|
 |
the old man and the platiquemos | ||
Tags: Platiquemos | Spanish | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 33 of 91 17 December 2012 at 12:21am | IP Logged | ||
This seems plausible. When I started speaking French with my wife, there was a very clear period of "activation". For the first two weeks, it felt like my brain was melting, and for four or so weeks after that, talking was still a struggle. I think that this could be recreated by spending a couple of hours a night doing Skype chats and working with a tutor, or by taking a two-week immersion vacation. There's a dirty secret, though. My output skills are still fragile even after 10 months of speaking French consistently. If I'm sick, or if I'm trying hard to explain something complicated, or if I'm just off my game, I'll stammer, pause, and miss words (some of this is because I deliberately sacrifice fluency for correctness). It's like I have a finite supply of mental bandwidth, and if I dedicate 60% of that to French, I do OK. But if the total bandwidth is reduced by illness or fatigue, or if I need to use 75% of it to formulate a complicated idea, my French suffers. Fortunately, I'm definitely getting better, and I try not to stress too much about my limitations. I'm really looking to forward to hearing about your experiences with FSI! 3 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 34 of 91 17 December 2012 at 7:51pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Platiquemos Unit 4, track 6/14
I redid the first three lessons with the "rewind" protocol, which took a couple of days, but the past couple of days, I have been working through unit 4 again. I pretty happy with rewinding a minute on each error; by the time I get back to the error, it is like I'm doing it over again. I can move through the dialogs pretty quickly so far; I know most of the vocabulary and understand them the first time through. I had problems with the response drill on this unit. Even though I would understand it perfectly if I just listened to it, getting the correct response out in the time provided was hard. A couple of times I would make an error, rewind a minute, work back to the point where I made the error, and rewind again several times. One time I even backed back to the beginning of the drill, you know, make an error, rewind, make another error, rewind further. I don't know why these things are so challenging, even when what you are trying to do is easy to understand. After I finished Platy last night, I went to one of my favorite places to use Spanish in our neighborhood, a Carl's Jr fast food place. The staff are all Spanish speakers, and I used to shadow Assimil (quietly) in a corner when there weren't any other customers there. The folks who work there have been very nice to the grey haired guy muttering Castilian Spanish in the corner. They've been impressed by my Harry Potter reading after a year of studying Spanish, although we usually talk about Spanish rather than having me talk in Spanish. Anyway, last night, I decided that I was being ridiculous using English to do the simple interactions that I need to do there, so last night, I took off in Spanish as soon as I walked through the door. I really liked the way I sounded. I was spitting out long sentences at a pretty fast speed, and I could understand everything said to me. We didn't have any long conversations about philosophy, but we did talk about the weather, the tacos I ordered, and that my Spanish was getting better. I sat where I could eavesdrop on the conversation in the kitchen and behind the counter (nothing really private), and I found that I could undertand pretty much everything... I'm encouraged, even if it wasn't rocket science in Spanish. Some of the files in Platiquemos are very short, and the rewind technique doesn't make a lot of sense for them. If you are bumping against the beginning of the track when you rewind, it might be better just to repeat the drill until it is perfect instead of going back to the beginning each time. I haven't found a perfect app for doing platiquemos yet. Back when I was repeating each track a certain number of times, any audio app would work. If I'm rewinding for errors, I need to use one of the audiobook apps, most of which have a button for rewinding a certain number of seconds. One app, akimbo, supports rewinding back into the track before the current track rather than bumping into the beginning of the track. It has other configuration problems for me; I find the appearance of the app's screen ugly. mortplayer audiobook does not allow rewinding back into the previous track, but it seems to work fine otherwise. ginkgo audiobooks is very lightweight, and works about like mortplayer. I had some trouble getting it to reread tags when I reinstalled an album. ginkgo allows either tag based or folder based navigations, which can be convenient. 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 35 of 91 20 December 2012 at 7:12pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Platiquemos Unit 4, track 12/13
I've had some challenges getting in my time doing plati the past few days. I've done something, but I have been practicing a few minutes at a time. The "rewinding" protocol works well, even a few minutes at a time. Since some of the tracks/drills are quite short, I created a version of Platiquemos where I merged all the files in each unit into a single file each. This makes it possible to easily rewind back into an earlier drill if you have an error right at the beginning of a drill. One of the absolute keys for me doing Platiquemos or Pimsleur, is to be sure that I keep physically active enough to stay concentrated. Last night I was trying to practice Platiquemos in a warm car parked in a shopping mall parking lot (while my wife shopped), and I simply could not stay awake. When I got out of the car and started pacing around in the cold, the lesson went much better. steve 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 36 of 91 21 December 2012 at 6:09am | IP Logged | ||
|
Unit 5 track 1
I had a hard time with the conversation stimulus drill today. I pounded my way through it, but there was a lot of repetition. I think I'm going to go back to thoroughly reading each drill/track before I start to work on them. I think doing it without the printed material made it harder than it has to be. I'm a little worried about some of the tracks I've already completed. I went back to a hard drill, that I finished a couple of days ago, and I found that I could barely keep up at all. It doesn't seem like I don't know the answers; it just seems to be a matter of speed at spitting them out. I have to be very familiar with a drill to keep up, even if I know, and could write out every answer given time or a Michel Thomas pause option. I hope this course is building my speed. steve 1 person has 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 37 of 91 21 December 2012 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | ||
I have used the pause button hundreds or perhaps thousands of times doing FSI drills. For me it was helpful to put the answer together in my head when possible, rather than just hear and repeat the answer, although I did some of the later as well. I found review to be helpful and did it generally when I felt the current lesson felt like "deep water". I would generally make a noticeable improvement in the current drill, although I may not have perfected it by any means before moving on to another. Detecting improvement in the current drill, or sometimes just getting through it is sufficient for long term progress. Then, when coming back to the drill, perhaps I repeated it one time less than previous, or hit the pause button less or perhaps not at all. These little signposts of progress are all that is necessary to know you are on the right track. 3 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 38 of 91 21 December 2012 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Good advice, Luke.
One of the things that occurs to me about this course is that it was originally prepared to supplement classroom instruction. I would assume that the teacher would adjust pauses in drills and speeds of speech to get students broken into the drill. While FSI instruction in those days had a strong audiolingual component, it doesn't sound like they were fanatical about only working at native speaker speed. I am concerned about establishing a criteria for moving forward from a given drill. I think I have a tendency to aim for perfection, even when it is a waste of time for general language learning. I have similar reactions when I find that I have lost some of my sharpness on a given drill. I have to remind myself that my goal is not to do Platiquemos/FSI perfectly, it is to learn as much Spanish as I can... steve 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5264 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 39 of 91 22 December 2012 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||
|
Perfection is your enemy, Steve. You're right not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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 40 of 91 26 December 2012 at 6:36am | IP Logged | ||
|
Platiquemos/FSI start of Unit 6
Part of using any language program is finding a way to use it that works for you. I'm starting to be very encouraged by what Platiquemos/FSI is doing for my Spanish. I have had a lot of good days since I started the course. I also find that I actually enjoy FSI drills. Back when I was in graduate school for my ESL/Second Language Acquisition masters, the doctrine was that language acquisition is a process where the learner's interlanguage proceeds through a series of steps of increasing complexity, as the learner develops a grammatical system that approaches the grammatical system of native speakers. As a learner moves from memorized chunks to self generated, novel utterances, the learner may temporarily make new errors. These errors are a sign of progress not a problem. Therefore, discouraging all errors may stop the learner from moving to the next step in the development in his or her interlanguage. The doctrine also was that the series of steps a learner's interlanguage goes through is not well understood, so trying to fine tune lessons to cover the exact input the learner needs next was futile, and would probably not work. Therefore, it is important for the learner to get a variety of input, rather than concentrating for a long time on a certain structure. I have been trying to do Plati/FSI in a way that ignores this. I have also been ignoring one of the basic tenants of the old behaviorist/audiolingual theories of learning that FSI is based on, the idea of massed and distributed practice. This would suggest that review at ever increasing intervals is important. The instructions in the introduction to Plati/FSI suggest a certain number of hours to complete the course; they do not state that each Unit should be concentrated on a certain number of hours before moving on to the next. Combined with Luke and Iguanomon's advices, I've changed the way I am doing the course. I always knew that my first approach was way too simplistic. I find this course much more enjoyable if I don't insist on accuracy, if I just do my best. I've stopped beating each drill to death, and have decided to just move ahead as soon as I start to have some success. I've also started to schedule a regular reviews, which is my mental way of letting a drill go even though I am less than perfect. I can always get it later when I review it. By reviewing older, more familiar units, I also stop myself from pounding away at a lesson that is very hard. I'll review lessons at ever increasing intervals. If I had been doing the lessons from the beginning, it would have gone like this. unit 1 unit 1 unit 2 unit 2 unit 3 unit 1 unit 3 unit 4 unit 2 unit 4 unit 5 unit 3 unit 5 unit 6 unit 4 unit 6 unit 7 unit 1 unit 5 unit 7 unit 8 This design means that the interval between reviews would double each time. If this is too much, I may drop off to a bigger interval. Pimsleur increases the interval five times for each review, for example... I'll try this for a while; if I do the whole course this way, I will have done each unit 6 times by the end of the course. The first time I do a new unit, I plan to read it aloud, along with explanations before I actually try to do the lesson. I will go as slow as I need to to be sure that I understand everything I'm saying in the drills. I also give myself permission to pause and rewind, if I want to. As you can see, I like setting up systems :) steve 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. |
