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srs, fsi, podcasts, l-r, shadowing | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 25 of 44 10 March 2014 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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At my intermediate stage, I feel like the main thing I'm missing is vocabulary. If you don't know a word, it can make a sentence incomprehensible. If you can't think of a word fast enough, you stumble and sound bad speaking.
I hope that the 10000 sentences will teach me enough vocabulary that it will help both my speaking and listening/reading. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 26 of 44 24 March 2014 at 4:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Ok 1900 cards in anki in the learning and mature categories.
I've read about 166000 words so far this year in Spanish. My grades so far: SRS: 89% Reading:74% I'm doing better. I'm not suffering, but there are times when it is hard to get through the anki deck. One problem I didn't anticipate is that I find that there is a lot of competition for my time. I used to always carry a book everywhere I went; I would read a few pages during times spent waiting during the day. I thought I could get in few pages during the day. Today, I do a few reps on anki whenever I have a spare moment. I'm reading less than I used to. I continue to have steady improvement in my passive skills. I can just read most normal, online news stories. I miss some vocabulary, of course, but I can figure it out from context. The people on the radio seem to be speaking more slowly and clearly, although I can still get lost if there is a sudden change of topic. I read a bunch of the Spanish language translations of Hemingway's Fiesta and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley. I have a harder time with the vocabulary in these, but I'm much better off than I was. Gabo still is way beyond me, unless I'm LRing. I've got to try some Isabel Allende. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BOLIO Senior Member United States Joined 4651 days ago 253 posts - 366 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 27 of 44 24 March 2014 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just wanted to drop by and tell you that I am following your log with great interest and hope to be where you are now and where you are wanting to go. I too want to be able to speak Spanish at a very high level but I really want to be able to read massive amounts of Spanish Literature.
I wish you the best in your studies. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 28 of 44 13 April 2014 at 6:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I've lost two long posts, so this time I'm going to paste it in after I'm done.
I did one long post on emk's blog, pure brilliant reasoning I'm sure, and it somehow disappeared; I attempted a short version, which didn't make that much sense. I then did a long post on this thread, and it also disappeared. It's probably user error. A post is due on this thread; so here it goes. I'm at 2400 cards on anki in the learning and mature categories. This is still below the pace I need to get to 10000 by the end of 2014. I should have reached 2500 by the end of March. I've slowed my new card pace down to 30 new cards a day, and I'm reviewing about 150 each day. I find this a quite bearable pace so far. Reading is getting easier and easier. Newspapers have moved from partially comprehensible to completely comprehensible with a few words I don't know, but I can get from context. In general, novels translated from English have become readable. If I am familiar with the story, I can just keep going to the end. Unfamiliar stories may need a dictionary occasionally. I have trouble with native Spanish materials pretty often. A dictionary or L-Ring helps. I had a thrill the other day reading El pergamino de la seducción by Gioconda Belli, and it wasn't one of the erotic scenes. I took off reading and went about 5 pages before I hit a word I didn't know or a sentence I couldn't understand. I fell apart over the next few pages and had to look up some words, but it wasn't bad. I wonder if I shouldn't just keep charging ahead, ignoring vocabulary. I had an amusing experience this morning. As I was dropping my daughter off at ballet, and I got a skype call from someone I'd been trying work with, but had sort of given up on. I got my daughter into ballet, and then took the call. I had no idea who this person was, only that he or she was from Colombia. Suddenly I was facing a lovely young woman, and my Spanish fell completely apart. I've always had a tendency to fall apart around beautiful women, (remember the guy from The Gods Must be Crazy I) and adding my intermediate Spanish to my usual clumsiness... It was a pretty humbling experience. The young lady in question was helpful and I survived enough to talk about astronomy; we compared light pollution, and I eventually calmed down. My wife thought I was hysterical; I was pretty far from a smooth operator in any sense. I almost felt that the big dose of vocabulary I recently have learned made me less fluent. I kept stumbling and fumbling for half learned words when I would have sounded better if I had just kept it simple. I really needed more of those Shekhtman islands to sound good while I recovered. I need to make sure that I don't spend all my time in books. A pretty face shouldn't be able to drive me into incomprehensibility. :) Edited by sfuqua on 13 April 2014 at 7:00am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5123 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 29 of 44 13 April 2014 at 8:04am | IP Logged | ||
Your progress sounds good, you're not far behind schedule.
What you could do is to try extensive reading without looking up much (or anything if you're game) for a month. Even if after that month you come to the conclusion that it's not efficient, fun, useful etc., you won't have lost much. What, after all, is a month in the grand scheme of things? But if you find it to be a positive experience, you've got one more tool, one more choice. I personally enjoy extensive reading much more than looking things up while reading. I want to get into the story, experience flow, and my experience is that the meaning of new words often just pops up in my head after a few relevant encounters. Many people combine extensive and intensive reading, or limit the amount of words they look up, or only look up words after the second encounter etc. You've got many options, I would just try it out for some reasonable amount of time (a day or a week is often not enough to see the benefits and costs of a particular method, but a month should be). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 30 of 44 18 April 2014 at 1:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Garcia Marquez has died.
I am so glad that he lived. I thank the many people on this forum who encouraged me to study Spanish and to read his books. I haven't read everything he wrote yet, so he is still alive for me. They will read him a thousand years from now. Edited by sfuqua on 18 April 2014 at 6:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 31 of 44 25 April 2014 at 12:33am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm at 3000 sentences today. It looks like 8000-9000 sentences might be a comfortable number for me to get through this year. Of course there is nothing magic about 10000 sentences, it is more of a brag than anything else. I recently found myself dreading my anki reps more than I should, so I cut back my new words to zero for a couple of days and just did my reviews. What a huge difference! I feel much better about the whole process. What was interesting was that the sentences I was reviewing were suddenly much clearer. I had a much more frequent experience of formerly difficult sentences just "popping" into focus instead of being opaque. I think that I have a tendency to force feed myself too much of particular ways of studying. I usually have "breakthroughs" when I shift gears. I felt guilty about laying off new cards for a couple of days, and yet it was one of the best things I've done.
Now, results. I have a steady increase in my ability to read, well everything. News on the web is pretty easy. Young adult books translated from English are pretty easy too. I'm still need support for native novels in Spanish. Big chunks of native novels will seem easy, and then I will hit a page or two where I need help. I think I'm going to stop trying to analyze this and just start doing extensive reading, as Bakunin suggested. Long ago, in Samoa, where I was learning my first nonnative language, I read a manual that a Morman missionary had on learning to read a foreign language. It suggested something like Bakunin suggested, saying that it was better to just make a wild guess at what an unknown word was than to stop to look it up and lose the flow of the story. I could read aloud an hour a day for a month, and see if this wouldn't jar me into just being able to read. I've been dreaming about doing the "Super Challenge". There's nothing in the Super Challenge rules that I see about how well you have to comprehend what you read for it to count. I've been concerned recently how badly my spoken Spanish falls apart if I get nervous or have some distraction. I think that I just don't speak Spanish enough. Since I started studying Spanish two years ago, most of my studying has been aimed at building passive skills. I did the first 10 lessons of Pimsleur, decided it was too slow and then did Assimil. If you are not a genius, or you aren't in an immersion situation, Assimil is best at building passive skills. I actually didn't finish the entire active wave of Assimil, although I did shadow the living daylights out of it. Shadowing seemed to improve my pronunciation a lot, but it involves following another speaker, not building your own sentences. I did Michel Thomas first course, and I had a big, temporary increase in speaking ability. Then I fiddled around with some disorganized reading and shadowing for a few months without accomplishing much. I started FSI, and found at about lesson 15 that it was getting very hard, and I was enjoying reading-listening. I quit FSI and L-R'ed my way through Cien años de Soledad a few times. I had a big increase in listening comprehension. Everything except Michel Thomas that I've done has been mostly passive. Given my lack of attention to my active skills, it is no wonder that my passive skills are way ahead. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 32 of 44 25 April 2014 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been thinking of getting a teacher on italki to help me build a bunch of
"Shekhtman Islands". I could shadow through some of these every day, so that I would get in some "speaking" practice even if I don't have time to do anything except anki and reading. Hmmn... I'm going to try to set this up tonight. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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