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Gary’s TAC 2014: Spanish, Italian, French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 138 19 December 2013 at 12:44am | IP Logged | ||
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End of my 2013 log - keeping up the chain!
And it’s time for my fourth TAC. I’m starting Spanish and continuing with Italian and French. As usual I'm starting a couple of weeks before the end of the year because I have a bit of time off work so it's an ideal opportunity for diving into new things. Every year so far I’ve completely overestimated what I thought I’d achieve, so this time round I’m trying to be a bit more realistic based on all that experience. And so, to be realistic… taking on a third language when I barely have enough time for two already is crazy. Even if it’s a similar one. But I’ve wanted to learn Spanish for years and I’ve decided that now is finally the time. I’ve no idea how the year’s going to turn out; I know it’s going to be a balancing act, and the time I allocate to each language is going to change a lot based on motivation and opportunity, so there’s not much point in making concrete goals. That said though, I’m keen to put a lot of time and effort into Spanish at the start in order to reach a basic conversational level, and I don’t think it should take too long. My main focus in all my languages is speaking and social usage. I also enjoy films and books, and being able to enjoy them is a great benefit, but all that is secondary. Spanish I’ve never formally studied it, but I live in a city full of Spanish speakers, so I’ve had a lot of Spanish friends over the years. Between that and my study of French and Italian, I’ve managed to pick up quite a decent passive knowledge: I can often understand conversations and simpler texts, and I can even say a few sentences. And finding people to speak Spanish with here is so easy, and they’re very friendly and helpful, so finding practice opportunities, my greatest difficulty in my other languages, shouldn’t be a problem! In the longer term, say a few years down the road, Spanish might well become my most advanced language. I expect that confusion with Italian will be an issue in early stages, but as my Spanish solidifies and I get more practice it should become less of a problem. I’ll be firmly leaning towards peninsular Spanish, since 95% of the Spanish speakers I meet are from Spain, and geographically I’m much closer to there. But obviously I’m keen to get some exposure to the Latin American varieties too, especially since I’d like to travel to South America at some point in my life. Minimum goal: reach basic conversational level. Michel Thomas + some Assimil + input + conversations from early on should get me there. This took me around 4 months in Italian, so should be less in Spanish. I’ll take a page from Benny’s book and try to speak from early on, just because I can! Ideal goal: be good at conversation by the end of the year. My French and Italian experience has taught me that the difference between being able to converse and being able to converse well (B1 to B2, more or less) is pretty big. But given my passive knowledge, similar language knowledge, and speaking opportunities, I think it could be possible, and the main obstacle will just be finding the time. Travel: I’m supposed to be going to Barcelona in December to play at a music festival. Resources: Michel Thomas basic and advanced, Assimil Lo Spagnolo (Spanish for Italian speakers); I’m keen to check out Destinos, and there’s enough TV, films and books to keep me busy for a lifetime. Italian Currently I’m perhaps at a low B2: on a good day I can converse quite well on many subjects, and I understand well although some regional accents can be tricky. But I still have a lot of vocabulary gaps, and still make some basic mistakes with things like verb conjugations and gender agreement while speaking, although far less frequently than I did a year ago. Minimum goal: reach a more “solid” level, with fewer gaps, fewer mistakes, and more consistency. Improve my accent. Ideal goal: reach some sort of fluency. Travel: I’d like to spend a week in Italy, probably around May. Resources: Grammatica avanzata della lingua Italiana (advanced grammar book), films, books, websites (Insegreto is a favourite for colloquial language). French I speak it relatively fluently and correctly on a good day, but I’m still quite inconsistent and I’m still not happy with my accent, and in-depth conversations can be difficult since I don’t get to practise them much. And my biggest problem is still just finding opportunities to practise it with native speakers. I go to a lot of meetups and so on but I mostly speak with intermediate learners, which is still useful but a bit limiting. Because of that and because of the plain fact of not having lots of spare time and not being in the country, I don’t see myself reaching a truly advanced level, but at the same time I think there’s still plenty realistic room for improvement. Minimum goal: some improvement in fluency and accent. Ideal goal: ...more improvement in fluency and accent? Travel: nothing definite planned. Resources: I’ve got a yet-to-be-opened copy of Alter Ego 5 that may or may not be opened this year; otherwise, again just films and TV and books. I’ll go into more detail about my plans and ideas for working on each of these in following posts, particularly regarding learning basic Spanish and accent improvement. Edited by garyb on 19 December 2013 at 12:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 138 19 December 2013 at 12:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I've gone through the first Michel Thomas Spanish lesson now. The only new thing I learnt from it was "así"... I had been wondering for a while what the equivalent of "comme ça" (or "ainsi" as it more closely resembles) and "così" was. Things are getting a bit more interesting in the second one, the object pronouns are making an appearance. I keep answering the "you" questions with the tú forms instead of the usted one though. MT does seem a bit too basic for someone in my situation, but my idea is to just go through it quickly in order to fill in my basic gaps.
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| agantik Triglot Senior Member France Joined 4627 days ago 217 posts - 335 votes Speaks: French*, English, Italian Studies: German, Norwegian | Message 3 of 138 19 December 2013 at 4:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Good luck with your studies and thanks for starting the Italian thread. Long live the Team and its leader!
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| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 138 20 December 2013 at 11:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks agantik! I'm happy to lead the team and it's great to see people who share my enthusiasm for the language.
Spanish Still going through MT fairly quickly, along with some looks at verb tables to see the bigger picture. Getting deeper into the verb system now. It's a bit complicated, and the subjunctive and indicative forms seem even more awkward than in Italian, but most of the logic behind it is very similar. And like for Italian it might take a while for me to start getting the forms right consistently in speaking. One of the students keeps saying "e" instead of "y" for "and". So do I. He must have studied French and/or Italian too. French and Italian: Accent improvement Accent has been a big focus for me over the last couple of years, and will continue to be, for two reasons: it’s my biggest weak point as I'm not one of these people who can pick it up just through listening, and a decent accent is more or less required for many native speakers to take you seriously since it's often the first impression they get of your level. I doubt I'll ever sound like a native speaker, but I want to at least sound like someone who's competent in the language, and not have an obvious English-speaker accent. The problem with accent improvement compared to improvement of other areas of language is that there aren't many resources or much thought dedicated to it, so I'm somewhat on my own when it comes to figuring out how to improve. I've discovered and tried various methods, all of which have helped slightly, but as I said in my summary from last year, they’re all just small pieces of a much bigger puzzle. These include: studying phonetics and IPA to understand the individual sounds, shadowing, listening and repeating and recording myself, okjhum's chorusing method, and Luca's phonetic analysis. My next experiment, based on a few things I've read and a bit of anecdotal evidence, is imitation. The basic idea is that you choose a particular person and try to speak like them, imitating their tone of voice and body language. I suppose it could be a friend, a character from a film, a famous person, or whatever. When you say something, you try to say it the way they would, even if it feels exaggerated and unnatural. Obviously the long-term goal isn't to end up speaking and acting like this person, but just to get more of a general feeling for how a native speaker speaks and acts. So in the last few days I've been experimenting with that. So far my conclusion is that it works... but temporarily. If I do a session of watching a video then doing some listening/repeating/chorusing etc., then I speak, I see a noticeable boost to my accent and also to my fluency - everything just comes more easily to me. But it doesn't last that long: after a certain period the effect "wears off" and I go back to normal. I suppose my focus moves back from accent to the conversation and the old habits come back. And as always, being in a noisy environment makes it wear off even more quickly. So so far I'm not sure whether I've discovered a method that's going to have more permanent effects if I keep applying it consistently or simply a trick that only gives a fleeting boost. In any case though it's a pretty good method for warming up and activating the language before speaking it. Obviously we all want to be able to speak well without needing any sort of warm-up because in real life you don't always have time to do it before a speaking opportunity: emk's written about this recently, the idea of being able to speak good French even when half-asleep at 4am and so on, and I've had similar thoughts, like what if an Italian friend calls me when I'm, say, absorbed in my work or even in a French conversation? So I suppose my doubt applies in general: is the warm-up just a temporary party trick, or will all these brief periods of warm-up-induced better speaking start to add up and result in improvements to your "baseline" level? I don't know. Edited by garyb on 20 December 2013 at 11:28am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 5 of 138 20 December 2013 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd say it's not unusual for accent effects to wear off. Even people I know with exceptional accents in English
will start to slip when they get tired or angry or spend a lot of time visiting their home country (this also includes people who lost their regional accent in English in favor of a "standard" one). So I think even as you get better and better at accent and your level of language proficiency in general, the feeling that you are sometimes slipping will never totally go away (though many of your slips may be only really noticable to you). Still worth working on though :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 138 23 December 2013 at 1:05am | IP Logged | ||
Good post, I agree with what you said about even good accents starting to slip. Having a good accent is almost like a sort of acting (like what I was saying about imitation), and it would only be normal that when you're tired or your mind is on other things the old habits will come back. I'm sure I'm more Scottish when I'm tired or angry; I've definitely had to tone down my accent over the years, after going to a university full of English people who often didn't understand me and then having a lot of foreign friends. Hell, as an extreme example, I was dating a Spanish girl some time ago and whenever she got emotional in any sort of way (which, let's face it, was extremely often - she certainly fit the stereotype!) she'd often just speak Spanish because English was too much effort at that point and she knew I'd understand between my passive knowledge and the context. So I suppose what I'm getting at is that whenever your mind isn't at 100% capacity then the "high-level" functions like speaking the language well don't work as well and you go back to a more basic and ingrained level. Anyway, today I finished MT Spanish Basic. Advanced next. After that I'll still need a lot more exposure to really get the hang of the verb conjugations, but that'll come. Last night I went to an Italian/Polish dinner party, hosted by an Italian friend and his Polish wife (who speaks excellent Italian). Plus their kids, who speak both languages as well as English, which is impressive. I understood what was going on half the time :). Nice food and some good conversation practice. I've finally started watching season 4 of Engrenages. I'm attempting it without subtitles; I understand the vast majority but it does require 100% concentration, and even at that there's the odd sentence that I don't catch or I have to rewind to catch. It's a good challenge and I suppose I'm finally getting out of my listening comprehension comfort zone - I think a lot of the stuff I've been watching has been too easy. Nothing wrong with easy stuff of course, it's all extensive input, but you need to push yourself sometimes too. Plus I'm one of these young people of the Facebook generation who can't concentrate for any reasonable period, so something that forces me to focus can't do any harm! After that I'll give Profilages a try; it's another French police series and Cavesa said she liked it in her log. And for Italian there's always Montalbano... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 138 29 December 2013 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Finished Michel Thomas Advanced Spanish today!
The course covered a couple of new verb forms (simple past and imperfect subjunctive) as well as going into more detail about ones already covered like conditional and imperfect, and combinations of them like pluperfect and conditional perfect. So many verbs! The simple past is pretty similar to its Italian and French equivalents, although this is the first time I've had to actually learn to use it as opposed to just recognise it, and as usual, irregularities abound. The imperfect subjunctive's stem is based on the simple past, so they should help reinforce each other. I'll start Assimil either later tonight or tomorrow. For Italian, I worked through Assimil (French base) using Luca's translation method (basic summary: one new lesson per day; a week after having done a lesson you translate the dialogue from target language to English; a week after that you translate back the other way - that replaces the traditional active wave). On the whole, that was extremely effective and I credit it for getting me to conversational level in a matter of months, but I did find that there were still large parts I didn't retain, and I ended up revising the book again to find them and make Anki cards for them. So this time I'm going to streamline the whole process by adding an extra part: during the final translation step, I’ll make an Anki card for anything that I didn't easily recall or that I otherwise think merits extra attention. I went to an Italian party a couple of nights ago where I had a great time and of course spoke lots of Italian. At the start I was a bit nervous and made a couple of pretty bad mistakes, and felt like people were judging me. Which they were, but positively: "Oh, parla bene!". Soon enough I got into the flow of it and I was doing well, although keeping up with group conversations wasn't always easy and at times I suffered from "language shyness": points where in an English conversation I would have said something but in Italian it would have been too much effort and would have interrupted the flow so I just stayed quiet. Fortunately there were plenty small group and one-on-one conversations. I also did a bit of interpreting since there were a few people who spoke only Italian or only English, but it was pretty simple stuff. It was a great experience since using the language socially is my main goal. There was also a Spanish guy and a girl who spoke Spanish as well as Italian, so I listened to a couple of their conversations. It was great hearing some of the stuff I've been learning in context, and that made me think about the benefits of getting exposure to native materials from the start. If I had more time I'd do a bit of that; I suppose even a few minutes per day would probably be helpful at this stage. But of course there are lots of things that I'd do if I had more time (Gloss, Lyricstraining, Duolingo, BDs, and lots of other things that people on this forum talk about) that would probably speed up my learning a little bit more, but I don't so I try to focus on the "core" stuff that most of my progress comes from - Pareto Principle and all. Although of course I can never be sure whether I'm focusing on the most effective "core" or whether my focus is incorrect, and that's half the battle. I'm still doing lots of the pronunciation imitation work, including recording myself, and it's helped me spot a couple of bad habits in my Italian. Vowel reduction is something that I was very conscious of from the start, yet despite that I still seem to sometimes reduce /a/s, especially when speaking fast. Shows how easy it is to pick up bad habits if you're not constantly paying attention. And sometimes even if I pronounce a vowel "correctly", I don't pronounce it "fully" enough; Italian's all about the vowels and every one of them has to be strong, even if unstressed, even if you're speaking very fast. Vowel mispronunciation is a nasty one because it's a dead giveaway of being an English speaker. I've also discovered that I often pronounce Es as open (/ɛ/) when in "standard" pronunciation in the dictionary they should be closed (/e/), in words like "per" and "questo", and sometimes the same with Os. I realise that there's some regional variation in this, but for now I'd rather aim for the standard. Overall this imitation idea seems to be working pretty well. I'm sure that like most techniques it's going to reach a point of diminishing returns soon enough, but for now it seems to really be helping my general speaking ability so I'll keep it up and milk it for all it's worth! Although my recent improvements are probably also down to other factors, like being more relaxed and well-rested since I'm currently off work. I've not had any opportunities to practise French recently, but I'm keeping it alive though pronunciation work and self-talk. Edited by garyb on 29 December 2013 at 11:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 8 of 138 29 December 2013 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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For a more in-depth, written form of Michel Thomas, try Madrigal's Magical Key to Spanish. Her verb chapters are worth their weight in gold.
I, too, find that the most challenging aspect is balancing languages. There really isn't any room for English and I'm starting to really regret not being immersed anymore. As I said in emk's log, I'm really looking forward to the World Cup because I can seek out bars where they're showing France's and all of the Spanish speaking team's matches and see if I can make some friends. I find Meetups aren't always great for making friends and native speakers around my age usually aren't interested in going. It just may help me to get a part time job in a restaurant - that's how a lot of people here learn Spanish to fluency. But I also covet my free time. I think it's good to go for speaking and writing early with Spanish. You already have so much passive knowledge that most of the work learning the language is going to be practice (which I need to do more of). You may find, like me, that writing in Spanish is ridiculously easy compared to French as there are far fewer things to get wrong. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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