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Older Learner tries Assimil for Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 97 of 175 10 April 2012 at 7:47am | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, the steps took much longer than I thought. It was shorter when I split them up, but trying to do them all at once wasn't fun.
Tomorrow, I'm going to do: translate lesson 6 "gloss" lesson 13 shadow lessons 6 to 27 I may do more, but I'll do at least this. steve 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 98 of 175 12 April 2012 at 5:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil Spanish with Ease shadowing wave Lesson 29
Like many people who follow Dr. Arguelles advice, I have felt free to adjust his methods even before I tried them. I resisted doing shadowing, and once I started shadowing, I resisted doing scriptorium and all of the other steps that Dr. Arguelles associates with it. I tried scriptorium today on some of the lessons that I have already "finished" shadowing. It was not earthshaking, probably because I was already so familiar with these lessons. Spanish is fairly simple to write, so this was very easy. This is what I did today: lessons 1-5 scriptorium lessons 6-13 reading aloud lessons 14-28 shadowing X2. I also spent some time conjugating verbs from the tables at the back of the book. I'm not sure if the scriptorium is worth the time. I could easily work 3 lessons of scriptorium into my schedule and still shadow 30 lessons or so. Scriptorium does give a connection to the written language that I have felt was missing from my earlier schedule. I've always tried to be honest in my appraisal of how well I'm doing with my lessons, and I have to admit that shadowing some of the recent lessons is not trivial. Even looking at the transcript, it is really challenging to get my mouth to move fast enough to keep up with the speakers. I'm getting completely lost on a couple of sentences in a couple of lessons, even when I've already gone over them a few times. I think I may simply read aloud the first few times I go through a new lesson, and then try shadowing. I may also make a rule for myself where I repeat shadowing a given lesson if I ever fail to complete a sentence before the next one starts. I've never seen anybody use scriptorium as a way to begin the study of a new lesson, but it has always seemed to me that it would be a good thing to do with new material. A slow careful scriptorium of the lesson would mean that you completely understand it before you begin to practice and shadow it. I know that Dr. Arguelles blind shadows lessons for several days before he even worries about what they mean or how they look written. From this I can only conclude that he has skills in language learning way beyond me. I would only be able to shadow a few words out of the sentences in new lessons at this point in SwE. I can only imagine the awful job I would do if I was trying to learn Chinese. It makes sense to me to do easy things with a given passage before I try to do harder things. Blind shadowing is very difficult unless the material is very familiar, even with English. I have to consider whether I find scriptorium useful enough to continue. steve edited to clarify, I hope :) Edited by sfuqua on 14 April 2012 at 6:51am 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 99 of 175 13 April 2012 at 7:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil Spanish with Ease shadowing lesson 30
I stopped my original trip through the book at this point in the active wave, so I am about to start covering material that I haven't seen for a few months. I still remember what the words in these lessons mean, but they are less familiar than what I have been working with recently. I did some very, "Listening Reading" type activities today while I continued the massive shadowing I've been doing. I got started late, so I kept it simple. I did: Lesson 27-29 listen to L2 and read L2 Lessons 27-29 listen to L2 and read L1 Lessons 27-29 read L2 aloud Lessons 1-14 shadow L2 and read L1 Lessons 15-29 shadow L2 and read L2 This would make an awesome passive wave. This took about an hour and was a little tiring; I was flubbing things up a bit at the end, but it wasn't a death march or anything. Maybe I'll do this again tomorrow. steve 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6150 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 100 of 175 13 April 2012 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | ||
I would drop scriptorium. I think it's only useful if you're learning a language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet or has highly irregular spelling. 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 101 of 175 14 April 2012 at 7:33am | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil Spanish with Ease shadowing wave 31
Today my family was all busy with other things, so I watched some Spanish language TV. I had very variable results understanding what the show was. I find some of the Mexican Telenovelas to be harder to understand than the Portuguese in HBO's Alice, which I also watched online. Weird. Portuguese appeals a lot to me, but I'm certainly not going to mess with that until I've finished Spanish with Ease and Using Spanish. I may follow these up with El Nuevo Portugues sin Esfuerzo. This would help me learn a closely related language and help me extend my Spanish. What the heck, Portuguese seems cool, but later, definitely later... I did: Lesson 28-30 translate L2->L1 (hyperliteral, word for word translation) Orally only. Lesson 28-30 Listening L2 Reading L1. Lesson 20-30 Read aloud, slowly and carefully (I'm trying to smooth out some of my rough shadowing) Lesson 1-10 Blind Shadowing Lesson 11-20 Shadow while reading L1 Lesson 21-30 Shadow while reading L2 It was a pretty intense hour and 15 minutes. I could barely catch my breath. The later lessons are challenging, and I fell apart in a few places. I think I'm going to do something similar tomorrow, but only over 20 lessons instead of over 30. It was a nice feeling of fatigue, with Spanish ringing in my brain. I had a dream in Spanish the other night unfortunately it was a dream of me shadowing Spanish. steve 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 102 of 175 15 April 2012 at 3:56am | IP Logged | ||
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Today was not a good day of language learning. I worked hard, but was disappointed with results.
My family was using all of the places around the house where I can pace and shadow, so I decided to go out and do my lesson sitting in my car. I grabbed a different set of headphones than I usually use and sat down to get started. First I listened to lessons 29-31 twice, first while reading the L2 and the second time while following the L1. I then made oral, hyperliteral translations of lessons 29-31. It went pretty smoothly, but the car was starting to get hot so I turned the key to move the car to some shade. It wouldn't start. I had turned the lights on when I sat down, and the battery was dead. I called my son, and he came in his car after 20 minutes or so, and I jumpstarted my car. Back to Spanish, I started shadowing from lesson 1 heading toward lesson 31, and I immediately started having trouble hearing what they were saying in the lesson. When I shadowed, my voice would drown out the voice in the earphones, and if I ever fell more than a word behind I was lost. I got frustrated and restarted several lessons, because I had no idea what was going on. By lesson 25, my mouth just would not move fast enough to keep up I pounded on that one maybe five times. I finally went through the last few lessons just doing the best I could, but in no way was I close to shadowing well. I went back into my house, and got my regular "shadowing" headphones, a pair of pretty cheap, noise canceling Sony's. I reshadowed lessons 15 to 31 with much better results this time; it was much easier to hear the voices. Even though I wasn't aware of any big problems with the first set of headphones, they definitely were a big part of my problem. I was still just barely able to keep up with the last couple of lessons, even while reading the L2 so I was still not satisfied. Next I decided to read lessons 10 to 31 aloud, on the theory that I could learn to go faster by doing it correctly slower. I stopped and repeated any sentence that threatened to make me stumble, and I also stopped and looked at the L1 translation if I didn't immediately understand everything. This was more satisfactory. That concluded two and a half hours of less than satisfactory language learning. I'm worried that I'm having trouble keeping up with the newer lessons. Perhaps I should shadow new lessons several times the first day. I'm not sure, but I want to be sure that I keep moving ahead successfully. I may not have had any big problem today except bad headphones and then fatigue. I'm really looking forward to getting into the later lessons where the vocabulary is thicker and harder. When I speak Spanish, way to often I find myself unable to say things just because I don't know the right word. I don't mean that I have forgotten the word, I mean that I never have learned it. I just hope the language in the lessons doesn't get much faster... I know it would be cheating, but I could always slow down the lessons in audacity. 10-20% slower would sure make it all easier. I could make a slow and a fast version and only do the faster version after I have mastered the slower version. Of course using a slow version first could just be a way to delay getting up to speed... I got a copy of HBO's Alice season one DVDs in the mail today. I thought that it was worth a $19.95 gamble for 13 hours (I think) of potential input. It seems to have both Portuguese and Spanish soundtracks and Portuguese, Spanish, and English subtitles. I really don't know if I'm going to enjoy the stories in it, but it seems useful for language learning. The Spanish soundtrack and subtitles seem very clear and simple to me so far. The Portuguese sounds cool too. steve 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 103 of 175 17 April 2012 at 6:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil Spanish with Ease lesson 34
Yesterday was great, today not so much. Yesterday, everything seemed to to fall into place. I could feel improvement. I think that now that I'm going through lessons that I only covered during the passive wave, that I'm learning more from each lesson. I like it. My process yesterday was, Lesson 30-32 translate L2->L1 Lesson 1-32 shadow Today Lesson 31-33 translate L2->L1 Lesson 1-33 shadow. I have been experimenting with shadowing more and more lessons each day. I think today I reached the limit. I was tired. It wasn't fun. Tomorrow I may try Lesson 28-34 translate L2->L1 Lesson 21-34 shadow, maybe twice. I've got to figure out an optimal amount of review to do while shadowing. I think 33 lessons is too much... I was tired after work and I was loosing interest by the end, which is bad because the less familiar lessons come at the end. I continue to have a deep and abiding hunger to learn this language backward and forward. I've been studying regularly for four months as of tomorrow. Like most beginners struggling to be intermediate, I'm frustrated by my "slow" progress. When I think back to my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer 36 years ago, I was behind where I am now in Samoan after four months. I went through the regular Peace Corps training and probably did not get to A1. I goofed off and waited for "immersion" to teach me Samoan for a couple of months (I was in a village where there was very little English). Finally, at about 4 months in country, I started studying, and my progress was fast. I guess I'm not doing too badly with Spanish, so far. I want it all *now*, although I know the only way to get anywhere is to keep plugging and let nature take it's course. So much of Spanish seems to be just out of reach; everything I learn shows me how much more I have to learn. There are so many pieces of the puzzle in my head, and I just have to get them to fit together... steve 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 104 of 175 17 April 2012 at 6:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Hmmn. Looking at what I wrote, I see another area for improvement. Instead of just starting to play mp3's from a certain lesson, I could make a playlist on some sort of SRS schedule.
I could do a sort of warped Pimsleur schedule for translating and shadowing lessons: Lesson 34 X5 Lesson 33 Lesson 28 Lesson 3 Or one of the other schedules: Lesson 34 Lesson 33 Lesson 31 lesson 27 Lesson 19 Lesson 3 Or: Lesson 34 Lesson 33 Lesson 30 lesson 21 (in a few days I'd add lesson 1) I'm not sure which "forgetting curve" would fit translating and shadowing the best. I'll have to look at that. The software on my phone does playlists fairly easily, and this might help me review without doing a "death march" from lesson one. steve edited to fix a sentence. Edited by sfuqua on 17 April 2012 at 6:54am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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