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the old man and the platiquemos | ||
Tags: Platiquemos | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4767 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 91 26 November 2012 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Platiquemos Unit 1 of 55
I'm getting near the end of Unit 1. Unit 1 has 9 tracks, a set of basic sentences and a series of pronunciation drills (and a song). I had a couple of long drives to do, and mindless pronunciation drills are an ideal way to kill time. I repeated each track 8 times. I'll probably just listen to the song once :) I don't think even Platiquemos can get me to sing. This was not very challenging, but perhaps not a waste of time. I could feel the way that I was pronouncing consonants changing a bit as the drilling went on. Maybe I was correcting my English accent, or perhaps I was adjusting my pronunciation from the Castilian pronunciation I used with Assimil. My trilled r still annoys me. It trills; I can differentiate rr and r, but my rr just isn't Spanish. I think my single r is about right most of the time. I missed work today; I had to see the dentist and the doctor, and I listened to Univision for a couple of hours. I try to have Spanish on the the background whenever I can. It seemed extra easy to understand, but my speaking and listening comprehension varies a lot from day to day, so it probably doesn't mean anything. steve 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4767 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 91 28 November 2012 at 5:15am | IP Logged | |||||
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Unit 2 of 55, track 1 of 12.
I'm still on the basic sentences in unit 2; which is followed by more fairly mindless pronunciation drills for most of the rest of the unit. I'm going to work through this unit the same way as the first 8 repetitions of each drill. I skipped ahead and tried the little drill at the end of the unit, and I found it surprisingly difficult. I realize that the drills in an fsi style course are going to be challenging, but I found this one very annoying, mostly because I don't think I would ever say it this way. This is the part that "hurts." 5 (un lápiz) ¿Es eso una pluma? ¿Esto? No, es un lápiz. 6 (una pluma) ¿Es esto un lápiz? ¿Eso? No, es una pluma. OK, input eso and reply esto, no problem. But the whole "¿Eso? No, es una pluma" seems weird to me. I could see "¿Eso? No. Es una pluma." "No, es una pluma." parses too closely to "No es una pluma." for my taste. I know that I am the nonnative speaker, so I am always wrong :), but I wish they had chosen a different example for a first drill to teach students how drills work. I'm looking forward to getting to Unit 3, which has a more or less complete complement of drills. From what I have read, my reaction to unit 3 will tell me how well I'm going to like this process. Even if I hate Platiquemos, I am going to complete up to the end of the first level, the first 9 units. I want to give it a good try. I hope I like it and I can ride it all the way to B1... So far so good. steve Edited by sfuqua on 28 November 2012 at 5:17am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 11 of 91 28 November 2012 at 9:03am | IP Logged | |||||
I found this drill odd at first and second too. Eventually I started imagining being in a classroom with an instructor who had a pen while I had a pencil. There's another drill somewhat like this that threw me for another curve where the objects in the sentences were buildings or something (hoteles). There I had to imagine being next to the building or a ways away from it. Similarly when eso/esto were used to mean something psychologically further away or nearer. Another thing that makes that drill challenging is the speed of the speech. It's certainly a case though where having the book and seeing the comma and reading about eso/esto helps the whole thing fit together. That one small point of eso/esto usage may not seem or even be that important, but I do think it's indicative of the level of detail that FSI/Platiquemos brings to the learner. It is quite comprehensive. Edited by luke on 28 November 2012 at 9:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5714 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 12 of 91 30 November 2012 at 7:34am | IP Logged | |||||
I dabbled in Spanish quite a while ago, effectively overlearning the first half or so of Spanish with Ease through shadowing. I eventually picked it back up (around 5 months ago) and this time I've gotten a lot more serious (like AJATT serious). I decided to switch to Latin American accent this time, since I remembered being very self-conscious and somewhat confused when speaking with people before (I've never actually met a Spaniard in my life, I don't think). What happened? I speak like a Castilian but with seseo. That is to say the strong gutteral /j/ and the distinct apical /s/ has since stuck with me. I think they're are some Latin American speakers who speak this way but I don't know any personally. In any case, my conversation partners never mention anything about it. Just an observation. I think the pronunciation drills are probably the most boring part of FSI Basic but they were sooooo helpful. The biggest difference between peninsular and American Spanish is in vocabulary (I feel like a thesaurus sometimes, especially when I can just spit out the peninsular equivalent of new vocabulary that comes up during my conversation lessons).
My plan was to shadow all the dialogues in FSI Basic (learn through a natural method) then continue but after I got a little ways come back and read all the notes (analytic method) then continue the other two and come back after a little ways more and get all the drills down. This was actually working pretty well until my schedule got a little too busy. I only made it through Units 1 and 2 (out of 4) with shadowing and reading the text and much less than that with the drills. It got complicated at unit two because I had to piece together all of the broken sentences with Audacity to create a dialog to shadow too. Not sure if Platiquemos has the whole dialogues and I know you've decided on your schedule more or less but I'd definitely recommend shadowing them at least once if you can. It was definitely helpful for my Spanish as a whole. Now that I have time I might try FSI again. Your Assimil adventure was a big inspiration, I hope this log is as much a success for both our sakes. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4767 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 13 of 91 30 November 2012 at 10:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Unit 2 of 55, track 5 of 12
@Rout. Thanks for the kind words, Rout. I was thinking about using shadowing as a way to review earlier material; after Assimil I start thinking about shadowing every time I run into audio material. I wonder if I could slice out pauses with audacity in batch mode and then shadow everything (that's in Spanish). This would be more interesting than attempting to review dialogs and drills that I already was familiar with. I think my accent may be something like yours, Castilian, but with s for the th sounds (seseo). I was working with some Mexican native speakers (10 year olds in my science class), on how to pronounce "Argentina." I noticed that I was much harsher on the "ge" /X/ sound than they were, although they seemed to think that the way I was pronouncing it was correct also. I guess it make sense; it is easier to move to a smaller set of phonemes, replacing the /th/ sound with /s/, which is already a part of the phoneme inventory. On Assimil, I wonder if I wouldn't have had a better time, if someone had said to me... just do the book as Assimil suggests, don't worry about how long it takes to get through all the lessons, but keep track of how much time it takes to finish it. Since it takes 600-1200 hours to learn Spanish, after you finish Assimil, plan to spend the rest of the 600-1200 hours shadowing Assimil from one end to the other over and over... After that amount of time and effort, then try to decide whether Assimil has gotten you to a B1/B2. @Luke. As usual, your suggestion about how to do the drill is excellent. I think there might be an really valuable general strategy there, that it is important to try to think of a context that makes sense for the drill, if there is a possible one. By picturing the teacher with the pen, it makes sense, and makes the drill easier to do. I seem to remember that you shadowed FSI some; how long is an FSI lesson with the pauses cut out? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 14 of 91 01 December 2012 at 11:50am | IP Logged | |||||
We learn as we go. The FSI's 600 hours of study for a language like Spanish is study/classroom time. Assimil is different. I don't know that there are 600 hours of study in a "class 1" (easiest for native English speakers) Assimil course. Depending on the course, there may be 200-300 of study time, depending on how much one tries to squeeze out of the course. One could do things like sentence dictation, translation, etc, to get many more hours out of a course, and that may be very helpful, but in the end one has a vocabulary of maybe 1500-2000 words. For that reason and many others I don't think one can hope for a single Assimil course to take one all the way to B2 unless they have exceptional language learning and test taking skills.
I wasn't shadowing FSI lessons per se in the way we talk about it with Assimil or audiobooks. What I would do is: Edit audio so I may have a few versions of the dialogue. 1) Original with sentences starting from the end for pronunciation. 2) The Dialogue with spaces long enough to repeat the sentence. 3) Dialogue with no pauses for either listening or shadowing. For drills, I would take out pauses to make the drill practically demand automaticity. Here's a crude picture with underscores representing silence in a replacement drill. Original __Drill A___¿Dónde está el auto?_________________________________________¿Dónde está el auto?__________________________________________Cómo________ _______________________________¿Cómo es el auto?____________________________________________. Edited __¿Dónde está el auto?____________________________¿Dónde está el auto? __ Cómo __________________________ ¿Cómo es el auto?_. Basically a drill that may have been recorded for 2 minutes may have ended up being a minute and 20 seconds. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4767 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 15 of 91 01 December 2012 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Platiquemos Unit 2 of 55, Track 10 of 12
@Luke. I don't mean to say that I think the best way to learn Spanish would be to just pound Assimil for 600 hours, but I mean to say that I just don't think that 150-300 hours is enough to learn Spanish to the intermediate level. When I learned Samoan and Tagalog, I probably spent about that much time in formal study to get to the intermediate level, but I was immersed in the languages at the same time. When I started this procedure, I underestimated how much time and work it takes to learn a language, when you are learning it "part time." The single, most profound thing I've learned from my Spanish project, is that learning a language part time is a very different thing than learning it while "in country." I think any disappointment/discouragement I felt with Assimil was because of my unreasonable expectations of what even a great language course can do by itself with a beginner in 150 hours. Back to Platiquemos. I got pretty bored with the pronunciation drills yesterday; I'll be glad to get to some "real" grammar oriented drills today. Unit 3, with its fairly complete complement of drills, is just around the corner. I'd better not complain, because I never heard anybody complain that fsi courses lack drills. I watched an hour of Por ella soy Eva last night on Univision, a not so serious telenovela. I fell asleep last night listening to Buena Vista Social Club. What a delight they are! I had never listened to them before, and I enjoyed them immensely. I couldn't understand a lot of it, of course, and I kept having an urge to jump up out of bed to get my dictionary, which of course is not conducive to relaxing into the music and falling asleep. I decided to make up meanings for the words I couldn't understand, and pretend that I was easily understanding it all... Pretty soon, I was one of the boys, drinking a cold beer in the cafe while the band played and the cool breeze blew in off the ocean. I told the waiter to get the band a round on me, when their set was done. And gee, there is that beautiful woman at the other end of the bar, who is sitting by herself. A couple of men have gone up to talk to her, and she has sent them away quickly. I wonder what she is up to. She glanced my way a couple of times... (And I realized that I was asleep). steve 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5024 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 91 02 December 2012 at 11:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm really glad your keeping this log, and will be following along. Your lucky to have
Luke chipping in, a lot of his old posts/logs really helped me out some time back. I wouldn't worry too much about how to do the drills. Trial and error will yield something that feels right. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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