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Older Learner tries Assimil for Spanish | ||
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| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 113 of 175 01 May 2012 at 7:26pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil Spanish with Ease passive/shadowing wave lesson 47
Last night I was tired before I started my Spanish lesson, but I plowed ahead anyway. 1) Lesson 46 read L2 while listening to L2, read L1 while listening to L2, read L2 aloud while checking L1 if needed for meaning. 2) Shadowed lessons 1-46 while reading L2 if needed. I was really tired when I finished. Some of the lessons still seem fast, although I surprised myself at how quickly and accrurately my mouth could move on some of the fast ones. Most of these lessons are very familiar by now. The whole process took a little over an hour to accomplish. The earlier lessons, some of which have been repeated almost 50 times now, are hyper/super/overlearned now. I can sing along with the speakers with the same rhythm and (mostly) same intonation, even in my sleep. Shadowing for over an hour is pretty tiring and intense. When I get to lesson 50 and start to translate the earlier lessons, I think I will have cut back on how many lesson I shadow. This is getting ridiculous. It would be cool to combine the massive shadowing I've been doing with something like Luca's method, something like... Lesson 8 translate L2->L1 written Lesson 1 translate L1->L2 written Lesson 1-50 shadow. Or I could do: Lesson 1-8 translate L2->L1 spoken Lesson 1-8 translate L1->L2 spoken Lesson 8-50 shadow or even: Lesson 8 translate L2->L1 written Lesson 1 translate L1->L2 written Lesson 8-15 listen, read aloud, repeat aloud Lesson 15-50 shadow. The third way is closer to the spirit of what Luca does, minus all the shadowing :) I'm daydreaming about reading novels a lot now. My listening/reading comprehension is getting better and better. My improved ability to process the language is letting me understand words well enough that I'm becoming limited more by the vocabulary that I don't know rather than by processing. Before there was a fast blur of words with several understood, often enough to get the gist of what was being said, now there is less blur. With clearer processing, I'm more aware of the words I haven't learned yet. I think some extensive use of native speaker materials would take care of this, although I realize that I've got a lot to learn from the rest of SwE and Using Spanish, as well. In reply to an earlier message, I claimed that I could imitate American Spanish pronunciation if I wanted to, you know just saying sinco instead of thinco for cinco. I tried doing that again yesterday, and I found it really hard. My pronunciation is getting very locked into the whole Castilian pronunciation, which is fine with me. I'm never going to sound like a native speaker, so I don't think it matters that much what target I'm missing :) The "vosotros" thing does seem to bug some of my interlocutors though... and "thinco de mayo" just doesn't cut it :) steve edited to fix a mistake Edited by sfuqua on 01 May 2012 at 7:28pm 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 114 of 175 05 May 2012 at 6:19am | IP Logged |
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Assimil Spanish with Ease passive/shadowing lesson 50
Today I: Lesson 49 read aloud 3 times (review lesson no audio) Lesson 48 (read aloud then blind shadow)X3 Yup,that's a total of 6 times through the lesson Lesson 42 read aloud 3 times (no audio again) Lesson 30 (read aloud then blind shadow)X3 Lesson 6 (read aloud then blind shadow)X3 By repeating the same lesson several times, I find that I'm getting a lot better at blind shadowing them. The big thing that makes me stumble when blind shadowing is not hearing and processing the language fast enough. I suspect more concentration on fewer lessons will help me get deeper into them. I want to get so that I can blind shadow everything in this book "with ease." Tomorrow, I start my "active wave." I plan to scriptorium the lesson and the exercises and then translate everything both directions. I think I could be moving faster than Assimil is at this point, although I do remember those "hard" lessons that are only a few days away in the "passive wave." When I listen to my telenovelas there are too many words/idioms that I don't understand. I suspect that my "grammar/processing" is ahead of my vocabulary acquisition right now, which makes me want to get into more native speaker extensive things. But what the heck, another 59 days or so and the passive wave of SwE will be done, and I can start some native speaker materials at that time while I finish up the active wave, or I can go into Using Spanish. Using Spanish doesn't really look *that* impossible now; maybe I'll just go through it first with my passive wave to finish my "Assimil Spanish." I definitely am learning much more Spanish with all the shadowing and reviewing I've been doing. I am working hard, and I feel tired when I'm done, but I'm not feeling the sense of stress and occasional failure I felt the first time through. My passive skills are still ahead of my active skills; they may always be that way unless I live somewhere where I use Spanish every day to get through the day. I am not going to sweat it; even if my active skills trail, they are bound to get better 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 115 of 175 06 May 2012 at 6:23am | IP Logged |
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Assimil Spanish with Ease, passive 51, active 2 shadowing/scriptorium
I shadowed for about 2 hours today; it was too much. I did scriptorium on lesson 1. I translated lessons 1-7 orally. I listened to the news in Spanish afterward. Lesson 50 was a little harder than the recent ones; it felt good. 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 116 of 175 07 May 2012 at 6:34am | IP Logged |
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Assimil Spanish with Ease, passive wave 52, active wave 3 shadowing
I tried yet another routine today. Lesson 2 scriptorium (including the exercises) I also translated L2->L1->L2; this was trivial, since I can recite the lesson "in the shower." Lesson 51 Listen to L2 read L2 Lesson 51 Listen to L2 read L1 Lesson 51 read L2 aloud checking L1 if needed to understand Lessons 21-51 shadow (while reading L2 if needed). I like this routine, since it measures what has to be done in the lesson by what you do rather than by what you achieve. I stumbled too much while shadowing lessons 50 and 51, but if I'm going to review them over the next month, it's no big deal; I'll get them when I get them. This took less than an hour, and I think I can repeat this routine even on work days. I went to a bookstore today and bought a copy of Los pilares de la Tierra. I spent a lot of time at the bookstore lusting over novels. I've got to stop buying things I'm not ready for yet. I will finish Assimil, and wring every bit of knowledge out of it before I stop, but I'm very hungry for some extensive reading. Experimenting with LpdlT, I can just start out reading; since I know the story well, and I can guess a lot of the words I don't know. If I did it formally, checking my English version of the book from time to time, it would be trivial to understand every word. I suppose this means that I'm about ready to read it... I think a lot of my knowledge of Spanish is still very much just "semantic processing." I can follow much of the subordination, but I don't think I really do much processing of verb tenses. I recognize the verb, but I think that I usually figure out the tense and aspect from the context when processing at full speed (ie reading aloud, shadowing). I'm pretty sure that I have not connected up some of the different forms of some of the irregular verbs, at least for full speed automatic processing. This is not to say that I can't figure it out if given time, but I generally couldn't tell you what the tense/aspect of a given verb is without thinking and figuring. Of course I couldn't do this in English either, so I'm not sure how significant this is. I watched a bunch of "Alice" this weekend with my wife. We set the sound to "Spanish" and the subtitles to English. My wife used to be the best Spanish speaker in the family, but I'm way ahead of her now. The Spanish in "Alice" seemed very easy to understand. There was more sex and nudity than I was expecting, but sex and nudity by lovely young people is not a bad thing. Brazil looks different than I thought it would. Richer and more European. At least it looks that way in the "Alice" version. So many countries, so little time. Even less if you're 59 with limited resources and a family. At least there are novels... Thank God there are novels... and movies... :) Novels, the poor person's plane ticket and time machine. steve Edited by sfuqua on 07 May 2012 at 5:51pm 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 117 of 175 07 May 2012 at 6:33pm | IP Logged |
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Back in the 1980's when I was doing my Masters degree in ESL/Second Language Acquisition at University of Hawaii, the idea was that language "emerges" and that errors are inevitable as the learner's interlanguage goes through successive approximations of the target language. The idea was that it is possible to memorize a phrase, a chunk of language, and use it correctly right from the beginning, but when producing new, unique, sentences, the learner is bound to make mistakes, and that some mistakes are actually a sign of progress. For instance, if the learner finally grasps how use the regular past tense correctly, he may overgeneralize it's use to irregular verbs and actually start making new types of errors that were not present before. Demanding perfection right from the beginning may stifle progress. The interlanguage moves through its series of stages by being exposed to i+1 comprehensible input, and by focusing on form. The focus on form part is to try to explain why learners fossilize with with very simple interlanguages.
I was listening to a recording of me speaking Spanish this morning, and I found the results interesting. If I could work a line from Assimil right into the conversation, I was dead on accurate, and sounded pretty good. When I would generate a new sentence, I had a tendency to build the sentence from slices of Assimil sentences. This would lead to agreement errors, when the slices from the different sentences referred to different things originally. My tense system is pretty primitive also. I tend to use haber + past participle for any action or state in the past, the present tense for the present time, or sometimes the future. ir + infinitive for the future sometimes, and estar + present participle for a present continuous. Other tenses only appeared in memorized chunks. I never used a preterite or an imperfect or future tense in sentences I constructed for myself, although they appeared in memorized "chunks" that I used to construct sentences. I would say that my lack of past tenses is the biggest problem. Anyway, I appear to be learning/acquiring Spanish in a pretty normal fashion. I think I may have been trying too hard for accuracy, which has to "emerge." I think that the massive shadowing I've been doing should be providing oodles of comprehensible input. I think this also suggests that it is better for me to shadow a large group of sentences, and not worry if some of the less familiar passages are a little rough, than it is for me to try to reach perfection on a few lessons by doing multiple repetitions. steve Edited by sfuqua on 07 May 2012 at 11:43pm 3 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 118 of 175 08 May 2012 at 6:26pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil Spanish with Ease, passive wave lesson 53, active wave lesson 4, shadowing/scriptorium second time through.
I experimented today using Fry's readability formula a couple of the novels I've been considering for my next step after Assimil. My results should be taken with a large grain of salt; Fry's formula's were not formulated for Spanish, and I am an A2 learner counting syllables. The basic idea of Fry should work for Spanish, passages with longer sentences and longer words should be harder to read. He ignores how familiar the vocabulary is, since his measure is just supposed to correlate to readability, not measure it with a great deal of accuracy. I expect I would have gotten different results if I had chosen different random samples to measure. By my measure, according to Fry's formula: La reina del Sur is at grade level 15+. Los Pilares de la Tierra is at grade level 6. Neither book seems to be considered very difficult to read by advanced learners or native speakers. The author of LRDS likes really long sentences during action sequences, and I think this drove up the score. My impression of the two books was that LPDLT was easier to read than LRDS, and the Fry formula supports that. It doesn't feel to me that there is as big a difference as the formula seems to suggest. I'm looking forward to getting to the "hard" part of SwE, about lessons 60-80. I want to stretch and challenge my Spanish some more. I was interested in the recent thread about how much instruction it takes to reach a given level (sorry I can't seem to find it to link to it right now). This would suggest that it would probably take about about 350 hours to get to a solid B1. This suggests that Assimil's claim that you can get to B2 with 30-40 minutes a day on 150 days is hogwash. There may be enough material there to get to B2, but it needs more intensive study than the "with ease" instructions. People who do it with Assimil used other resources, or knew a cognate language. Or they are really, really smart :) In a way this is encouraging. I'm actually exactly where you would expect me to be after the number of hours I've put in (120 by my best guess), an A2 who is flirting with B1. On good days, I'm pretty sure I am a B1 in my passive skills, but then I've always had a good tolerance for ambiguity. I may be missing more than I think :) steve edited to fix a number that was wrong. Edited by sfuqua on 11 May 2012 at 10:50pm 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 119 of 175 09 May 2012 at 6:14pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil Spanish with Ease passve wave 54, active wave 5
As you can see from my posts above, I am a fan of shadowing. The way I am doing it is closer to the procedure for LR. I find it useful to shadow for a bit longer than the original suggestions by Dr A, and I generally shadow first with support from reading the L2 and move to blind shadowing once the material is more familiar. Also, I read the L1 while listening to the L2 to learn what the lesson means before I do any shadowing. Since each Assimil lesson is short once the gaps are removed, I have been reviewing a large number of previous lessons each day. If I review lessons only once a day, I find that it may take several days before I can shadow a lesson smoothly. One problem with what I am doing is that it is possible, once shadowing the lesson becomes easy, to go through lessons without paying much attention to the meaning. I am not sure that this is valuable for language learning. When blind shadowing, one has to listen very closely to keep shadowing in lessons that are not completely memorized. After a couple of weeks of blind shadowing a lesson once a day, however, it is possible to listen to the lesson, shadow it a split second behind, and daydream about what is for supper. I doubt that this is terribly useful, I may have to refine my technique somehow. For now, I'm just focusing on shadowing the lessons, pretending that I am the narrator playing the role the narrator plays using facial expressions and gestures that I think fit. This tends to keep me "in the lesson" a bit better. So if you see a grey haired guy with headphones on, waving his arms and speaking Spanish, asking questions and answering himself, frowning and smiling, that guy is probably me. It amuses my 5 year old daughter. Last night I did: Scriptorium Lesson 4 Listen to L2 read L2 lessons 51,52,53 Listen to L2 read L1 lessons 51,52,53 Read aloud lessons 51,52,53 checking L1 and notes if needed to uderstand. Shadow lessons 18-53 using L2 text if needed. This took a little over an hour. I wish I could have shadowed a little longer, but there were time constraints with family activities. The TV was broken, and it had to be fixed before we could watch "La Reina del Sur." steve Edited by sfuqua on 09 May 2012 at 6:18pm 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 120 of 175 13 May 2012 at 4:31pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil Spanish with Ease, passive wave lesson 57, active wave 8 shadowing/scriptorium
yesterday: lesson 7 -- scriptorium lessons 54,55,56 -- listen to L2 read L2, listen to L2 read L1, read aloud lessons 1-56 shadow, reading L2 if needed Shadowing 56 lessons without stopping was tiring. By the end, I was feeling pretty tired, and I was getting a bit clumsy by the last few lessons. After I finished, I had strange sensation through the front part of my head, and a feeling of physical tiredness in my lips, tongue and jaw muscle. I also noticed that during the last few lessons, my r's stopped trilling. I wasn't short of breath or anything, but I think there aren't that many occasions in real life where you talk continuously, without breaks, for an hour and a half. I remember when I was learning Samoan years ago, I used to read aloud for hours on end. Reading aloud is different though; when you read aloud, you can pause, drink a glass of water, stretch, and go on. When shadowing Assimil, with the gaps removed, the audio keeps driving you forward at a pace that gets faster as you go through the book, and which does not slow down, even when some fatigue sets in. I've got to believe that pounding through that much material at full speed in a concentrated dose is "good" for my Spanish. Perhaps and hour of shadowing with no pauses is the equivalent of a longer period of less intense practice. I spent the rest of the day doing chores for the family and daydreaming about reading my way through some of the "dictator novels" in Spanish I'm reading Llosa's *Feast of the Goat* in English right now. steve 1 person has voted this message useful |
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