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James29’s Spanish Log | ||
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| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5367 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 73 of 668 31 October 2011 at 1:27am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for stopping by, Ignacio. I have watched some of your videos in the past and I think they are pretty cool. I really like the concept of walking around town. It has forever given me an image of Buenos Aires. Whenever I think of BA, I will think of some of those first videos I saw (even before some of those boring scenes from Destinos). I had a nice text chat with someone from Buenos Aires recently and learned a lot about the recent elections, history, politics and local Argentine economics. Anyway, thanks... I may drop you a line sometime.
For anyone interested, you can link to Ignacio's videos by clicking his youtube link next to his name (getreallanguages). Some of them are quite interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5367 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 74 of 668 31 October 2011 at 1:44am | IP Logged |
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So, this was a pretty good week. I did FSI lesson 27 today and yesterday. I might take a break from FSI tomorrow because lesson 27 was more than 90 minutes. It was not particularly hard, but that is over my limit for attention span. The lesson was on commands. I do not think I have ever really studied familiar commands. I have seen them and they are probably covered in the books I have studied, but the part of lesson 27 on familiar commands seemed like totally new material to me. It really seemed productive to do this lesson.
I also did a few Assimil Spanish Without Toil lessons. They are pretty good lessons now and I learn much from them. I did not work on my primary methods the morning of my morning meetup. I don't mind that. Unfortunately, however, the morning meetup is kind of flopping. In terms of other things, I had a couple long text chats. This sharedtalk thing is really hit or miss. Some people are strange, but others are really a joy to get to know and talk with. I guess that is life. I am not sure how productive it is for learning. It does not seem uncommon for people on that website to only want to write in Spanish. That seems odd, but it is fine with me because we simply write/talk in Spanish the whole time. I read/listened to a couple more chapters of my DHH. It is much harder when I don't know the chapter well. I am listening to the fourth disc of Assimil Spanish With Ease dialogues on my way to work now. I listen to them about half the time. Sometimes I shadow them and other times I don't. I took a long drive for work to where I could get the city radio stations. I listened to a little bit of talk radio in Spanish. I could not really understand it. I cannot think of anything else to write. It felt like a great week. Maybe I will do FSI tomorrow and maybe I will not. Perhaps I will go back and do lessons 1 and/or 2. I skipped those and I would like to go back and do them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5367 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 75 of 668 31 October 2011 at 2:00am | IP Logged |
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Oh, how could I have forgotten to mention that, once again, I started and quit French? I watched the first four episodes of French in Action. I must say, it is a great course and I wish there was something like FIA for Spanish (Destinos is not equivalent in my mind). The professor in FIA is a riot and really cracked me up. What a genius. Unfortunately, I cannot muster the time or willpower to take on another language. My efforts into Spanish have been great, but it makes me realize how much there is still to learn and I really do not feel like putting time into French would be worthwhile. I simply do not have the "fire in the belly" for French like I do for Spanish. Maybe I will pick up French again sometime in the future... but until then I will forever have "elle va a la fac" etched into my memory (sorry if I misspelled the French words).
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| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5775 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 76 of 668 02 November 2011 at 12:50am | IP Logged |
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I think it's great that you're speeding through FSI so amazingly quickly. You're already
half way there!!!!! Those lessons on the commands were the hardest ones in the entire course (all 4 levels) for me. I had to come back to them several times and even now I don't think I have completely mastered it. I'll be interested to see if your exposure to Assimil helps you through it! If memory serves you'll soon have reading sections to the lessons, do you have a strategy in mind? P.D. If you're interested I finished the passive wave of "without toil" this week. Edited by Random review on 02 November 2011 at 12:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5857 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 77 of 668 02 November 2011 at 1:09pm | IP Logged |
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That's funny that you mention "Elle va à la fac", as I constantly repeat that doing the little motions of the mime, and it's been well over a year (maybe two?) since I last watched the videos.
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| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5367 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 78 of 668 07 November 2011 at 3:58am | IP Logged |
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What a week. On a whim I decided to buy tickets to the Dominican Republic for later this month. I'll talk more about that later.
Random review, thanks for the comments. Congrats on your progress with Without Toil. I find that Assimil helped a lot. I would have quit FSI long ago if I was not already at a low intermediate stage when I started. Assimil is great to learn vocabulary and most basic grammar while keeping your interest also. FSI is not teaching as much vocab, but it really makes me think and process info much faster. I think I like With Ease better than Without Toil, but they are both good courses. "Elle va a la fac" is still stuck in my head. If it is going to be stuck in my head for a year or two I think I will go crazy. French is still interesting to me, but I will wait. I have not tried any French this week. O.K., this week's primary resources went well. I finished FSI lesson 28 and did the first run through lesson 29 today. I think 29 was the hardest lesson so far. My hunch is that I will have to do it three times because I had a hard time doing many of the drills even while looking at the book. These last few lessons have felt like new material. I have seen the stuff before, but I really never understood or thought about much of it. I am only about half way through FSI so I feel like the second half will be GREAT if these lessons are already challenging me with some new material. Someone asked earlier about the reading sections. I should probably note how I actually "do" an FSI lesson. On the first day through the lesson I will read the dialogue a couple times and check any words I don't know. I then read the footnotes and the grammar points. I then go back and read through the dialogue one more time. Then I just listen to the audio and do the drills. On the first run through I consult the book as necessary. On the second day I usually just read through the dialogue once and then listen to the audio. I try not to use the book on the second run through. I do nothing with the conversation stimulus or the reading sections. I don't even look at them. If I do another run through FSI I will work through those sections. I did Assimil the other days. I have finished lesson 83. I really like it now. The lessons are short enough to do in less than half an hour. The have a lot of new vocab and I am learning something about grammar in every lesson. Several days this week I was behind schedule and only had about half an hour for Spanish. Assimil was perfect for this. One day I did a morning meetup. There were no native speakers. It was the first meetup without any native speakers. It was actually pretty good. I was surprised. I had the evening meetup this week also. It was great! I felt like my Spanish was flowing quite well. Also, I had a much easier time understanding/listening to people. I read another 5 or 6 chapters of my DHH with audio. I have now finished Mark and John in my DHH. I will do either Matthew or Luke next. I may buy an NIV/NVI because the English translation next to the DHH is the Good News Version and it is not a very close translation to the DHH. The NIV/NVI is more challenging so I am somewhat reluctant to switch. As I said above, I purchased tickets to the Dominican Republic. My work schedule opened up for the last week of the month and my wife was fine with me taking the week off as long as I was back for our Thanksgiving dinner (which we will celebrate on Sunday). The DR was the only place I could find that still had cheap tickets on such late notice. It was important to find cheap tickets because I still want to take a trip in the winter. I am somewhat nervous about the trip. I have not travelled out of the country too much... particularly to a country that uses another language. One of the guys in the evening meetup is from the DR so I had a nice talk with him about his country. Well, I don't really feel like writing anymore. It has been a very busy week and weekend. Edited by James29 on 07 November 2011 at 4:06am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5367 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 79 of 668 14 November 2011 at 12:30am | IP Logged |
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I finished the second book of FSI today when I completed lesson 30 for the second time. I also did quite a few Assimil lessons this week. I worked with either FSI or Assimil every day since my last post and one or two days I doubled up on Assimil.
I am not sure what I will do this coming week. This is my last week before going to the Dominican. I might review lessons 27-30 of FSI. I kind of want to do those lessons again because they were tough for me. I may just do some Assimil lessons, however. It is written many places on this forum that FSI and Assimil compliment each other. This is very true. I really like working with both of them, but for very different reasons. I think they are a great combo. I am not sure when I will start the third FSI book. I don't really feel like starting it any time soon. I will likely finish Assimil first. I did a little bit of skyping. No need for me to repeat my thoughts on skyping. I went to a new bookstore in town and they had a good section of books in Spanish (hard to find around here). I sat and read from numerous books to test out my level. Reading "regular" novels like The Davinci Code would be too much work. I could generally understand, but it would be a very long/tough haul and I would need a dictionary quite often. I could read some of the young adult books fairly well (Harry Potter, Narnia, etc). Those types of books do not intereste me too much, however. I was able to read some of the business and "self help" books quite well. Many of them are written on a fairly low level. I read the entire first chapter of one of those books from the "Rich Dad" series and I could read it quite easily. In fact, I would say that there were almost no words I did not immediatly understand and the few that I did not know were apparent from their context. That made me feel great. I watched the next online economics course. I only have two more classes left and I will have finished the series. They seem to be getting easier to understand (due to my progress). I may start watching these in the evening. They are passive and I find them quite interesting. It does not feel like studying to watch them. I feel like I should be doing more for my trip, but I really do not know what to do to prepare. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5775 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 80 of 668 16 November 2011 at 12:29am | IP Logged |
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Regarding real grown-up books, I found/find reading parallel texts useful, and with
Spanish there are some great ones available! Another good way to quickly vastly increase your passive vocabulary is the L-R method (see this forum), which can be done with just English text and Spanish audio, but works best with parallel texts. E.g. Pltero y yo (parallel text here : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Platero-Yo-Dual-Language- Books/dp/0486435652/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=132139972 5&sr=1-1) and Spanish audio freely and legally available online. I was very skeptical about L-R, but I have been experimenting with different methods and my experiences with L-R are that it definitely works at least for improving passive vocabulary (regarding other claims about grammar and active vocabulary I don't know whether it works or not, but any rate it's a great way to get a ton of comprehensible input, so it's plausible). You can also easily find student editions of plays and novels with vocab and other explanations in footnotes and endnotes on Amazon (e.g. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Coronel-Tiene-Quien-Escriba- Hispanic/dp/0719008360/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321399453&sr= 8-1). Good luck in the Dominican Republic! Why not have a few days off study and watch a couple of Dominican films? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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