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Solaren’s Spanish Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| solaren Newbie United States Joined 3529 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 1 of 11 15 May 2015 at 5:01am | IP Logged |
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After 6 months of solid study of Japanese, I'm putting it on hold and starting Spanish. This is primarily to spend more time with my wife who is interested in learning Spanish, but not very interested in Japanese.
さようなら日本語...y hola espanol! In all reality I'll come back to Japanese in the future, I just love that language too much to stop and I was making great progress. However, I just don't have time right now to make real progress in both Japanese and Spanish. So! How am I going about this Spanish thing? Well, my wife and I are different learners and right now we are taking different paths. She's starting with Pimsleur each day and I'm doing 1.5-2 hours a day of Platiquemos which is based on FSI Basic. So far so good, I've just "finished" unit 3. "Finished" with a unit for me means that I can read and understand all of the Spanish in the chapter, do 100% of the drills with unlimited time to answer (by reading the drills and covering half of the page), and I can do the drills at 80% accuracy using the recordings with very limited time to respond. If I spent any longer than that I'd get really bored. After I finish a unit, I've been putting all of the drill sentences into an Anki deck in L1 -> L2 format. My goal is to get through this course and move straight into native materials, maybe Harry Potter with a dictionary handy. If anyone has advice or questions or comments please feel free to post as much in this thread as you want. I'm looking forward to talking with you. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BeBetter Newbie United States Joined 3483 days ago 18 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 11 15 May 2015 at 1:00pm | IP Logged |
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Awesome to hear you are adding another language to your bag. It will be interesting to
see where the different courses take you. If only I could convince my girlfriend to learn Spanish with me! Best of luck, I am looking forward to following your log. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| solaren Newbie United States Joined 3529 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 3 of 11 20 May 2015 at 8:45pm | IP Logged |
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As of today, I'm still working on unit 4 of Platiquemos. One hour a day this week has
been about the most I can spare, hopefully I'll have more time next week to devote to it. Unit 4 seems about twice as long as Unit 3 so far, so it's been taking me longer to get through. Currently I can read the entire unit in Spanish and comprehend what I'm reading, but my timing still isn't fast enough on a lot of the response drills, so I don't think I've internalized everything yet. I'd recommend to anyone doing FSI / Platiquemos to enter the sentences into Anki. I feel like using Anki with Platiquemos has really boosted my efficiency so far. I'm not sure if Platiquemos / FSI is the fastest way to get someone comfortable speaking Spanish... but it sure does feel dense! It feels like an accomplishment moving from unit to unit so far. Edited by solaren on 20 May 2015 at 8:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5228 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 4 of 11 20 May 2015 at 9:26pm | IP Logged |
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You might want to check out EMK's Spanish experiment if you're using ANKI. He used subs2srs in order to help create "earwigs".
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 5 of 11 21 May 2015 at 2:02pm | IP Logged |
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Good luck. Your strategy is very similar to what forum member Crush did originally and it worked wonderfully for him... work through FSI very thoroughly and then move on to native materials. Good luck. I'm sure you will do great!
I think of FSI and Pimsleur as quite similar... but Pimsleur is simply a lot easier. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| solaren Newbie United States Joined 3529 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 6 of 11 21 May 2015 at 8:06pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the comments!
@rdearman: I actually read through EMK's subs2srs log while I was actively studying japanese and gave it a try. I found it complicated to wrangle subs2srs into submission and for Japanese it was difficult finding native subtitles for anime. IIRC he used avatar with Spanish dub, which would probably work a lot better than what I was doing. I'll be interested in giving it a shot at some point with this language project. @James29: Thanks for the support, I'm interested to see how far Platiquemos will take me as a primary method. I'm not in a huge rush, so I'm just trying to digest everything in front of me before moving on to the next unit. Anki has been really helpful though, it allows me to review information in a written format and on the go on my phone. It's not a replacement for the oral response drills but I definitely feel it's worth it despite the amount of time it takes to make the cards. One of my goals for this log is to at some point stop writing my entries in English. It will be interesting to see when I feel comfortable enough to make the switch. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| solaren Newbie United States Joined 3529 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 7 of 11 22 May 2015 at 3:19am | IP Logged |
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So I actually had to use some Spanish today when having a conversation with my
cleaning lady. BTW I know how stereotypical that sounds, but I live a couple hours north of Mexico in California and in my case all of my neighbors are Mexican, as well as a lot of the population here so... my cleaning lady *happens* to be Mexican. So forgive me for how that probably sounds :) In any case, her English is probably not far ahead of my Spanish and so when I was having a conversation with her today about needing to reschedule my appointment next week because we are moving a bunch of furniture around the house, she misunderstood and thought we were moving. I paused for a moment trying to recall my 4 units of FSI before coming up with: "Hay mucho movimiento en la casa ahora mismo." She understood, and got a kick out of me speaking Spanish. I had to tell her I only speak a little. She was disappointed lol. 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 8 of 11 22 May 2015 at 1:53pm | IP Logged |
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There are very few Spanish speakers around me and one of the few "happens" to be my cleaning lady. How does that happen?! Unfortunately, she cleans the office at night when I'm rarely there so I don't get to talk to her too much. But, I can relate to that funny stereotype feeling you are expressing.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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