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TAC 2009: Spanish, French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 9 of 120 29 November 2008 at 12:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Today I did half of CD 1 of the MT Vocabulary course and Pimsleur lesson 19 twice. I find in the Pimsleur lessons I keep saying "Yo me gusta" instead of "A mi me gusta". At first I had trouble remembering to say things like "hace calor" and "hace buen tiempo" instead of "está caliente" and "el tiempo está bueno", but I feel like I'm getting the hang of it now, hopefully it'll be the same with remembering to use "a mi/el/ella/etc".
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 10 of 120 30 November 2008 at 2:33am | IP Logged | ||
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Doing Pimsleur (lesson 21) today was really frustrating, it was one of those lessons where my tongue kept getting tied. The single 'r' just really messes me up, and it is in so many words! I am getting more comfortable with the 'dr' combination, but 'rd', 'tr', 'rt' and other 'r' combinations where the other letter involves the tongue make it really frustrating for me. I don't really know what to do, because it feels like such a big obstacle and prevents me from getting entire sentences out.
I also finished CD 1 of the MT Vocab CD and started on CD 2, all in all about 40 minutes. I was still feeling a little flustered from the Pimsleur lessons, though. Edited by Crush on 30 November 2008 at 7:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 11 of 120 01 December 2008 at 3:50am | IP Logged | ||
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30 Nov.:
Today went better, I feel, but I still see the single 'r' as a big obstacle to fluency and it's hard for me to try and just step around it. Anyway, I reviewed lesson 21 of Pimsleur (somewhere along the line I either didn't record or mis-recorded some of the Pimsleur lessons I've done, as I haven't recorded doing Pimsleur lesson 20) and went on to lesson 22. I meant to do some of the MT Vocab course, but didn't. Instead I started on Platiquemos, just sort of playing around with it. I'd already run through Unit 1 really quickly, so today I went through Unit 2. I must say I'm not quite sure how to use this course. I've read the instructions and it really just isn't that clear to me. I think right now it's a little more difficult to figure out how to use it since all of the vocabulary and structure is really familiar, so figuring out how to actually learn from it is challenging. Also, going through the exercises was a little confusing too, although I had a cold today and don't think I was completely concentrating on it, so maybe tomorrow with a clear head it will make more sense. After messing with Platiquemos, I went on busuu.com and posted some corrections for people trying to learn English, then ended up talking to someone on the chat room feature for a while in a mix of Spanish and English. It was pretty cool to be able to talk with someone in "real time" and I really enjoyed it, I definitely recommend checking the site out. Yesterday was also interesting, I spoke with someone from Slovakia in German and we were both able to have a conversation and get the general idea of what we wanted to say across, each of us in our non-native language of German. The concept of using a middle language to communicate was something I found really interesting. Anyway, I just finished my Mnemosyne reviews and I've finally sorted that huge messy pile-up of words into my long-term memory (according to Mnemosyne, at least :P). The past few days I've had around 300 words a day to sludge through, tomorrow it shows me having 125. It may be time to get some more words from the frequency dictionary :) Hmm.. how about I set some pre-TAC goals. I want to: 1. have 2,000 words in Mnemosyne and sorted into my long-term (passive) memory.* 2. I want to finish the MT Vocabulary course (all 5 CDs) 3. continue doing one Pimsleur lesson a day, so I should finish Pimsleur II and be almost halfway through with Pimsleur III 4. shift my main focus into FSI after finishing the MT Vocab course. Optimally, I'd like to be around units 7-9 at the start of the TAC. * After removing a lot of the English -> Spanish cards, I have 988 cards in total. There are probably a few more cards in there that I will delete, so this means adding about another 1,100 words from the frequency dictionary. That's 44 new cards a day or about 300 new cards a week, assuming the official kick-off is December 25th (I think that was the day Reineke mentioned). In any case, that's the date I am using for my PRE-TAC goals :) Well, there you have it, my pre-TAC goals. I guess it isn't really too demanding, so long as I can remain consistent in my studying. I suppose I'll see how it goes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ExtraLean Triglot Senior Member France languagelearners.myf Joined 5998 days ago 897 posts - 880 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 12 of 120 01 December 2008 at 5:58am | IP Logged | ||
Welcome to the dark side. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 13 of 120 02 December 2008 at 6:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Heh, thanks ExtraLean.
1 Dec.: Today I did lesson 23 of Pimsleur, about 15 minutes of the MT Vocabulary course before I (literally) fell asleep, and my SRS reviews. I think I might review lesson 23 once more before I sleep. EDIT: I ended up reviewing lesson 23 again and finishing up segment 1 (CD1 and about 90% of CD2) of the MT Vocab course. Edited by Crush on 02 December 2008 at 1:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 14 of 120 03 December 2008 at 4:01am | IP Logged | ||
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2 Dec.:
Today felt like a really good day as far as language learning goes. I woke up still feeling sick, so my first run-through of Pimsleur was stressful, but later on I started to feel better and really enjoyed studying. Pimsleur lesson 24: twice MT Vocab: about 30 minutes FSI Unit 2: I don't really know how long. I went through the basic phrases and the exercises many many times, and if I had to make a guess I'd say I spent about two hours on it today. I think I'm going to move on to Unit 3 tomorrow, though I'm still confused how to tell when to move on. The exercises were also a bit confusing, because I couldn't find a pattern in some of the questions. I was really tempted to start actively studying German today, because after I'd done all this I was still anxious for more, but somehow I managed to waste away the time while thinking what I should start first :P 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 15 of 120 03 December 2008 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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3 Dec.:
So far today I have done: Pimsleur lesson 25: twice MT Vocab: maybe 30-40 minutes FSI Unit 3: once SRS reviews I'm about to go for a bike ride and I think I'll work on Unit 3 some more. UPDATE: It was too noisy today to be able to listen and understand the already awful quality of the FSI courses, so I didn't do much more of Unit 3. However, I did try out Iversen's word list method (I think, or something like it). What I did was right down 5-7 words I wanted to know, went through them until I thought I'd memorized them, wrote down the translation, and then went on to another cluster. Every three clusters I reviewed the words, and when I reached the bottom of the page I reviewed the whole thing. Then I covered up column one and went through the whole list writing the translations on the third column. Then I did one other set of this. These were with words I put into Mnemosyne, as I find it's hard to get the words initially into your long-term memory. After I had done both sets, I went back and culled words that I had trouble with or weren't able to recall at all in the translation stage and again put them into clusters and went through the process again. I think this method has a lot of potential, but the one thing that doesn't work very well for me is learning the initial cluster. I try to vary them up and recall them in different orders, but I can still see the ones around it and it seems like I am just memorizing them and not learning them. In the end, I did have a pretty good grasp of most of the words, but I think it might be more effective if you had a partner to read each word to you randomly until you had learned them, then afterwards you would fill in the translations (and since the words were presented to you in a random order from the beginning, the words as presented would still appear random and so it makes it less likely that you are memorizing a series of words). I might try this tomorrow with a friend who is studying German.. Anyway, it's been pretty interesting now that I've started learning vocabulary with SRS, the past few lessons almost all of the "new" vocabulary Pimsleur is introducing I've already learned :) Edited by Crush on 04 December 2008 at 3:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 16 of 120 05 December 2008 at 5:19am | IP Logged | ||
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4 Dec.:
Today I went through Unit 3 in it's entirety twice, the first time through repeating each section until I felt thoroughly comfortable with it, the second time through I repeated two of the drills near the end. I also went through the opening dialogs again a few times, in particular the second one. When asked to recall "Doscientos en billetes y cincuenta en moneda. ¿Dónde está la embajada americana?" it keeps tripping me up. None of the other words give me any trouble, but billete and moneda are words I've never heard before and it took me some time to process it. After spending about 3.5 or 4 hours on it today, I think I'll be fine moving on to Unit 4 tomorrow. So far I have really enjoyed these lessons, and I'm really excited to get to the Units with verb tenses to really drill those into my head. I also went through un poquito of the MT Vocab course, but it just really can't hold my attention. I think it might have something to do with the times that I do it, often in between Pimsleur and something else and when I am just sitting on a couch listening to it. I should try going for a walk or bike ride while doing these. I think I went through about 20 minutes today. I also did Pimsleur lesson 26 twice. I'm excited to finish level II and start level III. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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