I'm not sure why I have such a feeling of breakthrough; I think what seems to be a big change is just when you notice the steady small changes that have been building up each day... Edited by sfuqua on 24 October 2014 at 6:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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