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Panama in 3.5 months | ||
Tags: Living abroad | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4995 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 16 28 August 2013 at 12:43pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil: lesson 22 completed
LR: Finished HP y la piedra filosofal FSI: Completed Unit 4 So over the last days, I have been able to a bit of Spanish. Assimil is coming along slowly but surely. Nice thing is that I am now learning the most important tenses (imperfect and preterite, past tenses at the moment). This makes reading and listening a lot easier, as I can now start to understand more of the irregular verbs like tener, ser, ir etc. The different forms they take really messed me up so far, so this is good. Things like fui, fue, tuve etc were really annoying as I couldn't really see what they meant. Now, these things are starting to click. FSI is also going well. I found that just doing one unit a day was way too much and that repetition over time is really important. So for example today, I repeated all the drills of unit 3 and 4. Almost flawless, so I feel I am now ready to move on to unit 5 tomorrow. Finished the first HP book again (L2-L2). Will now start with the second book (have the first four books here in both Spanish and Dutch). Slowly but slowly I am making progress :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4995 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 16 29 August 2013 at 4:51pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil
lesson 1-23 FINISHED LR HP y la Piedra Filosofal FINISHED HP y la Cámara Secreta capítulos 1-4 FSI Units 1-4 FINISHED Unit 5 IN PROGRESS Nice assimil lesson again. Really feel like the assimil lessons are filling the holes that are created with LR. A lot of the things I find difficult at this moment with LR tend to come up in the assimil lessons, so I guess the progression is quite good. La cámara secreta has a little bit worse narrator. He doesn't change voice for different characters so it is a little bit more difficult to follow (first book has an awesome narrator, I recommend everyone that book. He has a different voice for every character, so it is really easy to follow who is saying what and when). But I must say, I am surprised at how well I am able to follow the story. FSI lesson was quite short and easy. It covered the irregular verb 'ser', which I already knew quite well (at least in the present tense). But I must say, the practice I got with using it on the spot was still quite good. Tomorrow I will not have much time, so I will only review unit 5. I also started with some anki. 25 new words each day, so I can complete it in under 10 minutes so it doesn't get tedious. Like it so far, guess it is a good addition. I use a standard deck of the 5000 most common words. Edited by supertom on 29 August 2013 at 4:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4995 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 11 of 16 03 September 2013 at 1:29pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil
lesson 1-26 FINISHED LR HP y la Piedra Filosofal FINISHED HP y la Cámara Secreta capítulos 1-8 FSI Units 1-6 FINISHED Slowly moving along. I like the combination I am using. The amount of input I get from the LR is really nice and it isnt too tiring. It also seems that Assimil is really closing a lot of gaps I found in the LR part. Missing vocab, missing easy grammar, all that stuff. FSI really ingrains the grammar points already learned in Assimil. It is going well and I feel like I am getting better :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4995 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 12 of 16 04 September 2013 at 12:51pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil
lesson 1-27 FINISHED LR HP y la Piedra Filosofal FINISHED HP y la Cámara Secreta capítulos 1-10 FSI Units 1-6 FINISHED Unit 7 IN PROGRESS Just doing my daily thing. Assimil was a nice lesson, lots of future tense with some other tenses thrown in as well. So it made for good practice. Still takes me a little under an hour to do each lesson, but this is mainly due to the fact that the translation part (writing from English to Spanish twice) takes me about half an hour. LR was fun. I understood pretty well what was going on and the books are just so nice to read, I love it. Unit 7 deals with regular -ER verbs, the use of ese-este-aquel/esa-esta-aquella. This was something I didn't really understood until now. I knew the ese/este part where este is near you and ese is near the other person, but I didn't know when and why to use aquel. Now I do, so that is good. Practice with it is nice too. All in all it is a good lesson with a lot of drills. I will redo them tomorrow to really ingrain them. Nice thing is that I am noticing that I am starting to constantly think in Spanish. Not very many 'real' things, but just random Spanish phrases popping into my head like 'el tabaco rubio, en espana, es barato' or 'no estamos acustombrados a esos formalidades. Tanto mejor, nosotros tampoco'. Assimil, gotta love it. The same with some of the drills of FSI. Guess this is good. Yesterday, I was writing an email to my professor in English, but the Spanish words kept popping into my head. Kinda funny, but it was quite difficult to find the English words sometimes.. :P 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4995 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 13 of 16 05 September 2013 at 1:40pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil
lesson 1-28 FINISHED LR HP y la Piedra Filosofal FINISHED HP y la Cámara Secreta capítulos 1-12 FSI Units 1-7 FINISHED Had a little bit less time today. Assimil was a review lesson, so not much new here, but it is always nice to get to the review part because that 'closes a chapter'. At least that is how I feel it. Also nice to see that the future tense always has the same endings, regardless of the verb. FSI was reviewing the drills. I notice that I make little mistakes, so that is good. The most difficulty I have with the translation drills. Replacement drills and variation drills are normally quite easy, but translation drills are just very quick and pretty difficult some times. But that's okay. Also, when I do the drills without the book (like today), I get confused sometimes in the beginning of the drill as to what to do. Then I need 1 or 2 'errors' before I know what they mean. HP was nice again. Chapter 12 was done listening only. I noticed that I am getting very good at hearing all the different words. I do not understand them all, but at least I can distinguish between most of them when I really listen. So it doesn't make that much difference any more whether I LR or just listen to the audio. I guess this is the result of a lot of hours spend LR L2-L2. Also, some of you may notice that I am moving fairly quickly through the material (FSI and Assimil). That is because I want to get as much exposure as possible before I move to Panamá. I want to get to the point where I can formulate correct sentences and understand most of what I hear. But getting to the point where everything comes out without thinking is a matter of endless practice, something that I will get without cost once I get to Panamá. So I will leave that part for my stay there and focus here on getting all of the important grammar ingrained and getting my vocab up to speed, so that I can quickly fill in all the speed and speech problems once I am there. For the next three days, I will be rock climbing in Luxembourg. So probably not a whole lot of Spanish during these days. I will try to complete my HP book, but probably no FSI or Assimil during this weekend. Edited by supertom on 05 September 2013 at 1:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4995 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 16 17 September 2013 at 3:06pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil
lesson 1-30 FINISHED LR HP y la Piedra Filosofal FINISHED HP y la Cámara Secreta FINISHED FSI Units 1-7 FINISHED Unit 8 in PROGRESS Nothing much to say. Wasn't able to do a whole lot last week, but I find that a small break is sometimes very important for the brain to catch up with all you have done so far. So lets hope this was one of those breaks. Happy to have finished the second HP book now. Will start on the third tomorrow. Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkeban, looking forward to it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5376 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 15 of 16 22 September 2013 at 2:11pm | IP Logged |
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Great progress. You are using some wonderful resources and I am quite impressed you can put in so much daily time. I burn out pretty hard after an hour or two.
You asked about the da Vinci Code. The audio book is simply awesome. Talk about an amazing narrator... Raul Amundaray is simply the best Spanish speaking narrator. I did the da Vinci Code roughly the same time I was doing the first Harry Potter book and it was fine for me... however, I first followed along with the English text and then listened with the Spanish text. I liked it much better simply because I am not really crazy about Harry Potter. I must say also that just listening to the audio of the da Vinci code is amazing and enjoyable. Edit: Amundaray speaks very slowly and clearly in the audio book. This is an important factor because it gives time to think/understand better than most audio books which use a more rapidfire approach to the audio. You can listen to a sample of the audio on audible.com. I hope you are able to continue making such great progress. If you goal is speaking, listening and having conversations I'd recommend really pounding away at FSI and active use of Assimil. Edited by James29 on 22 September 2013 at 2:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4145 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 16 of 16 22 September 2013 at 2:30pm | IP Logged |
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Very interesting log! I'm very impressed by your dedication to learning Spanish!
I just started playing with FSI yesterday - found your log when searching for more info on how people actually use it. Do you read the dialogue first, or listen to it first? Yesterday I did unit 3, but I only did the audio (listening to the dialogue, repeating it, responding to the drills, listening to the dialogues at the end). I enjoyed it - which surprised me, to be honest - but I can't help but feel that I'm missing something! Have you thought about getting a Skype language partner? Some informal conversation practice would probably be really useful to you before arriving in Panama. It's also a lot of fun! I found some of my language partners through italki. They're all from Spain, since that's where I'm headed. But there are dozens of members who are from Panama - they'd be able to help you learn some of the slang and idiomatic expressions from that area: http://www.italki.com/partners#learn=all&speak=spanish&count ry=PA&page=1 1 person has voted this message useful |
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