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Older Learner tries Assimil for Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 89 of 175 04 April 2012 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | ||
Congratulations! It sounds like you've really solidified the fundamentals and boosted your output skills this time around. And I always enjoy reading your log. I just pushed through to the end of Assimil, without worrying too much about the places where I had some trouble, and I was probably somewhere below B1 when I finished New French with Ease. I could read a few native books, and hold a rudimentary conversation with my wife, but I couldn't handle the specialized real-estate and vacation vocabulary on the DELF A2 exam. You're definitely over-learning the material (which seems to be a great idea), and I have no doubt that you'll reach at least a strong B1 by the end of the first course. And at that point, the world opens up: You can hold conversations and enjoy at least some native materials. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 90 of 175 04 April 2012 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Seriously, I would be overjoyed to be at B1. It seems to me that that is the level where you can take off in independent conversation.
steve 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AdamUK Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5153 days ago 12 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish | Message 91 of 175 05 April 2012 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Steve, thank you very much for posting your log with such commitment, it's great to be able to observe and share someone's progress from Day 1. I am just about to order Spanish with Ease, as I am just about to start learning French, German and Spanish at the same time. Don't ask; it's for college. :)
How would you say your conversational skills are at the moment? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 92 of 175 05 April 2012 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would say that I'm probably getting to be A2 or thereabouts speaking. I would guess I'm around B1 reading. I just took one of those online CEFR tests, and I scored B1 again. I have some surprising (to me) strengths and weaknesses when talking. Since I started shadowing, the words come out of my mouth more easily, and I think that I have improved some aspects of my pronunciation, but I am quite capable of babbling nonsense if I get excited and try to say something that I really don't know how to say. I was just talking to one of my students, and boy did I say some nonsense! What was it? "El tu hablas esta poco"
Not exactly what I meant to say... If I had Assimil to do again, I would shadow 10-20 lessons with both the passive and the active waves. I would do the regular Assimil exercises, but I wouldn't attempt "repeating aloud without looking at the text" or "translate from English to X" until I had done several days of shadowing of the lesson. Probably I would do something like the first half of the "Dutch Instructions" the first day I hit a lesson in the passive wave, and then shadow it for a couple of weeks before finishing "repeat aloud" part. Likewise, I would shadow for a couple of weeks before I would try translating. Some of the later lessons in Spanish with Ease are *hard* to "repeat aloud". I also find that the Assimil exercises are much simpler when the material is quite familiar. I guess I'm saying that I think it would be much more useful to shadow a lesson until repeating it or translating it is trivial than it would be to pound my way through the lesson slowly, the way I was doing it before. I was learning a lot, but it wasn't communicative. Shadowing was the "secret sauce" that made Assimil work again for me. As my language production speeds up and my grasp of the grammar slowly gets stronger, I am becoming more and more aware how much lack of vocabulary affects my production and my comprehension. Assimil is a great way to learn vocabulary, but there is no substitute for knowing twenty thousand words. I'm feeling the pinch of vocabulary more right now, because I'm going over lessons that I already have a pretty good passive knowledge of. I'm not learning much new vocabulary right now. I wonder what I'll be thinking of this whole process when I'm shadowing lesson 80, where I left the passive wave the first time through. steve Edited by sfuqua on 06 April 2012 at 3:49pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 93 of 175 07 April 2012 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil Spanish with Ease shadowing wave lesson 25
I'm in a dull spot in my learning. After I am done shadowing, Spanish wants to tumble out of my mouth. I guess I miss the steady growth in comprehension of the passive wave. Perhaps it is hard to notice ones progress at some points. I learn while I complete the lessons; I correct mistakes and get more accurate when I do translations and the Assimil exercises. I'm just not noticing progress the past few days. I had an interesting experience last night. I happened to click on HBO's Alice series, about the adventures of a young woman who, to quote hbo: "Sensuality and drama intertwine in a breathtaking and humorous story. Alice is a 26 year-old woman that lives a simple life in Palmas, a region of northern Brazil. After four years of dating Henrique, they decide to move in together, but her father’s unexpected death changes everything, taking Alice all the way to Sao Paulo, where she gathers with her stepmother, aunt, and sister. Alice stays longer than planned, and she finds new loves and friends, awakening to a brand new world. In the middle of urban chaos, Alice re-discovers the city, her country, and ultimately, herself." Anyway the Portuguese was interesting to listen to and the story and the lovely, spunky protagonist caught my attention. I could understand maybe 25% of the Portuguese. The show was subtitled in Spanish so I read the Spanish to follow what was going on... Suddenly it was over an hour later, and I had been enjoying the show through Spanish subtitles and the little bit of Portuguese I could understand, all without really thinking about it. I hadn't really even thought about the fact that I was reading Spanish. I guess I have learned something since December 16. steve 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| AndrewW Newbie United States Joined 5006 days ago 29 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 94 of 175 07 April 2012 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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If I remember correctly, the first season of Alice HBO dubbed into Spanish. For the second season, they left it in
Portuguese and subtitled it. Or something odd like that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 95 of 175 07 April 2012 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I contacted hbo last night about the first season dvd, and they told me that the first season was dubbed
in Spanish and subtitled in English, which is a little less fun and exotic for my taste. I watched a bit on hbogo last night. I hope there is a Portuguese version on line or dvd eventually. It was fun using Spanish last night for fun instead of for study. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 96 of 175 09 April 2012 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil Spanish with Ease shadowing wave lesson 26
I missed a day moving ahead through Assimil. I read about interlinear translations, something I used to make for myself in learning other languages. I would write only the unknown words interlinearly and then read the passages aloud. I decided to go through the Assimil lessons I have covered in the shadowing wave and see if I could come up with a gloss for each word in the lessons. Anyway, I went through all 26 lessons, and I found that I could "gloss" every word in every lesson at a very high rate. There were just 3 words in the first 26 lessons that I couldn't "gloss" at first glance. I think that I'll do this glossing with lessons the first few times that I shadow them. I also decided to memorize the verb conjugations that Assimil has already covered by lesson 26. There are other verb forms used, but not described yet; I'll wait until they mention them to memorize them. I doubt that conjugating the verbs will help much in speech, but I bet that it will help when writing, and it may help me recognize a new verb when I run into it. So far Assimil has covered the present, the perfect (with haber and the past participle), the imperfect, and is just starting to cover the preterite. They've also included estar + present participle for a present continuous, and ir + infinitive for a sort of future. I've seen a subjunctive or two and a future or two slip by, but Assimil hasn't really described them in the notes, so I'll memorize them later. If I can completely conjugate these tense/aspect combinations for ser, estar, tener, haber, cantar, comer, and vivir, it will make me feel like I know what's going on with Spanish grammar much better. Later, around lesson 60, when Assimil starts to introduce a new tense every other lesson, I'll have a foundation to work from. I mostly know these already, just from doing Assimil, but I'd like to get a firmer grasp on them. Often I only know the forms for a given verb for certain persons or numbers; I'd like to "complete the tables in my head." When I studied Latin long ago, our teacher advocated learning to conjugate in the regular way, and learning to conjugate "sideways". This meant going through all of the first person forms for the different (tenses or conjugations or whatever it was; it's been 45 years). This seems to make it stick a little better; I still remember how to recite some of them, even though I don't remember what they mean :) I think I'll learn to conjugate the verbs "sideways" too. It can't hurt. I'll do the studying conjugations outside of my regular lessons. I'm also going to shovel those pronouns from lesson 14 into my head. I almost have these down, but I just want to be sure that I have them firmly in mind. Right now my routine for today will look like: 1) "gloss" lessons 19-26 2) translate L1->L2 lessons 5-12 3) Shadow lessons 5->26 This will all take about an hour and a half, which is OK for this week since I am on spring break. I may have to cut back some next week when I'm back to work. I'm doing all the "glossing" and translating orally, which means that I am definitely shorting Spanish writing. I do write and email or two a day in Spanish, however. steve 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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