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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 1 of 83 19 September 2014 at 7:02pm | IP Logged |
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I've been doing FSI for about two months now. I'm starting Unit 8 tomorrow.
I have learned 5500 cards in my 10000 sentences deck. I have left a broken trail of learning logs around the site as I have drifted from method to method and material to material. I seem to have stabilized recently, and I think this log may be more coherent. I seem to have settled on a few activities, and I really find it useful to write about what I'm doing, even if nobody every reads it. I'm a 61 year old language learner. I had good success learning Samoan and Tagalog while living in immersion environments when i was younger. I've been doing Spanish for two and a half years with varying success. I don't find age to be a big problem for language learning, the main issues seem to be energy and time. I have many other interests and reponsibilities. I have a distressing tendency to chase after the "perfect method" that will "make me learn overnight", even though I really should know better. I have a graduate degree in ESL/Second Language Acquisition from the '80s which makes me a sucker for input based methods. I have had success with some materials. I quit Pimsleur after 15 lessons, because Assimil is supposed to magically get me to fluency faster. I had wonderful success with developing passive skills while using Assimil, but ended up with minimal active skills and a shaky understanding of Spanish grammar. I shadowed the living daylights out of Assimil and completed Michel Thomas, and got my active skills up to about an A2. I started FSI Basic, set my self the goal of doing every single item correctly once, and moving ahead when I got each right one time, hurrying (so I wouldn't waste time overlearning), drove myself mad, and quit after about a fourth of the course. I L-R'ed Cien Años de Soledad a few times, and had a big increase in my listening skills. I decided to quit all courses and just do native materials, and started a 10000 sentences deck. I continue this and find it quite useful. I just did a check of my passive vocabulary using some frequency lists and this suggests that I've learned several thousand words this year. Not bad. I started the superchallenge, and felt that I wasn't learning anything just extensively reading, that I needed to do more "studying". Too impatient once again. My passive skills are probably B1/B2, my active skills lag at A2. I lack opportunities to travel and I lack a gregarious personality. I have a lot of Spanish in my brain that can't get out in time to use in conversation. Perhaps FSI will bring some of the language benefits I would get from a long trip to Spain or a Spanish girlfriend. edited for typos Edited by sfuqua on 30 June 2015 at 5:25pm 6 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 2 of 83 19 September 2014 at 7:39pm | IP Logged |
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You sound perfectly normal.
Having one log is nice for someone who wants to track your journey. The false starts and this way and that are all part of the journey. I note the similarity between the words journey and journal. FSI Basic Spanish was very, very helpful to me. I was and still am an overlearner and perhaps underperformer. With FSI though, I got to the point where I could say things correctly without thinking about it. Good luck! I know you can do it! Edited by luke on 19 September 2014 at 10:55pm 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 3 of 83 19 September 2014 at 8:40pm | IP Logged |
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I plan to mostly talk about FSI in this log, but let me be clear about my "10000" sentences deck. This is completely separate from FSI. The cards in the deck are made up of cards from subtitle files, novels, and Internet articles. I also have some one word vocabulary cards. This fits nicely into random parts of the day.
Now to FSI. I noticed something the posts on this site about FSI that encouraged me to try it. People on this site seem to fall into two main categories with regard to FSI. One group finds FSI to be the royal road to automaticity. Time-consuming, but extremely effective. This is the group that has completed an FSI course. There is another group who finds FSI boring and ineffective. They generally did only part of a course or rejected it beforehand on philosophical grounds. Very few who have completed the course and think that it is rubbish. Now my two cents: Many people have learned to speak fluently without FSI, but the best I can tell, nobody learns to speak fluently without speaking. People who learn completely without an oral course like FSI have other places where they get to speak and listen. Some people can't stand to do FSI drills, for them to learn active skills they need another way to practice. For learners who can stand to do FSI, it can provide many chances to practice speaking, whether or not these people have other practice opportunities. For learners who lack the opportunity or personality to talk, FSI can provide the missing practice they need to activate their speech. Anyway FSI sounds like exactly what I need. I live in a Tagalog immersion environment at home and I only have an hour or so a day to devote to study. edited to correct my usual typos Edited by sfuqua on 19 September 2014 at 11:10pm 4 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 4 of 83 19 September 2014 at 9:16pm | IP Logged |
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Great observations about FSI. I'll add one more... I have not seen anyone who has finished FSI and says they do not speak Spanish reasonably well. You never see people who have finished it recommending against it.
If you absolutely commit to finish anything you start you may have better success. People will recommend against that advice and say things like "well, if you don't like it, why should you slog through it? Just quit and move on to something you will like." I take a different approach. If you know you have that rule to begin with you are going to be much more careful launching into something. You will pick your resources and studies much more carefully... investing more time and effort picking something you are sure will work for you rather than just trying something (knowing in the back of your mind you can quit if you can quit if you don't like it). This is the approach many very successful investors take... they set a rule that whatever stock they buy they will hold for the rest of their lives. It makes them make better choices that are not based on emotion or short term issues. and... yes, get a Spanish girlfriend!! That may make the difference. Edited by James29 on 19 September 2014 at 9:17pm 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 5 of 83 19 September 2014 at 9:30pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for your good wishes, James and Luke, your logs have been and inspiration.
After reading as many fsi logs as I could find I decided on a schedule of one Unit a week. I do the Unit with "the book open" on Saturday and Sunday. I make sure that I understand everything in the notes and in the translations. Monday through Friday I go through the lesson with the book closed. By Friday, I'm hitting maybe 90-90% correct. I do better on the course if I'm doing something else at the same time that keeps me concentrated, exercising, driving or something. I fall apart if I try to sit still and do the lessons after a hard days work. Yesterday I was stuck waiting for someone to call, and I decided to do the course while sitting and waiting. With nobody watching I found myself swaying from side to side while doing the rapid fire drills. The swaying looked weird I'm sure, but it seemed to keep me concentrated. I think I may have accidentally reinvented shuckling. Maybe it isn't the oxygen uptake that makes walking effective for drilling or shadowing language, maybe it is the rhythmic movement. Even as the course gets more difficult later on, I intend to keep up this schedule. A week of trying is enough, even if a drill isn't "mastered". When I have school vacation, I may try to do two Units at the same time, we'll see how I feel about it when a vacation arrives. I may also do the last 10 units or so over two weeks instead of one; many people seem to find them extremely difficult. Once again, we'll see. Edited by sfuqua on 19 September 2014 at 9:34pm 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 6 of 83 19 September 2014 at 10:12pm | IP Logged |
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Good point James. I will complete FSI; I don't hate doing it at all. It's just work sometimes. It is kind of fun when the automatic processing part of the brain will spit out and answer before the conscious part of the brain hasn't analyzed it yet. I think I need to stop thinking about how I'm talking, or at least pay less attention to it. I think I have some bad habits from doing activities where I have unlimited time to figure out how to build a sentence. You don't have any time to think about conjugating a verb in the middle of a conversation.
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| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4757 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 83 20 September 2014 at 5:19am | IP Logged |
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In case somebody is reading this log who isn't familiar with FSI courses, I'll give an overview. During and after world war two, the US government had a need for a large number of people who could speak various foreign languages. The courses produced in the 1950's and 1960's primarily used what was called the audio lingual method, a language teaching method based on behavioral psychology. This method involved memorization of dialogs, listening and repeating, and doing drills. These drills generally involved coming up with a response to a stimulus. These generally take the shape of substitution drills, where you generally replace a word in a sentence with the stimulus word, and transformation drills where you do a regular change in the sentence. These drills are done orally at as rapid a pace as the students can stand. FSI Basic Spanish is strongly in this tradition. Audio lingual instruction was effective with motivated students, although it was not magical. It fell out of favor when behavioral psychology fell out of favor, although audiolingual instruction was never proven to be less effective than other methods, whatever you read on wikipedia.
Check the courses out at http://fsi-language-courses.org/ Edited by sfuqua on 20 September 2014 at 5:49am 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 8 of 83 20 September 2014 at 5:46am | IP Logged |
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Let me give a brief overview of the first 7 Units of FSI.
Units one and two have a section of basic sentence to memorize, and a bunch of pronunciation drills. These units were two easy and short, and I did them both the same week, treating them as one long lesson. I had a breakthrough on my rr doing these drills. I can differentiate between r and rr, but my rr is not really Spanish. My rr pronunciation of r at the beginning of a word got better from doing these drills. Unit three starts the regular pattern of conversations and drills that the other Units of the course take. There is very little in FSI that is completely new to me, but I have to work to get to the point where I can perform at speed. Singular gender was the big topic this unit. This one was pretty easy. Unit 4 was hard for some reason, although I got it down by the end of the week. It dealt with number in nouns and the verb estar. Unit 5 for some reason was very easy, I was at 90-95% on the first day. I repeated it for the week anyway. It dealt with ser. Unit 6 was easy also, and dealt with -ar verbs in the present tense. Unit 7 seemed very hard when I first did it even though I had it down by the 7th day. It concentrated on -ir verbs and demonstratives. I start Unit 8 tomorrow. Edited by sfuqua on 20 September 2014 at 5:50am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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