BAnna Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4623 days ago 409 posts - 616 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Turkish
| Message 185 of 384 03 February 2014 at 1:37am | IP Logged |
I really admire your ability to keep plugging along with your language studies in the midst of a difficult situation and also send good thoughts your way.
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AmyinBrooklyn Senior Member United States Joined 4052 days ago 87 posts - 122 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 186 of 384 05 February 2014 at 7:08am | IP Logged |
Stelle - Just wanted to let you know that I am thinking of you. Good job managing to squeeze in Spanish despite the stress. Sending good thoughts your way.
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AmyinBrooklyn Senior Member United States Joined 4052 days ago 87 posts - 122 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 187 of 384 08 February 2014 at 3:49am | IP Logged |
Hi Stelle -
I hope you're doing ok. I had a question for you. When you listening to the Notes in Spanish podcast, did you get the worksheets as well? Thanks!
Amy
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Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4145 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog
| Message 188 of 384 08 February 2014 at 12:25pm | IP Logged |
All is well! Thanks to everyone for the kind words! I've been working a lot, trying to make up for the mess from
December and January. Luckily, all of the expenses for my trip have already been paid (including a non-refundable
flight), and my contract is ending in March - so there's absolutely no advantage to cancelling my trip to Spain. At
first I was kicking myself for buying my flight so early, since I didn't get the best deal. But if I hadn't already bought
the ticket, I probably would have cancelled my trip. So let's just call it fate. ;)
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Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4145 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog
| Message 189 of 384 08 February 2014 at 12:27pm | IP Logged |
AmyinBrooklyn wrote:
Hi Stelle -
I hope you're doing ok. I had a question for you. When you listening to the Notes in Spanish podcast, did you get the
worksheets as well? Thanks!
Amy |
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No. I thought about getting the transcripts, and I think that they could be really useful, but in the end I decided that
I'd rather spend my limited language budget on novels.
I do tend to listen to each podcast twice. The first time, I understand almost everything, but there are a few words
that I'm not sure about. The second time, I catch anything I missed.
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Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4145 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog
| Message 190 of 384 08 February 2014 at 12:44pm | IP Logged |
I'm now at lesson 42 of FSI Spanish. I'm moving through it much more slowly now - not because it's harder
(although of course it is), but because I like to split my walks between FSI and daydreaming. I was feeling
daydream-deprived, since I'd replaced an hour of daily thinking with an hour of Spanish drills! (If you're a
daydreamer, you'll understand. Ha!)
I really do enjoy the FSI program. My automaticity continues to improve. After several units on the subjunctive,
I'm getting more and more comfortable with using it in informal conversation.
I'm glad that I found out about FSI several months into my Spanish learning journey. I think that it would have
been frustrating as a complete beginner, and I also think that it's the perfect complement to the mainly native
materials that I'm now using. My grammar book *might* get opened once every week or two, but I practice
sentence structure and verb tenses almost every day with FSI.
Yes, it's dated, and sexist, and the sound quality isn't perfect.
But it's still one of the most comprehensive (and FREE!) tools out there for building automaticity!
I wrote a longer review of FSI Spanish Basic on my blog if anyone's interesting in reading more:
FSI
Spanish
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iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French)
| Message 191 of 384 08 February 2014 at 12:57pm | IP Logged |
Excellent, Stelle! I, too, enjoy language-learning while walking. It feels great physically and mentally. Hopefully you can inspire more people to do that. I'm enjoying following your log. Keep up the good work on your Spanish. I know you will be successful.
Edited by iguanamon on 08 February 2014 at 1:28pm
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1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4291 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan
| Message 192 of 384 08 February 2014 at 11:27pm | IP Logged |
What is the temperature? My relatives from Toronto said that they had an ice and snow
storm with windchills approaching a record-breaking close to -50 C, and my uncle in
Montréal said that it regularly has approached -40 C with big snow, and a few of my
relatives in Ottawa said that the Rideau Canal is frozen and that the Byward Market is
like Siberia. I like to go out walking when it snows, but people usually call me insane.
Several years ago I went walking down Québec City in -40 C weather with my French
cassette tapes to cram some more information into me, but I did not know that anyone else
did this.
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