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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5019 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 33 of 46 26 November 2013 at 7:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Just a reminder, I have a Google doc that tracks what I've done on which
days in more detail than I'm posting here. Platiquemos 8 Assimil 54 Destinos 25 Notes in Spanish Beginner 6 Scrubs 4 I started doing Notes in Spanish podcasts, the beginner ones. I figured I'd breeze through the easy ones. Plus, I've been listening to them at work, so I don't have my total concentration. I also started watching Scrubs in Spanish. I know the series really well so I usually know what they're talking about before I hear what they're saying, so that helps. It's really difficult to understand, although sometimes I surprise myself in what I understand. Anki is really helping me out here. I've so far done 1500 Anki flash cards, which means about 750 words since there are siblings. Anki really, really works. I wish I did it more with French. I'm sure there are easier shows to watch than Scrubs, but it's really fun, and sometimes doing things that are fun is really important in study. -- Stelle: yes, Destinos has gotten much better. I do find some things about it annoying, and I don't get the point of the recap episodes, but overall it's enjoyable. I've been coming home from work, fixing dinner and then watching an episode while I eat. I'm liking this habit out of all the study I'm doing. fortheo: yeah, some habits of MT are quite annoying. He corrects the student's stress levels over and over and over and over, but doesn't care about pronunciation issues otherwise. And like you mentioned, his accent is horrible. I do agree that his courses are a good way to pick up grammar quickly. However, I'm in this for the long haul, was already planning on going through Platiquemos, so I knew I would get a solid handle on the grammar through that eventually. I weighed the pros and cons and just decided that the annoyingness outweighed the utility. :) Good luck with your French! It's a beautiful language. Also, I've met a lot of people from Quebec and they've all been so so soo nice. I'm sure you'll love it there! Thanks for the replies, both of you. It's motivating to know that people actually do read these silly little updates. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4701 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 34 of 46 26 November 2013 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | ||
Just popping in to say that I love the Google Doc! The color-coding is so great. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5019 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 35 of 46 10 December 2013 at 7:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Platiquemos 11
Assimil 64 Anki (30 words a day, I missed a few days) Destinos 34 Notes in Spanish 10 Scrubs 19 Seinfeld 7 There was a pretty good stretch during the Thanksgiving festivities where I was visiting family and barely studied. That's ok though. Breaks are good for your brain. I'm enjoying watching Scrubs (and now) Seinfeld. I know both shows really well so it helps with the dialogue. And more than anything, I can watch these shows for hours and not feel like it's studying (which it isn't). I know that watching TV at this point isn't as good as studying a program, but it's fun and I never watch TV otherwise, so it's really really easy to do. It's giving me a lot of exposure and I can already tell that it's getting easier. -- Hekje: Thank you! I'm so glad I'm keeping record of everything in this doc. It keeps me really motivated to work hard every day. Plus, in a year or so, it will be so great to be able to look back and see at a glance how I learned Spanish. And when my friends ask me, "how did you learn Spanish?!" I'll have one small doc that shows exactly how I did it. I wish I did this with French! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5019 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 36 of 46 01 January 2014 at 3:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Platiquemos 12
Assimil 74 Destinos 45 Notes in Spanish 15 Scrubs 26 Seinfeld 8 Extr@ 13 Anki Harry Potter 1 page! I keep telling myself that I'll post an update here after my night's studies, and then when I get finished studying I'm so tired that I go straight to bed. Not today! Not on the last day of the year! So it's been a slow few weeks. I went home for Christmas and spent every waking moment seeing friends and family, and also had two full days of driving by myself where I couldn't really study. Then shortly after I got home I came down with a cold and that wrecked me pretty good, all I wanted to do was sleep. Suffice it to say that I haven't made the kind of progress that I would generally like to. However, on the positive side, I feel like I'm really make a lot of overall progress. Sometimes I'm listening to Spanish and forgetting it's Spanish. That's always a good sign. I'm quite impressed with things overall, and I have very high hopes and motivation for 2014! A few quick notes on what I've been doing: Platiquemos - It is, as expected, quite boring and I don't really like to do it. That said, I know it's extremely beneficial, moreso than any other program, so I'm still trying to do a little bit every day. I have over a year to finish it so I don't think that'll be a problem. I'm amazed at how some people here were able to repeat the same thing over and over until you had everything super automatic. At least so far, I've been moving on if I can think of the answer, or I get an answer wrong but it was a dumb mistake because I was hurrying. If I know the rules that it's trying to teach, eventually it'll become automatic. And I'd rather the automaticity come while I'm traveling or at least doing something more fun than Platiquemos. :) Assimil - This program is so weird. Seriously. Sometimes I sit there with a gaping jaw at the things they're saying. I remember the French Assimil being witty / funny. The Spanish dialogues can be super depressing and downright weird. I'm almost 3/4 through this course and to be honest I'll be happy to kiss it goodbye. Destinos - This course has gotten a lot better than the beginning. I still don't get why the first 5 minutes are devoted to review/previews of the current episode (I'm about to watch the episode, don't give me spoilers, holy geez) and the last 8 minutes are review. Which leaves about 10 minutes in the middle for new material. Unless it's a flashback episode. >_> Notes in Spanish - I'm halfway through the beginner lessons. I'm sure I could easily move on to the intermediate, but I'd like to finish this. I just haven't made it a priority to do at home. For the most part I've been listening to one at work while I eat lunch or something like that. I'm considering making this a goal that I do one per night while I'm at home. Scrubs - I'm on the second season. I realized that, while I've seen the first season a bunch (since I own it), I've only watched the rest of the show about one time each. So I don't know the plot nearly as well and it's harder to follow. I think I'll still continue watching this though. Seinfeld - I decided that, even though I know Seinfeld really well, it's a little too difficult without subtitles of any kind. Scrubs is actually far easier than this series. I'm putting this one on the back-burner for now. Extr@ - I watched this show for French and really enjoyed it. It's 13 episodes long and I watched it all in one day while I was sick. It's so cheesy, and for some reason so enjoyable. Highly recommended. The plot is EXACTLY the same as the French one. That probably helped my comprehension, but overall it was very easy for me to understand everything. Anki - Anki rules. If you're not doing Anki, you should be. Harry Potter - I finally started reading! Last night I started reading the first Harry Potter. This time I'm adding every unknown word to Anki. I got through one page last night and racked up quite a few new cards. :) I'm positive that this will be something that will progress me faster than almost anything else. I've read the first 6 Harry Potters in French and that has helped me immensely. But one thing I never did was add words to Anki. In fact, I only looked up unknown words for the 2-3 books IIRC. The rest I just read like a normal book and used context to figure out words. That DOES work, but I think it takes longer, and it produced some weird effects. I would understand words/sentences, but couldn't translate them at all. Because, they made sense in the context of what was said, but since I had no English correlation I couldn't connect the dots. I think that's all for now. I'm seriously excited to see how things fall into place this next year. My New Year's Resolution is: "do things." I have a lot of things I want to do. But most of all I want to be productive and have some amazing experiences. I hope you all have a great NYE and a super productive 2014! Edited by LeadZeppelin on 01 January 2014 at 3:23am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4142 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 37 of 46 01 January 2014 at 7:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I love your New Year's resolution!
When I watched Destinos, I skipped the intro. I also skipped the recap shows altogether. I still found it a very useful resource! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5533 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 38 of 46 01 January 2014 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been tempted to skip parts of Destinos but haven't and a few times I've already
found myself glad that I did not (and I'm still quite early in the series). Embedded in those similar intros is often material that seems to be intentionally placed there to prime you for when it reappears later in the episode (as they show previews of scenes from that episode in the intro). Also, I just watched my first recap show (episode 6, where she is on the train) and there was more than just a recap in there as they did progress the story as well near the end of the show by introducing what seems to be a few irrelevant characters throughout the episode (to have an excuse to provide dialog on the train) until one makes a suspicious phone call at the end of the episode suddenly changing your impression of this character into someone who may be relevant to the story after all. Another reason I decided against skipping any apparent repeat footage is that I started to notice very early on (by the 2nd or 3rd episode) that I often understood a lot more during the repeated scenes than I did the first time those scenes appeared (even if that repeated footage was merely in the very next episode, so it isn't like side studying over time is what changed anything). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4142 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 39 of 46 01 January 2014 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | ||
I think your way is much smarter than mine! I'm just a bit of an impatient person, and I couldn't deal with the repetition. I think I got it in my head that I just wanted to get through Destinos and move on to something else. If I were suggesting Destinos to a new learner (and I do suggest it, all the time), I wouldn't suggest that they skip anything. Do as I say, don't do as I do, right? Ha! I do think that Destinos is an absolutely amazing resource for beginners - and free makes it even better! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5533 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 40 of 46 01 January 2014 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I definitely understand the desire to "finish" a resource then move on. When I saw it was
52 episodes my first thought was to watch one a week for a year (since the episode count seemed to imply that could have been the intent), but that felt too slow as I wanted to go through it faster than that (same with 2/week for 26 weeks). I finally decided on 4 days per week (both weekend days + Tuesday + Thursday) which will allow me to complete it in 13 weeks. That number was much more palatable to me while hopefully still being spaced apart enough (every other day except for the two adjacent weekend days) to prevent burnout before finishing it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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