LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5019 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 25 of 46 07 October 2013 at 7:55am | IP Logged |
I made a Google doc to track my progress, to motivate me, and to make
sure I stay consistent. Plus I think it'll be neat to look back on later. Here's where all of my programs are:
Pimsleur 44 (Pimsleur II lesson 14)
Michel Thomas 3 (no progress)
Assimil 12
Destinos 2
I also started doing Anki. Just a frequency 5000 word list.
I've probably been averaging about two hours a day. If I keep that up for a year I think I'll like the results!
Edited by LeadZeppelin on 07 October 2013 at 8:05am
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LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5019 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 26 of 46 14 October 2013 at 8:27am | IP Logged |
Current progress:
Pimsleur 55 (Pimsleur II lesson 25)
Assimil 19
Destinos 5
Anki 20~ minutes total
I had a friend come into town and because of that barely had any time to study. So I had three days where I did
absolutely nothing and one day where I did some things but didn't meet my goals for all of my programs. Next week
should be much more productive though!
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LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5019 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 27 of 46 24 October 2013 at 6:58am | IP Logged |
Pimsleur 75 (Pimsleur III lesson 15)
Assimil 29
Destinos 11
Anki 156 minutes since the last update. I'm doing 50 words a day.
I'm ready to be done with Pimsleur! I'm going to start Platiquemos when I finish with it. I'm glad I'm already
supplementing Pimsleur with Anki, because it's apparent how little vocab it teaches you. Still, I think it's a very
worthwhile program and quite easy listening.
I'm uncertain when I'm going to be able to start listening to podcasts. I could probably start reading Harry Potter at
any time... though it would probably take me 45 minutes per page at this point to look up all the vocab I don't
know. That's a daunting task that, so far, hasn't been very tempting.
I have mixed feelings about Destinos so far. I feel like it's going soooo sloooowww. After 11 episodes, I'm still at a
loss why they spend several minutes at the beginning explaining what the show is, and telling you about the
different kinds of Spanish you'll hear. No, not the differences like South American vs Spanish, but conversational,
the narrator, and when Raquel talks to you. What? There's really no difference in any of these "kinds" of speech,
except that the characters talking together obviously talk faster. Is it really necessary to make me listen to this every
time I put an episode on? Episode 11 was actually a flashback episode where they took a few episodes and replayed
entire scenes from them, so there wasn't even any new content. In a normal episode, scenes are repeated and
paused etc. and makes me feel like there is barely any actual content in it. I figured that by now it would'e been
moving a lot quicker at this point. I hope it picks up anyway. The story is decent when it actually moves.
Anyway, I'm feeling pretty good at this point. I'm a little under one month since I started. Considering that I have a
full time job and plenty of other hobbies, I've made quite a lot of progress. Approaching A1 maybe. :)
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LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5019 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 28 of 46 05 November 2013 at 9:34pm | IP Logged |
Pimsleur 85 (Pimsleur III lesson 25)
Assimil 36
Destinos 13
Anki 136 minutes
So I went five days without doing anything. I was preparing my halloween costume, which ended up taking forever.
I'm back in the swing of things now. Almost finished with Pimsleur and looking forward to starting Platiquemos.
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LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5019 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 29 of 46 11 November 2013 at 6:49am | IP Logged |
Pimsleur 90 (Pimsleur III lesson 30)
Platiquemos 4
Assimil 42
Destinos 17
Anki (continued 30 words a day)
Yay, I finished a course! PImsleur I - III is out of the way and I'm on to bigger and better things. I've done
Platiquemos 1 - 4 so far. It's been easy for me so I've been breezing through them. I'll probably go pretty quickly
through 1 - 10 and then slow down quite a bit. But we'll see.
Feeling good. Motivation level pretty high. Still very excited to crack open the books each day.
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LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5019 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 30 of 46 19 November 2013 at 6:57am | IP Logged |
Platiquemos 6
Assimil 49
Destinos 19
Not the most productive week. I was pretty busy over the weekend though. Hopefully I do better this week!
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Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4142 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog
| Message 31 of 46 21 November 2013 at 2:14am | IP Logged |
LeadZeppelin wrote:
I have mixed feelings about Destinos so far. I feel like it's going soooo sloooowww. After
11 episodes, I'm still at a
loss why they spend several minutes at the beginning explaining what the show is, and telling you about the
different kinds of Spanish you'll hear. No, not the differences like South American vs Spanish, but conversational,
the narrator, and when Raquel talks to you. What? There's really no difference in any of these "kinds" of speech,
except that the characters talking together obviously talk faster. Is it really necessary to make me listen to this
every
time I put an episode on? Episode 11 was actually a flashback episode where they took a few episodes and
replayed
entire scenes from them, so there wasn't even any new content. In a normal episode, scenes are repeated and
paused etc. and makes me feel like there is barely any actual content in it. I figured that by now it would'e been
moving a lot quicker at this point. I hope it picks up anyway. The story is decent when it actually moves.
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Do you find that Destinos is getting better, or is it still too slow? I liked the speed, but I skipped over the intro of
every episode. I often skipped over Raquel's recap at the end as well. And I didn't watch any of the flashback
episodes at all.
After finishing with Destinos, I moved on to Notes in Spanish (intermediate podcasts) and Spanish TV shows with
English subtitles. Now I'm watching TV shows dubbed into Spanish (no subtitles, but I've seen them in English in
the past). Yes, Destinos is silly and inane and slow at times. But I don't think that my comprehension would be
what it is now if I hadn't started with Destinos!
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fortheo Senior Member United States Joined 5034 days ago 187 posts - 222 votes Studies: French
| Message 32 of 46 25 November 2013 at 2:10am | IP Logged |
Nice learning log, I really enjoyed reading it!
What was it about Michel Thomas that you didn't enjoy? I really like the Michel Thomas method for Japanese, but that recording had a female teacher and not Michel Thomas. I've heard some of the actual lessons by Michel Thomas and his voice/ accent really grated on me. However, I still think it's an easy way to pick up a lot of essential grammar very quickly.
Good luck! I started learning french a few weeks ago and your thread really motivated me. I am in a similar situation as you were at the beginning of this thread, except I'm going to Quebec not Belgium.
Take care!
Edited by fortheo on 25 November 2013 at 2:11am
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