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Unsure how to progress in my language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Caymane Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4099 days ago 29 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 15 19 December 2013 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone :)
(Please let me know if I shouldn't have asked such a broad question in this forum section.) Well I'm writing this post after some weeks of studying/ writing and general practicing via Skype , and unfortunately right now I have stopped getting a sense of progression. I'm learning new vocabulary but still getting tongue tied over basic verb conjugations! It must be a common thing I know, but every learner has different problems and I thought if I posted here what I'm doing during the average day, then maybe there's something I could change. This is what my daily routine has been like during the past 2 weeks: ------------------------------------------------------------ ---------- I get up early in order to fit in a 40 Min (20 Min's in Spanish) Skype chat. The subjects are always very general: What I do during my time , what they do, how we are progressing in our languages etc. I listen to a podcast from RTVE (Spanish broadcasting corporation) when traveling to and from my college, that's roughly 50 Min's each day. Again they are about general subjects like: what happening in the news, in science/popular culture etc. I usually get the basic idea about what they are about but with little depth. I often have to focus hard in order pick up basic words. These are natural, native podcasts though. :) In breaks I usually try and write a piece in Spanish (On Lang-8) I find it very difficult to focus when I'm writing as it's so slow, and I often only write one medium length entry a week. How much time I have during breaks varies a lot, so I don't account this time for much. I also read the news in Spanish during this time as well. I quite enjoy that actually, once you find a good one, it's not hard to transition from English news. When I get home, during the evenings I have an hour speaking again (30 Mins's roughly in Spanish) I'm not sure how best to ask people to correct me so I usually leave it up to them. The only thing I do tell people is not to give me a correction while I'm speaking as I find that very distracting. And when I find time I do the only formal studying I do, with Assimil Spanish with ease. I've nearly finished this, but I will probably go through it again as think I rushed it at the start. I would often just listen and read through the dialogue twice and then do the exercise before moving on. ------------------------------------------------------------ ---- Sorry for the wall of text. I hope I'm not asking for too much here as it's a very common situation. As you may have seen from my language learning log , I've set myself the goal to improve my Spanish by September next year in order to take the DELE Level B2. It definitively helps having a clear goal as I know what to aim for, but I'm still not sure how to get there. My ultimate goal is to be able to stay in Spain, maybe for backpacking trek where I would be able to only use Spanish. I'd appreciate any advice, thanks a lot! :) Edited by Caymane on 19 December 2013 at 11:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5523 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 15 20 December 2013 at 12:00am | IP Logged | ||
Please take this advice with a grain of salt. If something here sounds useful, great. If not, forget it. It's just random thoughts from one language learner for another.
Your methods look great! It sounds like you're getting up into the intermediate levels, where progress gets a little weird. When you first start out, progress is really obvious, because you're starting from nothing. But eventually you reach a point where you've got the basic language down, and you can more-or-less do a lot of stuff: You can carry on a basic conversation, you can read a book slowly, you can write in a mostly coherent fashion, and you can usually understand people when they speak to you. You're not necessarily stellar at any of these things, but you can do them. Once you reach this point, progress gets hard to notice. Sure, over a couple of months, you get better. But that improvement is masked by the usual day-to-day ups and downs, which can easily rob you (temporarily) of several months' progress. You may believe, intellectually, that you're still making progress, but it's not immediately visible. So what do you do? Well, you need to find some way to keep motivated even when you can't see that you're getting better. Personally, I found two ways to do this: 1. Find stuff that's so fun that it's intrinsically motivating. For example, now would be a great time to start trying a few TV series, to see if any of them "clicks" for you. Or read 2,000 pages of fun books. Two or three seasons of a TV series or half a dozen books can make an huge difference. 2. Put yourself into situations where you need your Spanish. This is less fun, sometimes, but it will occasionally convince your brain to sit up and take notice. Like my online statistics course in French: I can either cope with the mumbling professor or fail. I'm not going to suggest that you to change your methods. You're doing great stuff that has worked for lots of people. Sure, you might benefit from changing things around, but at this point, you're the expert on your own language-learning process, and the only way to get answers may be to run experiments. Every once in a while, you'll stumble over something that works, and you'll see a sudden spurt in one area. But that may be followed by a few months of groping around looking for another big win. So maybe the best approach would be to try some things, give them a month or three, and if they don't see to be helping, try something else? And in the meantime, as you experiment and have fun in Spanish, you'll be getting steadily and imperceptibly better. And then one day you'll look back at something that used to be hard and you'll exclaim, "Oh, wow, did I get better!" Anyway, that's sort of how it seemed to me. :-) 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4281 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 3 of 15 20 December 2013 at 12:55am | IP Logged | ||
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The assimilation method desribed above sounds good--I would add that living in a
Spanish environment helps immensely; I mean that in a non-literal, unintuitive manner-- for example, since 2008, my mobile phone has been in Spanish, when I have directions for something, I look at the Spanish instead of English directions (obviously for crucial things such as cooking and assembling heavy material and other dangerous activities, do not try this if not completely confident), I write notes in Spanish for things that I would in English (like placing nametags on leftovers in the refrigerator: "pescado y patatas fritas" instead of "fish and chips", I never use a dictionary Spanish to English, but only Spanish to Spanish, such as the RAE dictionary, and if I need information, I search it in Spanish, including mathematical and engineering terms. Essentially it is assimilation without physical assimilation, viz. being present in the country or with other Spanish speakers since it is implausible. You could try talking to a pet in Spanish; I even talk to my dog in Spanish now, although he gets confused because he grew up with English first. Most important would be to force thinking in Spanish, to block all English thoughts out unless necessary--it must become a part of oneself subconsciously--I typed all of this whilst thinking in Spanish, then translating it into English like a Spanish speaker who learnt English as a secondary language. So, instead of thinking something like, "It is late, and probably time for me to go to bed..." , think, <<Es tarde; y será hora que me acueste ya..." Edited by 1e4e6 on 20 December 2013 at 1:00am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5253 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 4 of 15 20 December 2013 at 1:51am | IP Logged | ||
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You're progressing nicely. You've been using a course along with speaking, but Assimil is generally considered to be grammar light. You sound like you may need more balance and focus by adding some drills and grammar study. Keeping emk's caveats in mind, and being aware that I don't have THE answer at all, just some suggestions that may help- you might try focusing your listening and speaking a little more. Have you tried Veinte Mundos? It's a free online magazine with a transcript and audio. Each is downloadable, and there are a lot of audios for both intermediate and advanced levels. You can listen before you read, then read, then listen and read, then listen, etc. Difficult words can be moused over for a pop=up definition. Also have a look at the multimedia exercises at Centro Virtual Cervantes. The exercises graded B1 and B2 sound like they may be right for you, it might not hurt to have a look at some of the A2 exercises too. If GLOSS is working again, have a look at their Spanish exercises.
If it's a course you're after, the FSI basic course has been very helpful for many members here. Have a look at James29's log. FSI Basic is quite thorough and useful, unless you just really want to avoid non-Iberian resources, in which case, the Cervantes Center exercises may be just the ticket for you. I might also suggest that you start a regular television series, something you'll enjoy. Take notes, write a review and talk about what you saw and heard in your skype chats and write about it on lang8. Lastly, you might try an online tutor, costing on average about €7 an hour. ¡Buena suerte! Edited by iguanamon on 20 December 2013 at 1:56am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5013 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 5 of 15 21 December 2013 at 11:47am | IP Logged | ||
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If you are getting tongue tied over basic conjugations then FSI basic / platiquemos is definitely the way to go. You don't necessarily have to do the whole course (although that would be very worthwhile at some point)but you could use it to focus on particular tenses that you need to perfect.
The course will get you to practice the conjugations, out loud, over and over until they become ingrained in your mind. It will also improve your automaticity when speaking. I would like to commend you on the dedication you have shown so far. You will go a long way with that attitude! In fact you strike me as perhaps being the kind of person that could make it through the entire course. If you are that serious about Spanish, it seems like a natural next step. I am not saying drop your other activities, because they are indeed very important, but I really think FSI will make the difference that you are looking for in your Spanish. Regards backpacking trips- Spain is great, but very expensive. I would definitely recommend going to one of the cheaper South American countries so that you will be able to stay as long as possible. Either way, if you take that step and seek to avoid English as much as humanely possible, you are sure to discover the life changing potential that learning a new language has. Edited by dbag on 21 December 2013 at 11:50am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 3988 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 6 of 15 21 December 2013 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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You understand everything said in the RTVE? If you do that would be impressive. Some of the moderators talk very fast and sometimes the voices are muffled or there is background noise. I find that the easiest person to understand is Pepa Fernández.
I don't understand everything said on that website, even if I close my eyes and concentrate. :( Edit: Sorry, I just *really* read your post right now. I would actually recommend not doing something as hard as RTVE because the percentage of words that you will comprehend will probably be like 40% as a B1 learner. It's hard. Especially since you say that you are having trouble with verb conjugations. Why don't you do something that is challenging but more realistic? Showtime Spanish is a little easier and it progressively gets harder in detail as you go on. It's kind of like training to become a good athlete; you don't just start out playing against olympic-level players but HS-level players. Then as you get better you progress and progress. If you just play the elite athlete right from the start you really won't even learn how to be competitive; you'll just get destroyed. http://radiolingua.com/shows/spanish/show-time-spanish/ I'm not sure how best to ask people to correct me so I usually leave it up to them. The only thing I do tell people is not to give me a correction while I'm speaking as I find that very distracting. This is what I do with the Spanish speakers that I talk with on skype--you can have them write down your mistakes in the text box on skype so you don't get interrupted. And then you also have a record of the mistake. Edited by culebrilla on 21 December 2013 at 1:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4135 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 7 of 15 21 December 2013 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I prefer listening the advanced podcasts on Notes in Spanish rather than Showtime Spanish. I find the conversation
more natural. Talking about grammar... I agree that FSI is a great way to drill and build automaticity. It has its flaws, but I'm glad that I'm using it. I also like the Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verbs workbook. I put some cloze sentences from the exercises into anki so that I'm constantly revisiting the verb tenses that I've learned. Do you read a lot in Spanish? I get a lot of my grammar from reading. And - speaking as an elementary school teacher now - the kids who read the most are always the ones with the best grammar in their native language. Edited by Stelle on 21 December 2013 at 1:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 3988 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 8 of 15 21 December 2013 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I listened to a few to see how it was and there was only English at the end to explain what happened to less advanced students. He could just listen to the Spanish parts and then stop listening at the end.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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