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| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5704 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 17 of 27 06 November 2012 at 6:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks again iquanamon! These look excellent. Definitely going to give these a try as my input ratio of authentic material:didactic material starts to change.
I learned this well with my German. :D I actually try to give comments back in Spanish when I can (which can take forever since I have to get my comments checked over by someone - usually I throw it in a conversation I'm having over sharedtalk.) I think I have a pretty good reputation so far. Sometimes I have my writings checked over more than once (I know, crazy right?). The first person will say, "No, that's not correct. Here ya go!", the second person will say, "That's correct, but this sounds more natural. Here ya go!", then I hand it to one of my tutors and he/she says, "Wow, you sound like a native! You can also use this word if it's a high register conversation blah blah blah. Here ya go!". Of course I don't do these with all my conversations, but you get the point. If I'm confident, it's fairly short, and I'm in a hurry (like feedback for a tutoring session), I'll ask someone over sharedtalk or see who's online from Skype and get an answer right there, and usually with a good explanation. :)
You know it's weird, I have this book, matter of fact I have two copies of this book (shipping mistake, don't ask), come to think of it I've even read two chapters of this book! All I can say was I felt like I was being taken away from the language by reading this (in English) so I put it down and I actually thought it was kind of overrated. Inspired by your post, I picked it back up again over the past few days and finished all 215 pages. It IS excellent! It's just not organized very well, haha. Most of the information I wanted/needed to know was in the middle of the book. I can definitely understand why it's so highly rated, and most of the information here seems worthy of going into Anki. Thanks Iguana! I might never have come back to it otherwise. Weird reading something in this book then immediately spotting an example of it in my graded reader or hearing it on TV. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5704 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 18 of 27 06 November 2012 at 7:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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OK, so I've decided to casually (sc. hurriedly and unpreparedly) post this since I realized I'm beginning to forget all I've done in the past few days. Things may get a bit messy - sorry for the long post!
Reading: I finished the last 14 pages from book 4 (Aventuras de Gil Blas) of Castillo and Sparkman's Graded Spanish Readers and I have to say that I've liked it the most so far even though it was an adaptation of a book from (stolen by?) Padre Isla via Alain-René Lessage who borrowed considerably from Vicente Espinel who in turn borrowed copiously from other Spanish picaresque novels. The novel itself is very Spanish, and still remains witty and hilarious to this modern reader (especially for an adapted, didactic-type text). Maybe I'll check out the full "original" French version one day. Moving on, I read the 5th book (La Gitanilla) by - you guessed it - ¡Cervantes! (this is cool). It was enjoyable but less so. The language, though edited for didactic purposes, rang archaic. That was 41 pages, and with that I finished tome one of the 2 volume set. In volume 2, I read book 6 (Un Vuelo a México) which was 36 pages, and the first 24 pages of book 7 (De México a Guatemala). These books are great little original stories about two newlyweds traveling around various parts of Spanish America. They're actually pretty enjoyable, and tell a lot (in Spanish) about the history and the indigenous past of Mexico. It's weird that though this edition is from the 40's, the language is still strangely modern sounding (even if the situations or political correctness isn't). 3 more books left in the series. Other things I've done over the past couple of days: - Trimmed out the dialogs from all 40 lessons of Ultimate Spanish: Beginner - Intermediate, cut out any unnatural gaps, sped them up anywhere from 5% to 17% (the recording quality of the CDs, though crystal clear, is allover the place when it comes to acting and pace of the speakers). What a HUGE difference this makes - they actually approach sounding like real Spanish speakers (sort of). I cut the whole thing down to 31 minutes which I can just play straight through, shadowing or just listening, and loop it all I want. After I sped it up, I noticed I had some weak points so I went back to the originals and reviewed/shadowed. I've listened to/shadowed this version of the dialogs at least 10 times while exercising or driving around. Haven't had a chance to clean up all the vocabulary in the book and translate the dialogs yet, though. - received and listened to all of the audio from this book which is absolutely excellent. I didn't understand most of the idioms, but I understood the situations and since I could mostly understand what was literally being said in the idioms I could also infer a lot of the meaning. This program is excellent not just because it's a series of dialogs built around idioms (which is a great idea), but because the audio is brilliant! This is how Spanish people actually talk, or at least the ones I know, and I'm not talking about the dialogs themselves, I'm talking about the lilting accents and phrasing of the speakers. While the speakers mostly speak more slowly and clearly than normal spoken Spanish (hello Audacity!), there's no effort to make it sound like international Spanish (as in most courses). Very few courses have this quality opting instead for radio-announcer-played-in-slow-motion, so I was kind of shocked when I heard the first few dialogs and thought to myself, "that sounds exactly like my friends Natalia and Melenie when they Spanish". As for the idioms themselves, some are pretty regional. I tried out, "cada muerte de obispo" (~ "once in a blue moon") with a Peruvian girl and she didn't get it at all. Some other notes on the book: all the dialogs have nice, little introductions at the beginning of each dialog, each idiom or expression is typed in bold in the dialog, after the dialogs 2 examples sentences of each expression are given, then little quizzes are given to solidify your knowledge. All the dialogs are translated in the back along with a full answer key to the quizzes. There are 25 lessons that are extremely similar to what a Latin American Assimil might look like (though there is no learning gradient with respect to difficulty since this book isn't for that purpose; also the dialogs are a bit more risque than what might be found in an Assimil). The only downsides are it only has a Spanish->English glossary and the cast of actors is a bit female heavy. - Listened to all the dialogs from Spanish Beyond the Basics. This is a truly excellent coursebook and is perfect for following up Ultimate Spanish: Basic - Intermediate (I have Ultimate Spanish: Advanced, but it's very business oriented). There's much less of a constructed feel to the dialogs (which are much longer) since they're not trying to cram every new grammatical point and thematically related vocabulary word into a 1 minute dialog. The speaking is a bit slow (yay Audacity) but it's much more natural sounding and the quality of the recordings themselves is excellent. I recognize many of the actors too. Can't wait to jump into this actively. - Finished watching Dragon Ball Z in Spanish. I've now completed all 444 episodes of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z which totals up to around 140 hours of listening input (conservative estimate). My listening comprehension has gone up from around 30% when I first started watching the shows around 6 months ago to up around 95%. Don't know if I'll watch Dragon Ball GT. Even though it's the only one I could find with subtitles available, I always found it kind of boring compared to the other two. Dragon Ball is simply hilarious, and always brings back great memories of my childhood. Also, now having watched it in 3 different languages, it's funny to see how far different cultures have gone in editing out the more provocative aspects. The German so far is the best: most unmolested and best translation. The American English version is the worst and the Latin American Spanish one is almost as good as the German one, but they seem to have been strangely uptight about Master Roshi's perverted nature (copious amounts of editing in this respect). The Peninsular Spanish version takes the editing even further, but not by much. I think the Peninsular Spanish version was made first, then the Latin American version "translated" from that. - Finished lesson 40 of Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish. I started this book in the beginning of my studies but got bored at lesson 40. I realized it's relatively incomplete with respect to a lot of the tenses. I liked it at first, since I'm one of those grammar-translation guys and this is the only thing I've found worthy of being called a Latin American Spanish grammar-translation manual that even comes close to being half as good as those that abound for German *sigh*. I'm only finishing it because it keeps giving me dirty looks from across the room. - Did my weekly round of tutoring. Had my best tutoring session yet, though I'm still not sure why all my tutors are consistently surprised with my level of Spanish. Maybe they're just trying to cheerlead. It's fun adjusting to the three very different personalities of my tutors, and sometimes quite challenging (in a good way). Edited by Rout on 16 November 2012 at 5:20am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5704 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 19 of 27 15 November 2012 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wow, what a week (not just for language learning). I've been spending a little too much of my free time in English so I'll try to make this brief.
Reading: I finished volume two of the Graded Spanish Readers by finishing the last 17 pages of book 7 De México a Guatemala, all 39 pages of En Guatemala, the 41 pages of Volando por Sudamérica, and the 40 pages of Un vuelo sobre los Andes. That's 137 pages of intensive reading in a little over a week's time. I suppose that's pretty good. So what are my opinions of the series? I absolutely loved books 6-10 (volume 2). The characters (a newlywed couple named Diego and Patricia) were very likeable and the story was very interesting and well written. Patricia and Diego end up traveling across South America for their honeymoon, and most of their interactions with the natives center around conversations about the culture, history, and indigenous populations of each country. At short of 200 pages I felt like it ended a little abruptly, and I definitely would have liked to enjoy more of it. I hear there are alternative versions of books 6-10 that focus on different countries, maybe I'll check them out. The vocabulary must be useful since I continually hear it come up in my Skype lessons (to which I respond: "¿Cómo? ¿Puedes teclearlo? Ah eso es lo que quieres decir, claro, claro." Then, boom, it's in my active vocabulary). The end vocabulary says it contains 2671 root words, but this did not include words whose meaning could be easily derived from their English cognates (though some were not so easily derived unless you had a big English reading vocabulary already). Anyway, there are 60 pages of vocabulary of which I may or may not make a sweep (such a daunting task!). Book 1 was a lot less enjoyable and more easily identifiable as didactic literature. The literature excerpts were nice, but the second book was a lot more enjoyable. I haven't chosen my third book yet, but I think I'm going to go with Easy Spanish Reader by William T. Tardy since it's the only other graded reader I have that's not in bilingual format. In order to get through it sooner (since it looks a good deal easier), I'm going to read it cover to cover out loud. I've noticed when I try reading a new passage out I struggle, but when I read it to myself or read to myself then read out loud, it's no problem. It's like when I try reading out loud I have less ability to concentrate on the meaning. This suggests to me that it's harder, therefore my new challenge. We'll see how it goes. Other Stuff: Really too much to list. I should have posted sooner but was waiting to finish the second reader. I'll list some basic things: - Continuing conversational lessons with my tutors. They all three say that my conversational abilities are noticeably improving quickly. I don't notice it. I hope they're not just being nice. I've noticed one of my Colombian teachers has kind of a quirky accent; "cada par de zapatos" turns into "caaa par 'e z'pat's", like she's out of breath. Just an observation. I'm also taking part in the italki challenge, so I've added a couple of more lessons next week. That's 5 one-hour lessons in a row Monday through Friday! I'm still not sure how to prepare for the lessons. So far self-talking seems to be the best. Reviewing a list of words I want to use during the conversations is the worst. - I've been listening to my edited version of Living Language Beginner-Intermediate and I think I've gotten as much out of it as I can for now. I've listened through Beyond the Basics and while it is really good, it also seems very basic; not much new vocabulary here, but it's kind of fun activating the vocabulary I've read. We'll see what I go for next on this front. - Watched a little TV, typed up a few painstakingly crafted letters, had some more (typed) conversations on sharedtalk. If anything else comes to mind I'll post it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5704 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 20 of 27 28 November 2012 at 7:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Reading:
Well, I haven't had much time this week to post, and the holidays made studying itself a little challenging, but I'd like to declare that I've finished my third book Easy Spanish Reader by William T. Tardy. This book is absolutely excellent. This is the first time I've tried reading a book aloud from the outset and I have to say it was pretty successful. Sure, there were some words that tripped me up, but overall, since the material was easier on the whole, it wasn't that bad. I've probably read through the whole book a total of three times. So, what did I like about this book? Well, even though the material, vocabulary, structures, etc., were easier, they were all extremely useful. Also - and I can't stress enough how much I love this - every couple of sections has a review. This was so useful! Each review is a summary of the previous sections, therefore instead of skimming the whole book when you're done, you can just read the reviews (which is exactly what I did when I finished the book). Also, being the kind of book that it is (a reader), the exercises are very good; most of them are oral exercises asking you to recall and put in your own words different aspects of each chapter. If used in conjunction with a teacher, this book could take an an intermediate- or advanced-beginner very far. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to complete the exercises. Also, it apparently comes with recordings but the version I have (though I bought it new) did not for some reason. I've now moved on to the well-known First Spanish Reader by Angel Flores. I've started and stopped it a few times already, since I'm trying to figure out the best way to proceed while reading aloud. When I've used bilingual texts in the past, I'd read until I came across a strange word or construction, look at the translation, then moved on, but I'm not sure if this is the best approach since I've heard of other approaches in which the complete English set of translations is read along with the Spanish. I might do a little experimenting in this area since the rest of my readers are all bilingual. I'll keep you posted. Other things of done: - Again, I've been experimenting a bit and I've done so many things and with such infrequency (because of the crazy holiday weekend) that it's hard to recount all of it. Anything I experimented with was in addition to my steady set of conversational practice (this current week is my 5-days-in-a-row week), watching tv, reading articles here and there, writing, and talking on sharedtalk. The only thing missing is reading readers, since I inadvertently took a 2-3 day break from this. Also, I'm not sure how much more I can get out of Assimil/Living Language/Linguaphone type courses, that is, the jack-of-all-trade type manuals that don't focus on vocabulary, grammar, idioms, etc. in isolation but all at once. I'm not completely sure, but I think I'm beyond this and need to start drilling down on my weak points instead. - I've noticed some problems spring up with my use of the subjunctive (big surprise) and my speed with some really common irregulars (dar, hay, etc.) which I plan on drilling almost exclusively as far as grammar goes this week. - I've found an extremely pleasant way of gaining vocabulary for anglophones learning romance languages - guessing! I find myself guessing all the time in my conversation practice and getting it right more than 75% of the time. Why not just look it up in the dictionary? Because when you guess it it sticks! The only word I've had to guess more than once was "significado" (I keep wanting to say "significación" which, though apparently it exists, gets me somewhat perplexed looks - much in the same way we don't use "signification" that much in English, I guess :p ). - Yesterday was my best conversational practice to date since I myself actually noticed a difference. Today I was a little less impressed with myself in speaking, but still no longer having to focus on listening at all (except for the odd word here and there not yet in my vocabulary). I noticed one of my favorite things to do is explain English modes of speech or English expressions in Spanish. Fun! Upcoming plans: Just wanted to mention that I've scanned Mastering Spanish Vocabulary, which is a thematically divided vocabulary book broken up into 24 units. Most of my conversational lessons from here on out will center around one of the 24 categories. Each of my three teachers will let me know a week advance which category and I will memorize the vocabulary, intensively read a few articles on the subject, watch a few Youtube videos on the subject, and write one (or a few) essays on the theme before having our lesson. Theoretically I should have gone through each theme 3 times within 24 weeks. I'll be using Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Vocabulary to supplement my studies. I've never successfully completed any type of targeted vocabulary acquisition, so this is more or less an experiment. The reason I'm doing this is, unlike languages I've studied in the past, I need to get good in Spanish quick (that is faster than 1.5 years from beginning to fluency) so we'll see how it goes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5704 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 21 of 27 07 December 2012 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thought I'd make a quick post since this is probably (I hope) the last week in which I can't really make excuses for not studying more. This is finals week (I have a final in Chinese today!) and needless to say my attention has been drawn away from Spanish a bit.
Reading: So I have indeed taken a different approach to reading bilingual texts and I did start with First Spanish Reader by Angel Flores. The book itself is a pretty good collection of stories and I especially like the proverbs. I'm halfway through the book (if it weren't for finals I'd probably be done). For this book I'm reading the sentence in English then reading the Spanish equivalent aloud. With pencil in-hand while I'm reading, I'm underlining any words I've never come across or that I know (usually cognates) but aren't in my active vocabulary. Any sentence structures I don't know I underline as well (not really much on this front, but I like underling curious sentence structures and copying them into notebooks - I actually used to do this in English with my favorite authors). I'm going to sweep the book again and write all the underlined words in a notebook for deeper examination later. When I'm satisfied, I'm going to read the whole book aloud (it's not terribly long). Other: Well, as for my speaking sessions, I've had my best and probably worst this week. I think generally I'm improving, but I had to rush home from a work-outing for one and exhausted and unprepared, I muddled through not really able to say much. Hopefully the next will go better. I've decided to postpone drilling my grammatical weak-points until after finals. I have worked through all the vocabulary agreed my tutor and I agreed upon. The topic he chose was Chapter 10 - "Leisure Time, Recreation, Sports, Games" from Mastering Spanish Vocabulary, since he thought it would be an easy start, which it was. I knew most of the vocabulary, and it was actually kind of boring topic for me anyway, but I know it's an important subject. I've decided to do the same topic for all three tutors (don't want to spread myself too thin on vocabulary work). Just as an aside, my work Spanish is fairly fluent. Last Sunday I got mistaken for a native speaker twice. I was asked if I was Colombian (I guess since I am "de tez clara" and have an "acento claro"). It's kind of funny observing the opinions that people of one country have of another. I used to think of the hispanophone region of Latin America as analogous to a country like the United States - just a bunch people living within the arbitrary borders of one "state" or another. That may be the case, but they certainly don't see it that way. I've officially given up on telenovelas (for now anyway). I just can't watch them, they're too boring. I tried going back to adolescent cartoons, but there's not enough vocabulary there. I've switched over to watching kung fu movies dubbed in Spanish, which is both entertaining to me and still challenging enough to get something out of it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5704 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 22 of 27 13 December 2012 at 9:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Una muestra de mi escritura:
Como bien saben, estoy aprendiendo español y, en cierta medida, puedo hablarlo y escribirlo bastante bien (a veces). Estoy ganando terreno – o así lo creo – en todos los frentes, pero especialmente con respecto a mi dominio idiomático del español; es decir, cada día que pasa o absorbo o aprendo activamente varias colocaciones, dichos, modismos, etc. Pero esto no es suficiente. Estoy harto de cometer errores y de no poder encontrar las palabras adecuadas todo el tiempo. Por eso he decidido hacer un esfuerzo sistemático para ampliar mi vocabulario memorizando listas de vocabulario (del libro Mastering Spanish Vocabulary) y escribiendo ensayos en los que usaré las palabras nuevas aprendidas. Después de escribir los ensayos, los publicaré en iTalki/lang-8 para que me los corrijan. De esta manera, espero finalmente tener el vocabulario de mis sueños. ¿Qué piensan de todo esto? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5254 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 23 of 27 13 December 2012 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Con la ayuda de los nativos en lang8, me suena como una buena idea lo que estás haciendo, pero, para mí, puedo aprender mejor las palabras con contexto.
Actualmente, me gusta mucho leer una página aleatoria en wikipedia todos los días para mejorar mi vocabulario en el portugués. Lo que me gusta es que, dado que las páginas son aleatorias, los tópicos son diferentes y me exponen a tantas palabras que no me estoy acostumbrado- algo de música, ciencias, arte, biografía, filosofía, etc. Me ayuda mucho para ampliar mi vocabulario. Vea el lado izquierda de la portada de wikipedia.es para cliquear en la "página aleatoria". Algunas veces tengo que leer algo que no me interesa mucho pero algunas veces encuentro algo que no sabía que me gustaría. ¡Vale la pena! Quedo muy impresionado con tus esfuerzos. ¡Buen trabajo! Edited by iguanamon on 14 December 2012 at 12:20am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5704 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 24 of 27 14 December 2012 at 1:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
¡Gracias, iguanamon! Y gracias por el consejo también. La verdad es que eso es exactamente lo que hago si estoy aprendiendo un idioma como afición durante mi tiempo libre. Pero como debo mejorar mi español en cuanto antes, estoy probando todo tipo de métodos y técnicas, algunos de los cuales no suelo utilizar, como usar tarjetas de palabras, el SRE (es decir, ‘SRS’ en inglés), memorizar textos, etc. De esta manera, espero hablar español con la misma soltura con la que hablo alemán en una fracción del tiempo. Vamos a ver si tengo éxito. :p Edited by Rout on 14 December 2012 at 2:19am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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