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An experiment: 100 days of _Cien años_ | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4766 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 17 of 55 15 August 2013 at 6:19am | IP Logged |
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Macondo 8/14/2013
I went back to L-R, after a couple of days of sentence by sentence slogging. I'm doing Listen L2/Read L1. The latest results are: Day 1 85% Day 2 92% (I don't know what happened here, but it messes up a nice curve) Day 3 84% Day 5 87% Day 6 89% Day 7 91% Day 8 92% Day 9 88.5% (more noise?) Day 10 92.5% Day 11 91.2% Day 12 94% Day 13 worked 12 hours, heavy manual labor 60 year old body and mind rebelled, no Spanish... 0% Day 14 95% worst day yet, exhausted from another day of moving, the Spanish didn' want to make sense. Day 15 (back to L-R) 95% Day 16 95% Day 17 96% I am absolutely astounded at how fast the "comprehended words" curve is moving up. 85% to 96% in only a little over 2 weeks. Many of these words would be quickly forgotten if I quit; they are only half learned, but I think I have a better idea L-R than I did before. I'm not going to quit. I don't think that I could possibly have learned enough words to have moved the comprehension curve as much as I have, but something is going right. I bet I'm actually relearning many words that I had seen before, but forgotten. I went off of L-R for a couple of days because it seemed that I wasn't really mastering things. If I do the whole L-R sequence, I will be working through the book up to six times, shadowing it the last time. I bet after I do that, the entire book will rattle off my tongue pretty well. I realize that I am not actually doing the full L-R method; the big thing I am missing from the "method" is the multiple hours a day of exposure. I seem to be learning anyway. I found a copy of cien and its English translation formatted as a parallel bilingual book, so I'm going to start using this. Using the book and its translation as separate volumes can be awkward sometimes. I tried reading a little bit of Allende's Zorro, and it looks like I am very close to being able to read it without any support of an English translation. This is a big improvement. Translations of Hemingway seem relatively easy also. Understand; I'm not saying I know every word, but I know enough to understand what is going on. My comprehension of the radio continues to improve. Comprehension is so much like a snowball; the more your know the easier it is to learn more. Those of you who have read the book may be amused by a problem I had a few days ago; I was pretty sure that I my comprehension was going backward, when they introduced Rebeca. I kept thinking that the sentences were saying that she was eating dirt. The joke was on me because she was a dirt eater; I was understanding the language correctly. I haven't mentioned it, since I do it separately from my L-R, but I've been using anki to work through a word list of "unique words from _Cien_" (about 16000 words I think), the first 15000 words from the Chile word list "Lifecache" (sp?), and the first 15000 words from the wiktionary subtitles word list. Most of these words are overlap, and many of the words are just various forms of the same root word. I've been exposed to a little under 500 words with this list; they are in various stages of mastery. One last comment on age, I really don't think that there is any difference between how fast I can learn at 60 and how fast I could learn at 23 (when I learned my first L2) at least for passive skills. I have advantages now, better discipline, better organization, less need to drink beer and chase women. I have some disadvantages, a job and family that take top priority. I love my family, and I have to keep my job to keep them fed, so Spanish will have to take whatever time is left over I love this book, and I love this way of learning. I'm already planning what book to read next. Edited by sfuqua on 15 August 2013 at 6:31am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4766 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 18 of 55 16 August 2013 at 6:26am | IP Logged |
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I spent about 2 hours in Macondo today. I L-R'ed along nicely. I can feel many words moving into that "partially learned" state. I wonder how I would be doing if I'd chosen something by Isabel Allende to read, as I almost did. My impression is that her vocabulary is simpler. Maybe I'll read something by her next.
Today we dropped back a percentage point to 95%. So far we're at: Day 1 85% Day 2 92% (I don't know what happened here, but it messes up a nice curve) Day 3 84% Day 5 87% Day 6 89% Day 7 91% Day 8 92% Day 9 88.5% (more noise?) Day 10 92.5% Day 11 91.2% Day 12 94% Day 13 worked 12 hours, heavy manual labor 60 year old body and mind rebelled, no Spanish... 0% Day 14 95% worst day yet, exhausted from another day of moving, the Spanish didn' want to make sense. Day 15 (back to L-R) 95% Day 16 95% Day 17 96% Day 18 95% I hope I have the patience too work back through the book a few times as aYa suggests in order to make this stuff stick. I think L-R works even with shorter sessions than aYa recommends. Of course 1 hour probably works only 1/7th as well as 7 hours, but it still works. While all this L-R stuff is certainly rapidly improving my passive skills, I don't think it is having any effect on my active skills yet, except that I can be a little more confident answering because I can be a little more sure that I understood the question. This will surely change if/when I shadow through the book. aYa seems to suggest shadowing without looking at the print, and not worrying about missing some things. I might drop the speed down from 160 wpm (audiobook speed) to 120 wpm (Assimil Spanish with Ease speed), which would help me have enough time to keep up shadowing. I've also thought about pushing the speed for listening up to 180 wpm. I still can mostly follow at this rate, and learning to comprehend at this rate could only help in trying to understand hysterical radio announcers. Probably I should just leave things at 160 wpm. There are probably a lot of reasons why this is the "audiobook standard". I've been listening to the book using "American Spanish voices" so far, a male and a female voice; I built the audiobook to alternate voices about every minute. As I type this I'm compiling a version of the audiobook that uses fours voice, male and female voices from both America and Spain. I find switching the voices wakes me up and keeps my attention. :) edited to fix bad English Edited by sfuqua on 16 August 2013 at 6:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4766 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 19 of 55 17 August 2013 at 5:21am | IP Logged |
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Macondo:
1 hour hanging out with Gabo. Day 19 94% 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4766 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 20 of 55 18 August 2013 at 5:50am | IP Logged |
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90 minutes in Macondo today.
reality setting in about the vocabulary comprehension levels Day 20 91% One thing interesting about the whole vocabulary thing is that I always measure it by picking a random page from the part of the book I haven't read yet. This means I haven't previewed the vocabulary at all and it is a measure of my general vocabulary level. Once I finish the book and start a second trip through, the whole vocabulary situation is going to change quickly. I checked my vocabulary scores against parts of the book that I have already covered once with L-R, and I found that I was easily at the 98% level. This means that if I cover the book once I will have at least partially, in the contexts where they appear, learned over 15000 words. This is all pretty effortless. I have to make an effort to slow down my eyes reading the English, and concentrate on the Spanish voices to set the pace, but it isn't hard. I have about 800 words in different levels of mastery in anki; the reviews are starting to kill me and I may have to back off my rate of new vocabulary. Many of the "new" words I'm learning from anki are words that I already know... :) 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 21 of 55 18 August 2013 at 1:45pm | IP Logged |
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Do you like the book? I have not yet read a book that was originally written in Spanish and I am trying to decide which to read first.
Do you find your reader is better than the Google Chrome Text to Voice add on? Have you tried it? It is not bad and I was thinking of using it. I have numerous good books in Spanish in pdf. Can text to voice readers read them or do I somehow need to get text files or something. I am not a great technology guy and this stuff sometimes confuses me. I appreciate your analogy on comparing vocabulary to a snowball. That is perfect. Also, I agree with you that age has some major advantages and I think I am a much better learner now than I was when I was young. The biggest advantage I think I have is that I don't look at 2-4 years as such a big time block to learn a language... with 40 years already on me it seems like a lot less time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4766 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 22 of 55 18 August 2013 at 8:25pm | IP Logged |
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I haven't tried google text reader; I'll look at it. I like the IVONA reader for the flexibility in speeds and voices, male and female, Spain and America. Perhaps google reader is better. I usually massage the texts with notepad++ before I turn the reader loose on them. "Raw" pdf's often have annoying things in them like page numbers or the author's name and the title of the book at every page. If you know regular expressions, notepad++ makes it easy to slice the text up. If you've never worked with regular expressions, it may not be worth the time to learn them. I find that changing the voice with IVONA reader makes it easier to keep concentrating.
CADS is a challenging book although not as challenging as some people have made it out. CADS often gets mentioned as the greatest book ever written in Spanish, or the greatest book of the 20th century, whatever that means. I tried to read it in translation back in the 70s, and I sort of got lost in the middle and just skimmed the second half. Many characters have the same name; it is a multigenerational novel, and it is easy get lost. If you read an addition that does not have the family tree illustration at the beginning, I would recommend that you download one from the Internet. I'm sort of quoting someone here, and I can't remember who, but it makes sense to me. The book itself has something for everyone. Liberals can see it as a parable about cruelty and oppression. Conservatives can seem it as a parable about the inevitable collapse and corruption of Liberal utopias. Hedonists can see it as a great story about sex. And so on... I see it as a mad dream sequence, mostly making sense, but at any moment switching into hallucinations and madness, usually with deep psychological resonation in the subconscious. But this doesn't quite capture it either. It's not that crazy, as long as you view it as a parallel universe that resembles Colombia, it makes perfect sense. There is plenty of sex and violence in the story, but it is not erotic in the traditional sense. Sex often does not sound like that much fun, which might be expected from a writer who has the recurrent theme of love as a disease or a demon. For instance, when the overly well endowed Jose Arcadio finally "does it" with the tiny, probably underage gitana, and "...the bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a disorderly crunch like the sound of a box of dominoes, and her skin broke out into a pale sweat and her eyes filled with tears and her whole body exhaled a lugubrious lament and a vague smell of mud.", I find myself worried for the girl. The next sentence shows that she is an enthusiastic participant in the proceedings, so my worry is misplaced. My point is that the sex and violence in the book can be just as exaggerated and unreal as anything else in the book. For me, so far, CADS is a psychologically disturbing dream. I could easily spend hours a day L-R'ing it if I didn't have my happy responsibilities as a father and husband. I will have no trouble going through it in the repeated steps that seem to be a part of L-R. I love the book. :) edited for bad English Edited by sfuqua on 18 August 2013 at 8:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4766 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 23 of 55 18 August 2013 at 10:03pm | IP Logged |
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I've shied away from actually trying to analyze CADS, since it has already been done by people much brighter than me. One of the nice things about reading a classic is that there are so many resources available to help you understand the book. Even reading the book at the surface level, as I am, there are enough "echos in the soul" to make reading it a powerful experience.
From my limited reading and research, it looks like Gabo never did anything like CADS again. I saw the movie version of _Love in a time of Cholera_ the other day (in English!), and I wonder what the book of that is like. I started it, and it seems much simpler and more straightforward than CADS. I should probably read something by another author next, to get used to another idiolect, but it is also attractive to think of just running through everything I have by Gabo in order, Leaf Storm to Melancholy Whores. It's probably just because I'm still at stage one culture shock in Spanish (the honeymoon phase), but it seems to me that Spanish language literature over the past 50 years or so is just "better" than English language literature. More challenging books get published and become popular than in the English speaking world. Perhaps not; I just may not be familiar with the junk that gets published in the Spanish speaking world. :) edited to fix bad grammar Edited by sfuqua on 19 August 2013 at 12:29am 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 24 of 55 19 August 2013 at 12:45am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the info. I have seen a lot of good things written about Love in a time of Cholera also and was thinking of doing that one first. Do you have any idea why these majorly successful books don't seem to have audiobooks? There are audiobooks in English, but I cannot find any in Spanish. I am not too fond of the computer text to voice readers so I usually stick to regular audio books. Also, I don't like to read Spanish books without audio because I get too caught up in individual words and read far too slow in Spanish without audio.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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