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FSI and SRS | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4953 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 9 of 83 21 September 2014 at 11:08am | IP Logged | ||
There is a third cathegory. People not doing FSI for a different reason than finding it boring/ineffective. I really considered doing FSI as my main German course, and I would recommend everyone the pronunciation chapter, but there have been huge ortograph changes. I want to learn German with now correct orthograph right away, not to relearn it later or to use orthograph which is going to slowly die out and which may cost me some successes with the language. For French, I was already too advanced, for Spanish I have other methods I prefer. But I may give it a real go for Swedish or another less common language. Yes, the courses are old and I think it does affect some aspects of learning from them. The German orhograph is just the most visible exemple. However, the method is awesome and efficient for anyone willing to get through it I believe. I am glad you like it and I wish you a lot of success, it trully looks like exactly what you need. I'm looking forward to reading about your further progress. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5319 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 10 of 83 21 September 2014 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Steve, I am a little bit concerned about your FSI plan. If I understand you correctly, you are planning on doing each lesson seven times and you are going to do FSI every single day. You have a good amount of Spanish under your belt... you know the grammar and you know a lot of vocabulary. My only conclusion is that your estimate of getting 90% right after seven runs through is too harsh and you are likely doing it much better. How would you describe how you do the third time through each lesson?
For what it is worth... I suggest somehow finding an alternative way to scale things back a bit and try to get through the course faster or with fewer repetitions. If you want to do it most days try doing each unit three times and conquer two units per week. Just move on after you go through each lesson three times. Then when you "finish" the course you can take a break for a while and simply go back through the course again hitting each lesson twice or so (this is basically what I did). Or, if you really do need to go through each lesson seven times to come close to mastering it you might want to work through something else first (do an active wave of the Assimil book) and come back to FSI. I'm not saying you cannot do it the way you have set out... I just think it would be a long tough haul. Again, my sense is that you are being too tough on yourself and your Spanish is better than you think and you are really doing fine with each lesson after three-ish passes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4088 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 11 of 83 21 September 2014 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm a big fan of FSI. I haven't finished the course - I got up to unit 48 or 49, then went to Spain, and never picked
it up again. I'm thinking that I might go back to unit 40 and finish the whole course. But I'm one of the people who thinks that it's a good route to automaticity. I wasn't super demanding on myself. If I mostly "got" a unit, I moved on to the next. I couldn't tell you my accuracy percentage, because I didn't count errors. I just decided after an audio track if I felt comfortable, or if I should run through it again. I had already worked through a lot of Practice Makes Perfect Spanish verbs (a workbook) and SRSed a lot of the irregular verbs, so that helped too. I guess you could say that I used FSI as a supplement rather than as the cornerstone of my learning. I think you'll really get a lot out of it, and you'll be amazed at the progress that you make! Still, I think that it's important to include native material as well. At your level, you could listen to podcasts, read easy novels, do language exchanges on Skype, write short texts and have them corrected by native speakers - all of these are really important. It's especially important for synergy. It's one thing to drill a sentence structure through FSI. It's another to drill it through FSI, notice it in a book, hear it on the news, hear a native speaker use it during informal conversation, and then use it yourself in writing. Then it's *really* yours. If you have an hour to devote to Spanish every day, maybe you could spend half of it on FSI and half of it on other stuff? (In case you're interested, I wrote a pretty long review about how I use FSI) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7149 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 12 of 83 21 September 2014 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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With FSI, some drlls and some types of drills are much more challenging than others. Rather than count the number of times I did a drill, I did a drill until I got it down to a satisfactory level. That might be ten times for some drills, and might be several dozens of times for others (over a long period of time). Edited by luke on 26 September 2014 at 8:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4709 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 13 of 83 21 September 2014 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for all the nice advice and good words everyone :)
I know that different parts of FSI vary in difficulty, it's just that I am constitutionally unable to make reasonable decisions about how well I have learned a lesson. I'm am always second guessing, backtracking, getting frustrated at slow progress skipping ahead too fast, and in general behaving the way students do when they need a teacher. If I make an objective measure of how well I'm doing, say 20 errors or more in an hour means repeat the lesson, I put a lot of pressure on myself to meet the standard ("My God, I'm at 19 errors with 4 minutes to go, I've got to be perfect, what was that prompt? Does that count as an error? I was thinking about errors not paying attention... D**n it, now what was that prompt? I stink... This course stinks... I should study ancient Latin, nobody expects you to be fluent in that... Now what was THAT prompt? I'm hopeless!) I'm just going to do the lessons a certain number of times, overlearn some things and underlearn others. Seven is probably too many times for somebody at my level, by the fifth time through I usually have made all the progress I'm going to. If I leave my number of repeats at this level, however, I should get all there is to get out of FSI. One hidden advantage of overlearning is that it makes the last few repeats very easy. One hidden disadvantage is that you will have forgotten the first part of the course by the time you're on the last part if there isn't enough built in review. My personal rule for this is that if I get through the lesson 5 times over the week, I'll count it as done. If illness or schedule make it absolutely impossible to do the lesson for a day, I'm not going to obsess over it. I may drop back to only doing the lessons a fewer number of times a week if I become convinced that I don't need this many repeats. If my Spanish was a little stronger I would try sweeping through with just a few repeats, but I want to be sure that I get everything out of the course there is to get. I am working through a 10000 sentences deck in my spare time all this time, so I'm reading native language material for at least 45 minutes a day, albeit in the unnatural context of an anki deck. I listen to about 30 minutes of radio in Spanish a day, either Voice of America Buenos Días América, or Noticiero del Mediodía de Caracol podcasts. I try to make these other things as just a normal part of my life, not a part of my dedicated hour of Spanish. I think I need to get an easy Spanish novel in my backpack for times when anki is done for the day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4709 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 83 21 September 2014 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I started Unit 8 yesterday. I kept the book open but rarely looked at it. I only look at the book when I get lost and I intend to read all the grammatical explanations. There is little in any of the lessons I have read in the course which is completely new. I lack speed and automaticity. Unit 8 looks pretty straightforward.
Now for some results so far. I definitely am more quick and accurate with the parts of the grammar that FSI has covered so far. I look forward to the lessons where I will learn some of the other tenses and develop speed with those. I also seem to be getting better at doing FSI drills themselves. I seem to be able to work through them more quickly than at the beginning. I'm looking forward to being able to handle bigger and bigger pieces of Spanish grammar at full speed as the months go by. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4709 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 15 of 83 21 September 2014 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would really like to get finished with FSI by next June. I'll be on trip to the Philippines next summer, and it will confuse my poor Tagalog even more than it is already if I'm doing FSI drills.
When I finish FSI, if I'm at the B2 or so level in Spanish, I plan to switch to L-R, shadowing, reading, and reading aloud with native language materials. That's a ways away and I don't want to sound too much like the little kid who says he wants to be doctor when he grows up :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4709 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 83 23 September 2014 at 4:46am | IP Logged | ||
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I missed doing Unit 8 yesterday for no good reason, so I did it twice today. Whatever the Unit gained in familiarity from doing it twice, it lost in fatigue. Twice is too much on a work day...
I did a best case scenario for completing the course before my Philippines trip next summer. I don't see how I can do that without moving a lot faster than I was planning. Getting to Unit 45 seems doable even at my "about one unit a week" pace. Unit 45 seems like a good place to do a review of the course, if I haven't done so already. By that lesson you've done a most of the tenses, and after that the course gets harder. Maybe I'll just start a "one day a Unit" review of Units 1-45 during my time in the Philippines. Instead of actually worrying about when I'll finish FSI, I'm going to pretend that it will go on forever. A day which involves anki, a podcast, and an FSI lesson isn't that bad. Someday I'll do a week of Unit 55 and then I'll have to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I'm just going to keep moving forward. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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