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5000 words and nothing to say. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3874 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 12 03 November 2014 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have drilled 5000 words into my head.
At 20 new words per day, it works out to be about 200 reviews per day which is manageable and done within 9 months. 
Was it worth it? I know Anki under-reports actual time spent. It's probably closer to 150 hours of real-world time. 150*60=9,000 minutes. 9000/5000=1.8 minutes per word and I still have to maintain beyond this point! I am not able to reproduce most of the words. I only did Spanish -> English cards as it felt awkward to go the opposite way (and happens to be frowned upon by actual translators: L2 -> L1 only). When I learn French, I don't think I'm going to do 5000 words. The last couple thousand would have been best learned through voluntary reading. Mostly topic specific words or synonyms for more frequently used words. Perhaps 2000 or 2500 would be better and then once drilled, it would be much faster to basically get rid of the deck and keep reading. The Learning with Texts program might be a good compromise as well. Extensive/Intensive reading with the ability to track vocabulary. How quickly do you read in your L2? I'm still quite slow in Spanish but only because I don't do it often enough - and I skim. What about at the beginning level? Even averaged at 30 words per minute, that's 270000 words over 150 hours. 270000/50000=5.4 novels' worth of words. Also, I have taken the advice of some on here (emk comes to mind) and have become ruthless with which cards I keep. My leech limit is now two. If there's a word I really want to know, I'll reset it until I get it. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4039 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 2 of 12 03 November 2014 at 11:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi, I find your report very interesting and I have a couple of questions for you:
- can you understand spoken Spanish? - do you have a gist of the grammar? Beside that, congratulations to be so consistent. I had a bad experience with doing flashcards. I found that the return of investment has been much higher in the first two weeks than in the rest of the time, than I burnt down and dropped this method. Than I had a much higher boost in comprehension studying a bit of grammar, not only in written comprehension but also in oral comprehension. Then another much higher boost doing Assimil. This with Dutch that is much more difficult then Spanish (at least for me). Now that I started Spanish I'm just doing listening, reading and grammar (but being Italian I already have an high comprehension rate so I didn't pass to the preliminary steps and I'm doing things one would usually do at B1-B2 but with a A1 level of writing and speaking - I started two weeks ago with reading and listening and two days ago with grammar). So I think my approach to Dutch has more or less the same difficulty than yours with Spanish and that can be taken as comparison. One thing I didn't understand now: what are your plans now that you studied the top 5000 words? And how did you studied the words? Do you know the plurals, the genders for all the nouns and the basic verb tenses and conjugations? Or you have to study that from scratch? This 5000 words were 5000 word groups or there were duplicates like hope, to hope, hopefully, hoped and so on? Sorry for the many questions! I'm also a beginner learner and I want to have a complete overview of the different methods with pro-cons, which kind of learner is better served etc :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3874 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 12 03 November 2014 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I can understand spoken Spanish when it's a little slower and clearly enunciated, but that's hardly surprising. Shorter phrases are recognisable at full
speed, but again, likely given enough exposure and context. I certainly have an understanding of the grammar. Two semesters in university, plus Assimil, and I'm now pushing through Platiquemos. Anki is just one part of my efforts. It was a pre-made frequency deck with infinitive verbs, a mix of words with no variation in gender/plural, and occasional idiomatic phrases. For me, there is no point in learning verb conjugations by flashcard. Having glanced at some books for learning Italian and French, I'm convinced that the grammatical structures are the hardest thing for English speakers. The similarities between those languages from an Anglo perspective are glaring. Changing how one thinks is hard: "To me it does it [the thing]" is not intuitive, but is normal in Spanish. It's hard to stick with a method if you don't believe in it. I had to convince myself that Anki was worth trying first. I'm currently doing the same for FSI/Platiquemos. Edited by epictetus on 03 November 2014 at 12:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5181 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 4 of 12 03 November 2014 at 12:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Did you enjoy it?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5254 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 5 of 12 03 November 2014 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
In order to be able to use Spanish, you do have to engage with it, outside of Anki and courses. I'm just a guy who taught himself Spanish without ever using Anki. Anki isn't bad, it can be highly useful and efficient when used to boost your studies, but I do cringe when I see someone use it to "drill" the most common 5,000 words. It tends to become, despite their protestations to the contrary, a huge focus, and this can leave a learner without the necessary engagement with the language where it lives and breathes outside of the Anki deck in order to really make these words theirs.
Extensive reading doesn't mean it has to be incomprehensible. Parallel texts at this stage can be highly useful and they don't have to be novel length either. Being able to glance over at the English immediately saves looking up words and you get to see phrases and constructions more easily. You don't have to spend hours finding parallel texts. For example, Global Voices.org has articles translated from and into English (and other languages). You can make your own parallel texts out of them by creating a word document (I use openoffice) and insert a two column, one row, table. Copy and paste Spanish text on the left and English text on the right and you're done. For "ready-made" parallel texts the Alba learning textos paralelos site has many available, some with audio. Now if you want parallel texts about whatever you are most interested in in English, that's much more of a heavy lift. At this stage, it's about learning how to read and understand Spanish. There's not as much choice at this stage, within the range I have suggested, I know. Surely, you can find something that, even if it doesn't captivate you, won't annoy you too much. So few Spanish learners are taking advantage of the totally free Veinte Mundos site. The archive has a ton of intermediate and advanced articles, all with audio and mouse-over definitions/explanations of difficult words and phrases. The articles can be downloaded into pdf and the audio saved as mp3. I don't know how much time you spent with Anki but it only takes about 10 minutes to listen and read one of the articles here. Even if you went over them three times, that's only a half an hour. If you did that as religiously as you did Anki drills... This kind of "starter" extensive reading will help you to see words in context, add natural repetition, help you to make your own connections and increase your vocabulary. If you'll write about what you've read (on lang8) and/or talk about it with a native-speaker afterwards, even better. I'm not saying that you're going to easily read and understand right off the bat. You're most definitely not. It's going to be uncomfortable. The more you do it, the easier it will become. Now is the time to be uncomfortable so you will be more comfortable when you get to Guatemala and can maximize your immersion opportunity there. ¡Buena suerte! 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4341 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 12 03 November 2014 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Have you thought about doubling your vocabulary? 5k words really isn't that much for reading. At least in my experience (though not with Spanish). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3874 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 12 03 November 2014 at 2:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for the recommendations, iguanamon. I think the prospect of just finding resources
seemed daunting. A ready-made deck of flashcards seemed efficient at the time! You're right about the preparation for Guatemala. Anki was interesting and probably somewhat useful but perhaps it's outlived its usefulness as a tool at this stage. I'll take a look at those sites later today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3874 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 8 of 12 04 November 2014 at 4:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think this is partly where I got tripped up. I thought it would be a brilliant way to kill time on my commute when I was in university, but it somehow grew into a game or challenge of some kind. Not what I intended at all.
I should re-read things more frequently. Even just printing parallel texts out and leaving them in plain sight should force me to not rush through them.
I think this was suggested on my regular log, but I forgot to bookmark it! It looks great :) I'll try replacing my Anki habit with a small reading habit. Edited by epictetus on 04 November 2014 at 4:30am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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