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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 17 of 175 08 February 2012 at 6:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Still plugging along. I get a great sense of satisfaction from doing the translations for the active wave.
Last night when I studied, I was so tired that I was nodding off while studying. For me at least, it's not simply finding time to study, it's finding energy after a long day. After a long day, sometimes the Spanish doesn't flow very well. 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 18 of 175 12 February 2012 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil Spanish lesson 57 passive wave, lesson 8 active wave
I'm starting to have some productive abilities; the active wave seems to be working. I can imagine that I will have quite a bit of productive ability by the time I finish the active wave. I've cut down on the amount of review I've been doing as a part of my regular daily schedule. Doing both the active and passive wave seems to take me about an hour; I can only commit to about that much time with my work and family responsibilites. I've also simplified the steps I'm doing for each language. I don't want to include the review in my daily lesson plan, and then feel like I've failed if I don't get to it. I am still reviewing old lessons whenever I have time, but I feel better about missing it for a day if I don't schedule it every day. I've also tried to get more of the lesson done earlier in the day. If I save Spanish for the last thing in my day, I sometimes feel sleepy when I'm trying to learn. If I can get in the passive wave during lunch hour and do the active wave before supper, it goes a lot better than saving the whole thing until just before bed. I keep adjusting the way that I do the lessons, trying to stay within the parameters of Assimil, which, as we know, are very loose. Right now the passive wave looks like this: 1) Listen to the lesson, repeating the "ejercicio" aloud in the pauses provided, while reading the English translation. 2) Read the passage aloud checking the translation if needed. 3) Read through the passage again, repeating each sentence aloud without looking at the print. This step takes up much of the time of the lesson. I peek at the English translation if I forget what the sentence means. 4)Translate the ejercicio from Spanish to English orally. Repeat until I can get all the way through without any mistakes. 6)Fill in the "ejercicio de control" orally. Repeat until I can get all the way through without making a mistake. Active wave: 1)Read the passage aloud checking the translation if I have forgotten the meaning of one of the sentences. 2) Translate the passage from English to Spanish orally. Repeat until I can get all the way through without a mistake. I count it as a mistake when my translation is different from the Spanish in the lesson. This can be frustrating, since I think that some of my sentences are good Spanish, but they just differ a bit from the sentences in the lesson. 3) Translate the passage from English to Spanish in writing. Check and correct the result. Other stuff: Most days I spend 45 minutes exercising alternating between a stationary bike, a stairclimber, and an cross country skiing machine. While I'm on the machine I listen to all of the Assimil lessons, put on shuffle. I try to follow what is going on, although this is hard with lessons I haven't covered yet, especially with the lessons from Using Spanish. I talked to some students the other day who are native speakers of Spanish. We had some fun. I was slow and stumbling, but I expressed myself. steve (edited to correct grammar) Edited by sfuqua on 12 February 2012 at 8:55pm 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 19 of 175 13 February 2012 at 5:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I suppose the only reason that anybody would read this log is to see if the "older learner" part of the description is having any effect. As I approach halfway through Spanish with Ease, my impression is that my results are about the same as they would have been at any earlier time in my life. I'm pretty certain that my receptive skills will be at something like B2 by the time this is done; I see daily improvements. My productive skills are lagging, but I think this is the nature of Assimil. I hope that the productive abilities will emerge.
One thing I've noticed about myself as an older learner is that I don't have much patience with hard core memorization of large vocabulary lists. Maybe it's harder now, or maybe I'm just less driven. Or more lazy. I may not be a typical older learner. As a language teacher, I have seen people my age who were hopeless. Maybe they were hopeless at 20 also. I have learned two languages as an adult, one of them to a high level of proficiency. That may have some effect. I did a masters degree in computer science in my late 40's without taking much in the way of undergraduate classes; I studied a bunch of undergraduate textbooks and talked my way into being admitted to some graduate courses. I was only admitted to the program after I passed a few courses. Maybe that kept my brain cells active. Anyway, my results so far are encouraging. I am making progress, and I don't feel any big differences from when I was a youngster. If any older person who is thinking of learning a language ever reads this, my advice would be to go ahead and try. It's more fun than doing sudoku. Whatever the eventual level I reach in Spanish, I'm enjoying the process. Heaven help me, but I bought a copy of French with Ease for after I finish my Spanish Assimil books... 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 20 of 175 16 February 2012 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil Spanish with Ease passive wave lesson 61, active wave 12.
Wow, Spanish with Ease seems to have gotten much harder the last couple of lessons. It took me almost an hour to get through the passive wave yesterday. The sentences were long; the vocabulary was dense, and it just didn't fit into short term memory very well during the "repeat the sentences without looking at the book" phase. If this keeps up, I'm going to split the passive and active waves and do them on alternate days. 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 21 of 175 18 February 2012 at 5:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Spanish with Ease, passive 63 active 14
It took me one hour and five minutes to get through the two waves today. I drank a glass of port while I studied; maybe that helped :) I think the thing that is slowing me down is trying to repeat the whole "numbered section" during the passive wave. Today I decided to try breaking them down, trying to repeat the units that could stand together as a "complete sentence." Splitting sentences at conjunctions that join sentences make the process go faster. I don't think that I'm losing much linguistically splitting them this way, just losing the some of the pressure on memory. Anyway, I've got to get some "ease" back into this process. I reviewed some of the earlier lessons, and I can see that I've been learning the past few lessons even if they've been taking longer and have been less fun. steve edited to fix a bad autocorrection by my phone Edited by sfuqua on 18 February 2012 at 4:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4888 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 22 of 175 18 February 2012 at 9:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I had similar experiences ... if I'm not rested then language study usually knocks me
out cold, I have much less patience for memorizing vocab lists these days, I had to create my own "sentence breaks" in Assimil, and found that each lesson took far more time that they advertised. I went to Mexico this past November, and had made it to about lesson 80 in Assimil (so, 30 lessons into the Active phase). And it was frustrating; I felt that I had lots of language inside my head, but I just couldn't access it quickly enough to have a decent conversation. On a different trip I had prepped with Pimsleur I and II, and though I knew less, I could access it more easily. Back to your comment about taking a trip to the Spanish-speaking world. Using a language abroad is the big reward for me. I'd recommend finishing Assimil, then switching to an audio course (Pimsleur or Michel Thomas) a few weeks before you leave. Even if the audio course is at a much lower level than what you know from a textbook, I find that they help unlock the tongue, or something, and make it easier to speak overall. Edited by kanewai on 18 February 2012 at 8:07pm 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 23 of 175 18 February 2012 at 11:37am | IP Logged | ||
At the moment, your in the toughest section of the book. Lesons 60 to 70 odd are long and tough , and it takes way longer to do both waves. The rewards are their though, you dont seem to find Spanish this advanced in many other courses. I (and others) have had exactly the same frustrations at exactly this point in the book, I hope it helps you to know that! Good luck, I am enjoying this log. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5846 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 175 18 February 2012 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | ||
In my Danish course we are five students and I (= my age: 50) am the youngest person in the group. My classmates are very advanced in the foreign language, but how much they really study at home, I don't know. Maybe they just read through the texts at home and look up an unknown word here and there. For me it's hardcore study to understand the texts because I have only two years of learning experience with Danish. By the way, the oldest learner in our class is a woman of 80. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 19 February 2012 at 8:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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