|
 |
The importance of milestones | ||
Tags: Goals | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Tilia Diglot Groupie Denmark Joined 4477 days ago 48 posts - 68 votes  Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 11 02 October 2012 at 11:51pm | IP Logged |
|
In the last couple of years I have been trying to maintain and improve my Spanish, on
and off. In some periods with more efficiency and motivation than others. Lately I have invested more time in it and I am trying a little more systematic approach. For one thing I joined this forum and will try to take some of the good advice given in here. I do not have any specific plans, in near future that requires that I learn Spanish well. It is more like a hobby. I just like the language and dream about traveling to South America again one day. My first question is: How important do you think it is to set oneself specific goals and deadlines to really get anywhere with teaching oneself a language? I do have a long term goal of reaching some level of fluency, but can that be enough? Combined with thinking that it is fun and interesting to learn more of the language. From reading some of the posts in here I get the impression that most people like to set themselves specific goals like: In 3 month I would like to be able to do this and that. I can see how having such goals (steps on the way) would probably improve my learning. My next question is: Which kind of measurable goals can or should I set myself? Sometimes I find it hard to find out how much progress I am really making, though I have definitely improved since I started the project. So in other words how do I best test myself? I am not (yet) using any of the language programs that are frequently recommended in this forum (assimil, pimsleur ... ect.) Maybe they have inbuilt tests? In terms of methods and materials I have used only what I could find for free on the internet. You tube videos, Hola que tal, radiolingua podcasts, song lyrics, I tried out some limited free versions of langue programs like Babble, I use flashcards(actual physical flashcards, so according to some I am a cave man ;-))and I use SpanishDict for translation. (Mods. If you think this post belongs in another section please just move it. I know it says that this section is for learners of their first foreign langue. But I felt that it might be considered a too basic and newbie like question to fit anywhere else.) Edited by Tilia on 03 October 2012 at 12:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Rob Tickner Senior Member New Zealand Joined 4489 days ago 126 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English* Studies: GermanB1, French, Swedish | Message 2 of 11 03 October 2012 at 12:59am | IP Logged |
|
Without concrete and quantifiable goals, I lose steam quickly. Qualitative goals can be
justified away into oblivion, which for me defeats the purpose. With your techniques (flashcards, for example), it shouldn't be too difficult to set some good quantifiable goals for yourself. You could then run vocabulary recognition/production tests at prescribed intervals to test yourself and see if you met your goals. Example: You have a deck of 1000 Spanish flashcards, you set a goal to be able to recognize 95% of them Spanish->Danish, and to produce 85% of them Danish->Spanish, by the end of the month. Edited by Rob Tickner on 03 October 2012 at 1:00am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 3 of 11 03 October 2012 at 1:04am | IP Logged |
|
Here's a nice thread about goals.
Also, I like Benny's approach to this and the consistency thread is a place to go for that. For females, it can also be beneficial to try to be in harmony with your cycle. (for example, trying to evaluate your progress while you're irritable due to PMS will do more harm than good. identify what contributes to your irritation but don't look for more!) My approach is to mostly improve by having any input I want, and occasionally making the effort to stick with the same materials and use them with more frequency. I then evaluate my progress. If I'm not where I expected to be, the decision depends on whether I'm enjoying it. If I'm bored, I don't continue, but if I'm enjoying, I try to get the most out of the resource, even if I realize it can't give me as much as I wanted. I just recommend you to keep studying:-) Sooner or later you probably WILL run into a specific problem - then just it think over and decide what to do about it. You're studying a widespread language with some fantastic resources out there. You're pretty much guaranteed to get fluent if you just stick to it. Try to make it a part of your lifestyle. Coat the learning in as much sugar as you want :) Here are my favourite resources for Spanish: http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/# http://www.learner.org/resources/series75.html a tv series for learners http://albalearning.com/ http://lyricstraining.com/ http://gloss.dliflc.edu/Default.aspx - free lessons with interesting content 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 4 of 11 03 October 2012 at 1:32am | IP Logged |
|
Welcome Tilia.
And don't worry about being accused of being a Caveman. It shows distressing ignorance on the part of the wiseguys. Cavemen didn't have access to paper. Paper in any form would almost certainly not have been available before the onset of agriculture, which is probably within the last 10,000 years. Cavemen, as should be well-known, did their flash-carding on huge tablets of stone. Didn't anyone here watch "The Flintstones"? Sheesh! :-) More seriously, although I try not to be too neurotic about numbers, it does definitely seem to help to have some concrete goals, and echoing Serpent, I've found the consistency thread really helpful, as consistency was something I was dreadfully lacking in the past. (And I still have to work at it). I'm of the school of thought that tries to get into native material as soon as possible (which can be in parallel with formal courses, whenever one feels ready). It's up to you to find the materials that will suit you, but it could be something like "listen to xyz podcast for at least n minutes each day", or "watch 1 episode of xyz" per day, or per week, or per month, or "watch 1 TL DVD per week", or whatever, or "read 1 chapter of abc" every other day", etc, etc. And/or, as has been suggested, it could be in terms of vocabulary learned, or grammar units mastered. In fact it's probably useful to have goals in at least those 3 fields in mind most of the time, i.e. -Vocabulary -Grammar -Native input (audio, audio-visual, written) and some "output", whether spoken or written or both. (You may know there are some who think you should delay "output" for as long as possible, until you have had sufficient "input", and that there are also many who do not take that view!). I won't express an opinion on that. You probably have your own views, and in any case, you might find your ideas developing as you go along. (I've changed my mind quite a few times about a lot of things, especially since joining HTLAL. It's an ongoing process). 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4950 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 5 of 11 03 October 2012 at 2:04am | IP Logged |
|
Sorry, still getting glitches to post a new thread. Edited by outcast on 03 October 2012 at 2:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4493 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 11 03 October 2012 at 3:11am | IP Logged |
|
The answers you will get, as shown in the posts above, are of two different types:
1) goals for time and effort spent for various methods of learning; 2) goals for testable/measurable activities like learning so much vocabulary in a time period or finishing a course. Testing ourselves outside of formal tests like CEFR is often difficult. Since as is commonly known around here the difference between one level and another is not linear, but rather one of orders of magnitude (the inverted cone analogy), it takes a lot more time and effort to advance than previously. If the first 3000 words covers 95% of a text, it takes another 3000+ to achieve 98% and much more to make it to 99.5% (not exact figures but for purpose of illustration). And of course it is further complicated because one's current abilities can be unbalanced across the four capabilities of speaking/listening/reading/writing. What you possibly can do is try to make a self-assessment according to the criteria for various CEFR levels available on the internet. Or you could take time to read various newspaper articles in different topics and listen to short newscasts and a couple telenovela episodes. And you could try to find some Spanish speakers and see how long you can hold a meaningful conversation. And then you can devise a program to improve your abilities. It might include completing a course like FSI/Platiquemos, Assimil, or whatever to get to a solid B1+ across the board, and then go from there. Or you could work through the series of cheap Practice Makes Perfect workbooks for grammar while drilling a large flashcard deck. Or in an effort to improve everyday conversational ability, study idiomatic phrases and discourse makers. When you can get to 95%+ coverage you can use extensive methods (google on this domain for comprehensible input and extensive reading and listening). But to get to that point and also quantify your progress, you probably need to use established formal courses and workbooks plus flashcard drilling. Otherwise doing a little of this here and a little of that there, while it does add to your abilities, has a way of making for a haphazard course of study and progress that is hard to measure (I know because I did that for a long time with Spanish myself and am now trying more formal methods). Methodical means plus consistency gets you farther more efficiently in the long run as far as I am concerned than disorganized consistency alone (search for Iversen's series of posts on language learning as he is the king of methodical methods). As for Serpent's mentioning being in harmony with your cycle, I can't comment and will leave that issue to you ladies as thankfully that is not a consideration for we gentlemen. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 11 03 October 2012 at 1:54pm | IP Logged |
|
Well, the OP is already intermediate in Spanish. And 95%+ is waaaay too much:) How about Katò Lomb's method? :P I myself prefer to be at like 60%.
I forgot one more link: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Techniques See especially shadowing, LR, scriptorium, reading strategies. Edited by Serpent on 03 October 2012 at 1:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 8 of 11 03 October 2012 at 2:04pm | IP Logged |
|
@Tilia,
As you like physical flashcards, Iversen's word lists might also be worth exploring, since (assuming you write your own flash cards), they also depend partly on the act of physically writing down the words (or short phrases) with your own hand, and some sort of {eye:hand}-{brain:memory} process taking place. They also use the principle of trying to get the information into your long-term memory, for example by delaying writing down meanings for as long as possible, so (having looked it up and stored it in short-term memory), you then have to retrieve it, and the hope is (maybe after repetition) it has found its way into long-term memory. I have probably missed some essential points, so it is better to read Iversen's own words on the subject. There are quite a few postings, but the best place to start is probably here . There are 5 parts now I think, and part 4 deals with word lists among other things. I've used a combination of word-lists (my own variations on the basic method), plus physical flashcards (again in various methods, but I use the "delay writing down meaning" principle in that as well. Some days I'm in a word list frame of mind, other days it's flashcards, but it also depends on logistics and what else one is doing, of course. I like to consolidate my word lists into a hardback book, which is perhaps where I deviate from Iversen. But this leads me on to something else: The Gold List method. I'd heard of this ages ago, and seen it described by people who used it, but was not really struck on it. however, I'd never bothered to hear what the inventor of the system had to say about it, so I didn't understand the principles behind it, but now I do, and I'm going to give it a try. Check out the links I posted in this unlikely sounding thread. My posting is here (there are 3 links within). His website (blog) is here and the Goldlist section is here (but have a look around - there may be other bits and pieces about it elsewhere on the site. Now, a bit of a warning: he is seriously eccentric. However, coming from an Englishman, that is a compliment. We are quite fond of our eccentrics. :) If they happen to be geniuses, so much the better. I might not go so far as to say he is a genius, and he doesn't claim to have discovered the psychology behind it, but his genius, or talent anyway, is exploiting what others have discovered. And no one seems to doubt his own ability in Polish, Russian, and perhaps German, although he claims to know 20 languages (not all at the level of his Polish and Russian though). He writes on a lot of things, not just linguistics, and I am trying to ignore most of it, as it's easy to get distracted, and I suspect I wouldn't agree with some of it, but I think the Goldlist method is definitely something worth trying, and it only costs the price of a few good hardback notebooks to begin with, and your time, in chunks of 20 minutes (with at least 10 minute breaks) for as often as you want to do it in a day (but don't overdo it). The essence of the method is to relax and enjoy it, not to sweat it. Don't try to force things into your memory. That might get it into your short-term memory, but your long-term memory is a different thing altogether. Let that work at its own pace and in the long-term this will pay dividends. That's the theory anyway! I'll let you know if it works in a year or so's time :) (And you can do likewise if you like : ). Do Svidaniya! :) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
