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Shadowing Spanish from scratch experiment | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| TehGarnt Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4853 days ago 33 posts - 63 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 14 10 January 2012 at 7:56pm | IP Logged |
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I've decided to learn Spanish. I like the technique of shadowing, and I'd like to learn
Spanish as efficiently as possible, so I think it will be interesting to learn it only by shadowing exactly as Prof Arguelles describes in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=130bOvRpt24 . I've got the 1987 Edition of Assimil Spanish and so each day, while walking as advised, I'll go through the sequence of: shadowing without reading, shadowing while reading English, shadowing while reading Spanish. About 10 1.5 minute lessons per day, adding a new one and dropping the oldest. I'll also do the "sitting down" part of analysing one lesson, reading a few more aloud, and writing one down. Apparently this will take about 30 minutes a day. I won't do an "active wave" of translating the English, as that isn't given as part of the instructions. No other methods will be used, although I do know a few Spanish speakers who I will probably try out my skills on. A bit about the subject: 35 year old native English speaker, previous knowledge of Spanish at the "living la vida loca" level, 5 years of French at school (la chat est sur la table), 2 months of Pimsleur Italian and a 2 week Italian holiday about 2 years ago, knowledge decaying quickly since. I've been living in Germany and learning German for about 16 months, so any extra language learning time will be spent on that. The German learning experience will doubtless help me somewhat when it comes to understanding some grammatical concepts. So, as poorly controlled and arbitrary as this experiment is, this will be the log of its progress! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ReQuest Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5033 days ago 200 posts - 228 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 14 10 January 2012 at 8:27pm | IP Logged |
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Really really interesting! I will certainly follow your experiment, I bet your pronunciation will be perfect, though will you be able to produce different sentences, combine them? Will see, really interesting though.
Edit: Swype, I hate you. Edited by ReQuest on 10 January 2012 at 9:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5557 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 3 of 14 10 January 2012 at 9:05pm | IP Logged |
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Good luck with your experiment, I'll be interested to hear how you get on!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TehGarnt Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4853 days ago 33 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 14 10 January 2012 at 10:04pm | IP Logged |
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I've actually been doing this for about a week, so I'll bring this up to date:
Day 1, 05.01.12. I've decided to start by blind shadowing the first 5 lessons rather than just one. Doing only 3 minutes seems ridiculous. Day 2. I'm surprised by how little I understand of what I'm speaking. "Es una buena idea" I get, little else. Day 3. Starting to notice more details in the recordings, e.g. "boy" rather than "voy". Day 4. Starting to read the English translations. Just lesson one today, will move on at one a day. Day 6. Noticing small patterns, e.g. first person verbs end with "o", "to have" is "ten..." Edited by TehGarnt on 10 January 2012 at 10:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TehGarnt Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4853 days ago 33 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 5 of 14 24 January 2012 at 8:40pm | IP Logged |
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To mark the stage I'm at with this I think I'll indicate the span of lessons I'm covering
on the day I post. So today I'm at 6 - 22, meaning that I copied lesson 6 by hand and shadowed lesson 22 for the first time. I'm happy with how this is going, can notice my comprehension and pronunciation incrementally improving, but I can understand why people become dissatisfied and give up with the shadowing method and indeed the passive learning of Assimil in general. The first time I shadow a new lesson, I can't keep up with or even make out a lot of the new sounds, and I can't really say anything in Spanish apart from a few short phrases that I've memorised from the lessons. Compare that with, say, Michael Thomas, and it seems like a failure. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TehGarnt Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4853 days ago 33 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 14 05 February 2012 at 2:25pm | IP Logged |
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Man, there's a lot of these logs. I had to go to the fourth page before I found this
again. An mp3 player recommendation first: I've got a Sony ICD-AX412 which is great. Big buttons, and a function to timestretch recordings which makes them easier to understand. I've done shadowing with FSI courses, and it's very helpful to slow down the super-fast dialogues to begin with. On to the Spanish, and I've found the daily process takes longer than the 30 mins that Prof Arguelles video led me to hope for (perhaps mistakenly). The Assimil lessons average about 2.30 minutes, so a day's learning might consist of 10*shadowing lessons (25 mins) + reading and analysing one lesson (5 mins+), writing out one lesson (~10 mins) and reading 3 more (5~10 mins), so altogether it takes over 45 minutes. As I don't want to spend more than 30 minutes a day on this I'm going to continue at a slower pace, doing half as many lessons and adding a new one every 2 days rather than every 1. As for the progress, it's going as before, global comprehension improving but little productive ability. Assimil progresses quickly! By lesson 31 it's already on to past, future and subjunctive tenses. I didn't expect the verb conjugation to be so complicated, it's very confusing at the moment. Edited by TehGarnt on 05 February 2012 at 2:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 14 05 February 2012 at 2:48pm | IP Logged |
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Good luck, very interesting to read your log:)
you can find it in your own profile btw, rather than go several pages back:) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| TehGarnt Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4853 days ago 33 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 8 of 14 31 March 2012 at 8:59pm | IP Logged |
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Current stage: written lesson 46, blind shadowed lesson 55
Current regime: "half-speed" shadowing, adding a new lesson every second day, writing out a lesson every other day. Heck, I've really been neglecting this log. This endeavour has become a very pleasant, leisurely hobby. My comprehension and pronunciation are gradually improving. My speaking ability, judging from the few occasions that I've attempted, is very poor, limited mainly to repeating complete phrases from the lessons. I'm fine with this. I've got faith in the method and assume that I'll learn to speak fine when I know enough words to make it worthwhile. As most beginners seem to measure success by speaking ability, I can see why this method isn't for everyone. Hasta luego! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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