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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 153 of 175 07 August 2012 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I just scored a c1 on one of the online cefr tests. Of
course this is not my real level but I scored b1 on the same test a month ago. I think that all of the "repeating aloud" I've been doing is improving my grammar. Edited by sfuqua on 09 August 2012 at 6:55am 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 154 of 175 09 August 2012 at 7:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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Assimil Spanish with Ease passive wave 74, active wave 25
The passive wave is harder today than yesterday, and the active wave is taking longer too. I'm (mostly) on vacation now, so I can spend as much time as I need. I'm probably going to miss completing Spanish with Ease before my classes start in late August, but I'll be pretty close, and I can get it done by early September. I had an annoying sign of progress today. With a wife from the Philippines, and living in San Jose, California, I speak Tagalog many times every day. I started out speaking to a stranger the other day in Tagalog, and it all came out Spanish. I could understand the other person's Tagalog fine, but all I seemed to be able to say for several sentences was Spanish. I've certainly had interference the other way; I guess having my Spanish mess with my Tagalog is a sign of progress of some sort... Back 30 years ago when I did my ESL/Second Language Acquisition graduate degree, one of the techniques we used to use for testing learners' levels was to test how long a sentence they could repeat in the target language. I've lost the link right now, but people are still using this with bilinguals to compare their abilities in two languages. It makes sense that someone who has more skill in a language would be able to repeat longer sentences. I'm not aware of any research which shows that practicing sentences until you can repeat longer sentences builds ability in the language, but it makes sense that it might. Fitting more into short term memory should involve "chunking" bigger pieces of the language. A beginner would be working with repeating sounds, at an higher level the learner would be remembering words, and at higher levels, the learner would be learning phrases and sentences. Maybe Assimil's "repeat aloud" step is more important than people think :) steve 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 155 of 175 16 August 2012 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Assimil Spanish with Ease passive wave 80, active wave 31.
This marks the "halfway" point of Spanish with Ease. The passive wave is about three fourths done; the active wave is about one fourth done. This is the point in the book where my first attempt collapsed. I wasn't understanding the new lessons in the passive wave, I was having a hard time translating the active wave. The lessons were taking a long time, and there was little "ease". I couldn't understand the grammar notes in the lessons I had completed. I was hitting a wall. I started over and shadowed through the lessons again. I had immediate improvement in speaking. By the time I reached this point again, my progress had slowed down. When I checked some of the "hard" lessons from SwE, lessons 63-77, I found that while I could shadow these lessons, I was unable to do the "repeat aloud" step at all. Being somewhat obsessed with Spanish and Spanish with Ease, I went back to the beginning of the book and did the "repeat aloud" step for each lesson. The early ones were trivial, but by lessons 63-77, they took quite a bit of effort. From here on Assimil has lessons with shorter sections to repeat, and less new grammar per lesson, so completing the passive wave looks simple. The active wave has gotten hard enough that I think that I will have to keep to no more than one lesson per day. I plan to continue as I have been, doing the passive and active waves as they are described in the book, and reviewing by reading aloud and shadowing. My Spanish is still not where I want it to be, but it is much, much better than ever before. I decided early in my first trip through the book that the "repeat aloud" was not necessary. Many people skip it; it takes a lot of effort for some lessons. My recent improvements suggest that I was wrong. I now think that the "repeat aloud" step is a key part of the program. I now have much better ability in several tenses; it may be just the number of hours put in, but it "feels" like it has something to do with it. I don't find scriptorium or written translation very useful. Spanish has a very nice sound/letter correspondence, and I feel like I'm wasting time writing. Right now it feels like reading is teaching all I need to know about written Spanish. I guess I'm less interested in learning to write Spanish well. I know there are conventions about writing in Spanish that are different from those in English, but Assimil isn't covering those yet. Twenty-nine passive wave lessons from now, hopefully the middle of next month, I'll have to decide what to do after the passive wave in SwE. My choices are: 1) Nothing. Finish all of the active wave SwE before starting something else. This may be the best choice since I am going to start teaching again soon, and I will have less time than I've had these last two months. 2) Roll on into Using Spanish just like it was part of SwE. Some people have done this successfully; others have said that it was too big a jump from SwE. Some of the lessons look very interesting, and I'm inclined to do this one. 3) I could do another program in between Spanish with Ease and Using Spanish. A couple of months ago, I was pretty sure that I would do FSI and Platiquemos next, but my recent improvements make me wonder if this would be the best use of my time. I also have a copy of Streetwise Spanish, which emphasizes slang and regional variations. The format is similar to Assimil; it might make a good break from my steady diet of Assimil humor and Castilian Spanish. 4) I could also read a novel; I'm about ready. With a dictionary and some repeated reading, I can get through most things. I have a lot of vocabulary to learn. If I can read novels, perhaps there isn't much need for Using Spanish... I've tried to be honest in these posts, so let me introduce a strategy that may help someone else some day, although it's a little embarrassing. On Sunday, I stumbled across the "erotica" section of the Spanish section of amazon.com usa. On a lark, I downloaded a kindle file of an "erotic" novel about the adventures of a young lady in modern Madrid. The little novel turned out to be written in about exactly the right level for me. There was some unfamiliar vocabulary (so that's the word for "that"), but the grammar was mostly well within my level. I read about 40 pages before bed. I looked up words from time to time, but I kept trying to move forward if at all possible. The adventures of the a teenage girl seducing the man next door, getting bored and moving on the the handsome guy at the coffee shop, etc, kept me reading, and the Spanish just kept flowing through me. When I went to bed that night, Spanish was ringing loudly in my ears. I didn't have a native speaker around to talk to, but my "self talk" seemed more fluent and accurate than usual. A jump in ability from reading "erotica"? I think so. OK; it wasn't One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it makes me think that I might be able to read One Hundred Years of Solitude sooner than I was expecting a couple of months ago. I don't think that the erotic content was important; I bet any high interest Spanish at the right level would work. It also was important that I didn't know what was going to happen in the story, that I had to read and understand the Spanish to see what would happen next. Many people like to read a new book in their native language before they read it in their target language. I guess that is OK if your interest level is high enough to enjoy a second read through the material, but I think there is something to be said for discovering meaning the first time directly through the Spanish, especially Spanish intended for native speakers. My Spanish seems to be improving rapidly at this point, and I'm pretty happy learner. I'm really glad that I didn't convince myself that learning a new language would be impossible back last December when I started. I may be learning more slowly than I would have back in my teens or twenties, but I'm really not sure that there is very much difference. Both of my other languages were learned in "immersion" situations; I've done Spanish with Ease in my spare time. I'm sure that if you had sent me to live in Madrid with my little Spanish with Ease book, I would be way ahead of where I am now, even with my 59 year old brain. I think that old people who are in normal health, who fail to learn languages, fail for the same reason that young people fail to learn languages -- they fail because they give up. steve Edited by sfuqua on 16 August 2012 at 8:23pm 6 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 156 of 175 16 August 2012 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Other silly signs of progress:
1) My Tagalog is suffering a lot of interference from Spanish. I'll start out in Tagalog and within a few sentences, I'm speaking Spanish. 2) I've started mixing up b and v in English spelling when I'm typing fast. 3) I pronounced the word "celtic" as "theltic" yesterday. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5021 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 157 of 175 17 August 2012 at 12:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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Nice post! Regard your four options. Depending on your available time, I think you
could make a case for doing 2) 3) and 4). I was a person that found "Using" to be too big of a jump after "with ease". However, I had never learned a foreign language before, and I didn't even really now what a verb tense even was after doing Assimil. Grammar concepts were completely alien to me. So, really, Assimil put a large chunk of the language within my mental reach, and I had to systemise that knowledge later, with different material. However, If I had learnt the grammar while doing with ease, I may well have been able to cope with Using. However, I can't recommend that you do Platiquemos strongly enough. It will help make your speech automatic. The right words will jump into your brain immediately, because you are asked to manipulate the key structures and vocabulary of the language over and over. "With Ease" and "Platiquemos" complement each other beautifully, each one has valuable material that is not found in the other. I also think its worth doing "Using", even if you can make it through a novel. Its title is quite apt really. By which I mean I think its only really useful if you are actually using Spanish, as really it has a lot of idiomatic phrases and complex language which you would only really need if you where already quite proficient. Just some random thoughts I hope you find of help. Good luck, this is really one of the most useful logs out there and I'm enjoying it a lot. Dbag 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4687 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 158 of 175 17 August 2012 at 12:59am | IP Logged | |||||
I gave up on repeating early on, but stuck with shadowing (both blind and while following the written text) instead. Do you think that blind shadowing doesn't get you similar results as "repeating"? I'm currently doing French with Assimil and at just about the same place as sfuqua, except that I'm on the first pass through, BUT I've been doing lots of outside reading and listening. I haven't been doing the extensive shadowing the sfuqua has, and thus I have pretty shaky production skills, but I've actually gotten to where a novel is more is less possible to read and understand (which made dbag's comment stand out for me, since in many ways I'm still far behind sfuqua's level). Accordingly, each new Assimil passive lesson is still relatively easy to understand, but the hard work lies in the repeating/shadowing and active phase. I'll continue to follow this log closely, as it provides a great empirical study of a vigorous approach to developing active skills with Assimil. I don't know if I have the discipline to do what sfuqua has done, but if that's the missing link for unlocking active skills it may be worth a shot. 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 159 of 175 19 August 2012 at 6:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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Spanish with Ease passive wave 82 active wave 33
Both waves were pretty easy today, for a change. geoffw: I found that the repeat aloud step seemed to add accuracy whenever I am speaking slowly and carefully. At this point, for instance, I only seem to use the subjunctive when I am writing or speaking very carefully. Sometimes I even use it correctly :) I don't think that I used it at all before. I now use the future tense from time to time; before I think I only used "ir a infinitive". Maybe it would have happened without all the repeating aloud. I'm not sure if the repeat aloud stage is important, but it is something else to do to fill up some of the 600-1200 hours you need to get to the B2 level that Assimil claims to get you to "with ease". I think that shadowing and blind shadowing are much more important than the repeat aloud step... Repeating aloud had a powerful, subtle effect; shadowing had an obvious immediate impact. dbag's suggestions seem wise. I've always been attracted to Platiquemos/FSI. I think I mentioned somewhere else that I lusted after the FSI course, back when I did a little contracting for Peace Corps, writing a Samoan language manual. The FSI courses seemed like the state of the art compared to my slipshod Peace Corps writing. I love doing substitution and transformation drills, so I bet I would love Platiquemos/FSI. I chose Assimil because I didn't understand how it would work. The only thing about Platiquemos/FSI is that the courses are big. I know that they are big because they are thorough, but looking at the table of contents, it would take a while before I get to the part of Spanish where my biggest weaknesses are. This is sort of a bogus worry, since I am quite capable of fouling up very basic stuff if I'm having a bad day. When school starts again, I won't have as much time to do Spanish as I have now, and I'm afraid that Platiquemos may take up all the time I will have, and not leave any time for the other things in Spanish I'd like to do. I suppose that I don't have to do Platiquemos all at once; I could do a novel after each of the 8 levels and "finish" up the sequence by doing Using Spanish at the end. Of course that would take forever to finish. I really like the idea of having finished Platiquemos; I sometimes wish I had done it first. I'm really hungry to do some novels. I could see myself turning into someone who can read well, but who stumbles too much when he tries to talk. Platiquemos would fix that, I bet. Now to finish Spanish with Ease... 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 160 of 175 20 August 2012 at 4:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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My earlier comments about Platiquemos taking too long look stupid on rereading. If it
all helps, it's worth it how ever long it takes. The course looks awesome. I've learned a lot from Assimil, but I have a lot of "loose ends" in my grammatical understanding, and I still need to get a lot more fluent in my speech before I become easy for a native speaker to talk to. steve 1 person has voted this message useful |
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