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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5377 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 25 of 36 27 May 2013 at 12:13pm | IP Logged |
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Yes, good advice. Keep on chugging along.
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| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4767 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 26 of 36 29 May 2013 at 5:52am | IP Logged |
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The last couple of days I've been trying listening to native speaker stuff (radio, audiobooks) without really studying or anything, just listening with concentration. It feels very useful. I find my brain sort of tuning into the language and moving with it. It feels good. I understand a lot more with deeper concentration.
I'm still fiddling around with Assimil and Garcia-Marquez's books. I still feel like I'm making steady progress. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4767 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 27 of 36 02 June 2013 at 4:35am | IP Logged |
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It's quite odd to me that I seem to be moving faster now, but not working very hard at all. It is ridiculous that I had to learn this the hard way; I have a Masters degree in ESL/Second Language Acquisition. I don't think that brute memorization of large parts of the language has much to do with gaining fluency in the language. It is impossible to memorize all that you need to know. Memorization is probably a good idea to get enough parts of the language coming out of your mouth to start communicating at an A1 or A2 level. For me memorization did not lead to acquisition, or at least, not very much.
The "just fooling around with the language" that I've been doing seems to work as well as anything. Before I would be like this, "I didn't know that word. I failed. I must be sure that I learn it and never forget it. I must never forget it. I'm weak. The glass is half empty." Now I'm, "What's going to happen next? What the heck was that word? I bet it means,'X'. Now, let's keep reading. My God, she did what?" I'm pretty sure that I could learn to read with pretty fair comprehension without ever learning the grammar well enough for excellent comprehension or fluent production, simply by reading using a dictionary and/or parallel texts. I suspect this is what happens to people who "learn to read without learning to speak." For me at least, even reading aloud or shadowing (quite similar mental processes, in my opinion) would never lead to confident production by themselves. So, I've added something else, that many people thing is missing from Krashen's "comprehensible input" idea, "focus on form." I spend a little time each day reading through some Spanish, not pronouncing Spanish, but instead giving an English "gloss" for each word. So "pero voy a telefonearle para decirselo" would be said "but I-go to to-telephone-to-him for to-say-to-him-it" Of course this is not English, but rather a strange unidiomatic gloss, but it reflects the Spanish in my brain. I have standard ways of saying different tenses, so I change what I say to signal the tense of the verb. The only purpose of the is to be sure that I understand everything that is going on grammatically in the sentence, or more importantly, I notice that I don't understand it completely and need to look deeper. This is what I've been doing with Assimil; it's usually pretty straightforward, and has notes to explain what isn't clear. I've identified that I really don't have a clear understanding of the Spanish verbal system, rare tenses throw me frequently, as do unfamiliar irregular verbs. It's weird to have sentences from Spanish with Ease rattling around in my head, memorized by shadowing, and to realize that I do not have a complete understanding of the tenses involved. I've been spending most of my time reading, reading aloud, news reports, a few pages of this or that novel. I feel like I should, "buckle down" and complete a novel all the way through, but I may wait until I've worked all the way through Assimil Spanish with Ease, Spanish without Toil, and Using Spanish. Or I may not; I'm trying to make the "fooling around with Spanish" part of each day's activity as unlike work as I can. Edited by sfuqua on 02 June 2013 at 4:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4767 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 28 of 36 02 June 2013 at 5:10am | IP Logged |
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Acquiring a language takes exposure to a large amount of the language. Demanding immediate, fluent production reduces the amount of language one can cover. Demanding immediate, fluent production can slow language acquisition.
Simple exposure to language, reading, repeating, shadowing may only lead to a partial understanding of the structure of the language. You don't need a complete understanding of the structure of the language to understand most of it. Children obviously don't need to focus on the structure of the language, but adults are not children. Here is a sentence in Samoan (the best I can figure out the alt codes) Sâ 'ou alu 'i le â'oga Past I go to the school. The meaning is clear from the base meanings of the words without you knowing any Samoan grammar. There are several things going on grammatically in this sentence that you don't have to know to understand it. I don't see how you would ever notice these points except after a very long time and a ton of input. I think you can speed up the process by making these things salient to an adult learner. But I think there are faster ways of making these things salient than memorizing a ton of sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4767 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 29 of 36 03 June 2013 at 5:27am | IP Logged |
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I did testpodium Spanish again. I'm not sure if this is the same test I took last month with the same questions, or if I got new questions. I don't remember the questions from last month, so the test probably has some validity even if the questions are the same.
I actually did worse on the grammar section than last month (I think I flubbed the subjunctive questions), but I did better in every other section. I got 100% on the listening comprehension section. The listening comprehension section seemed very clear to me. I used better headphones this month; this may have improved my score, but I think I've made real improvement in comprehension this month. My reading comprehension score was very strong also. I may be ready to take the "harder" version of the test. Last month my score translated to a pretty high B1; this month it translated to barely over the line B2. Of course I realize that this test is not the same as a true CEFR test, but it does test Spanish several different ways, so it may have some validity, at least for the skills it tests. I did no specific study of items like the test questions, so any improvement in scores is a combination of increased familiarity with the test format and real improvement in Spanish. The results are encouraging; I would not have been surprised if I hadn't improved at all or had gotten worse. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 30 of 36 03 June 2013 at 7:20am | IP Logged |
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¡Felicidades! Seguro que has mejorado un montón :) ¡Ahora queremos ver más castellano y menos inglés! ;)
El subjuntivo sí que es complicado y lleva su tiempo acostumbrarse, pero dentro de nada te estarás exasperando deseando utilizarlo en otras lenguas que no lo tienen. Es motivador ver el progreso que has hecho desde el principio. No sé si sigues leyendo en castellano, pero ¡hay un universo de libros interesantes! He leído algunos libros de Isabel Allende y me ha gustado mucho el de "Eva Luna". Otro escritor divertido es Eduardo Mendoza. Su libro "El misterio de la cripta embrujada" se trata de un interno de manicomio convertido en detective que tiene que resolver un caso para ganarse la libertad. El estilo me hizo pensar a menudo a "Catch-22". Y un pequeño libro que creo que todxs deberían de leer (o que al menos disfrutarían de hacerlo) es "Platero y yo", un elogio a un asno y una poesía hermosísima. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4767 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 31 of 36 13 June 2013 at 5:55am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the encouragement!
I continue to be a pretty happy camper. By going through some pretty easy material, and carefully figuring out every word, I seem to be filling in holes in my grammar understanding pretty fast. I can do the same thing with some novels; I think it's getting time to actually read one instead on 5 pages here and 10 pages there. I'm thinking about reading some Hemingway in Spanish translation. Books translated from English should be a little simpler to read, and Hemingway is famous for his clear, simple prose. He wrote two novels which mostly take place in Spain, _The Sun Also Rises_ and _For Whom the Bell Tolls_. A quick search finds a lot of complaints about the Spanish translations of these novels, particularly TSAR. A quick glance at the first translation I could get my hands on shows that the translation lacks many of the qualities that the original had. Hemingway is famous for his "iceberg" theory of writing, that much detail should be left out, like the part of the iceberg that you don't see. The translator explains things more than is done in the original. Whatever the quality of the translation; I love Hemingway in English and have to think that he might make a good author to start off with. The translations of these two books have about 16000 unique words in them; even accounting for regular verb forms, proper names, and the like, familiarity with these words ought to get me pretty close to the independent reader level. I love Isabel Allende in translation, and Perez-Reverte also. I find _La Reina del Sur_ to be a little harder than anything else I've tried to read; I'm not sure why. Vargas-Llosa has a some really hard stuff too; I may do Allende or late Garcia-Marquez for first untranslated Spanish books. I've done L-R with some books from each of them. There is a whole universe of reading in Spanish; with the constraints of budget, work and family responsibilities, I'm not going to do a trip to a Spanish speaking country any time soon. I've spent much of my life traveling the world (and the universe) through books; soon I will be roaming a new world of books in Spanish. steve 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4767 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 32 of 36 13 June 2013 at 6:02am | IP Logged |
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I wonder what Spaniards think of Hemingway. Hemingway obviously considered himself an "insider" in Spain; I don't know if people from Spain agree, or if they generally think of him as a foreign buffoon. I know Hemingway spoke Spanish with a Castilian lisp, and that he was fascinated by bullfighting, but I don't know how deep and authentic his understanding was.
Perhaps, these days, Spaniards don't think of Hemingway at all. edited to correct terminology Edited by sfuqua on 02 July 2013 at 6:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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