rtickner Diglot Groupie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3510 days ago 61 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French, Spanish
| Message 9 of 14 05 June 2015 at 3:27pm | IP Logged |
Day 6
Most frequent 1,000 words passed through initial memorisation in Anki. Has consumed around 2
hours a day so far. Many words similar to English/French or learnt already from Michel,
which helps a lot.
Had a conversation with my brother in Spanish this morning - he is all but fluent after
having lived and worked in Chile for some time. Speaking at a relatively slow pace, we were
able to organise our weekend plans and engage in some general chatter about work and family.
Wasn't expecting much on that front yet, quite pleased.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
rtickner Diglot Groupie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3510 days ago 61 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French, Spanish
| Message 10 of 14 10 June 2015 at 3:57pm | IP Logged |
Day 10
A rather urgent work project has set my writing progress back a little, but I have finished listening to the Michel Thomas Language Builder and
Advanced courses, and am half way through the Vocabulary Builder course.
Anki vocabulary is going well - despite the limited time, 1500/5000 new words have been initially memorised - I spend between 90 and 120 minutes a
day on this. This vocab work is already paying huge dividends in that I can focus more intently on the structure of the language in the Michel Thomas
courses, rather than being bombarded by new vocabulary and new structure at the same time. There were only a handful of new words/expressions that
were new in Michel Thomas, which had not already been learnt through Anki.
So much of language learning is psychological - if I learnt anything from studying German, it's to resist the urge to "pause" or "stop" learning
partway through a course because it "feels" too difficult, which led me to "half-finishing" a whole bunch of course. During the Michel Thomas Spanish
courses (especially the Advanced Course), there were parts where I was muddled about the correct verb endings for different tenses, and sometimes I
would completely draw a blank. Whatever you do, do not stop at this point. Keep going. If you find the term "past subjunctive" daunting, face it head
on, and complete the course. At the end, when Michel says "That gives you all the tools of the language", something clicks over from "facing the
unknown" to "reinforcing and revising what is already known", which psychologically is much less intimidating.
10 days ago Spanish was complete gibberish - yet from an article randomly chosen a moment ago from Google Noticias (http://www.prensa-
latina.cu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3880441& Itemid=1), there were only two unknown words (desafíos and ámbito, and the
rest of the article was readily comprehensible. I'm happy with those results.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5300 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish
| Message 11 of 14 10 June 2015 at 4:19pm | IP Logged |
rtickner wrote:
10 days ago Spanish was complete gibberish - yet from an article randomly chosen a moment ago from Google Noticias ([...], there were only two unknown words (desafíos and ámbito, and the
rest of the article was readily comprehensible. I'm happy with those results. |
|
|
That's great! I'm happy for you, too.
2 persons have voted this message useful
|
rtickner Diglot Groupie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3510 days ago 61 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French, Spanish
| Message 12 of 14 13 June 2015 at 5:17pm | IP Logged |
Day 13
A good day for milestones.
* Anki - most frequent 2000 words have now been initially memorised. I've dropped back
to recognition only (Sp -> En) due to time constraints.
* Finished listening to the Michel Thomas Vocabulary Builder. All MT listening
complete now.
* Finished the translation of the MT Language Builder transcript from En -> Sp,
checking afterwards for correct spelling. Next up - MT Advanced translation.
Strongly considering iguanamon's suggestion re: incorporating a few more courses after
Hugo in 3 Months.
The stats in the first overview post of the thread have been updated (as they will be
as time progresses).
Edited by rtickner on 14 June 2015 at 3:10am
1 person has voted this message useful
|
rtickner Diglot Groupie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3510 days ago 61 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French, Spanish
| Message 13 of 14 14 June 2015 at 5:46am | IP Logged |
On reviewing suggestions made by forum members earlier in this thread, I have added the following courses to the plan on page 1:
- Destinos - watched episode 1 - I can tell this is going to be fun to explore the different dialects and regions of el mundo hispano.
- Learning Spanish Like Crazy - listened to the first few lessons - feels like Pimsleur, will be good practice to go over what I learned from Michel Thomas, plus learn some new usages and slang.
- Assimil - listened/read lesson 1. Have used it before, like the small bite-sized lessons.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
rtickner Diglot Groupie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3510 days ago 61 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French, Spanish
| Message 14 of 14 16 June 2015 at 9:35am | IP Logged |
Having come this far, I am now putting Spanish on hold to work on German. I will return
to Spanish when time permits.
1 person has voted this message useful
|