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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 33 of 36 13 June 2013 at 9:55am | IP Logged |
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Isabel Allende has some books that are intended for "younger" readers, like the "Las memorias del Águila y el Jaguar" trilogy. I haven't read them but they might be nice starting places. Jesús Fernández Santos has some short stories that i found interesting when i first started reading actual Spanish literature. So does Vargas Llosa, though apparently they've got a bit of jerga peruana. At least that's what i was told by the people i spoke with online when asking for help.
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| lewevanhoop Newbie United States Joined 5015 days ago 13 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Afrikaans, Modern Hebrew | Message 34 of 36 14 June 2013 at 9:56am | IP Logged |
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For some just fun reading in Spanish I bought Juegos de Tronos and that is very good practice since you can compare it to the English original.
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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 35 of 36 25 June 2013 at 5:02am | IP Logged |
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I continue to be quite pleased with my progress -- running through Assimil, and doing random reading. I am making noticeable progress weekly. Going through Spanish with Ease and Spanish without Toil one lesson per day and following up with Using Spanish may be all of the "course" Spanish I ever need. The added attention I am giving to understanding every little word in each lesson is still leading me to learn things even though I am only on lesson 36 in each book.
My receptive skills are still way ahead of my active skills. I haven't spent much time on active skills, so this seems natural. With my limited time and energy to devote to Spanish, job and family must take precedence, I haven't been very successful at setting up ways to interact with native speakers. If I've only got an hour or so a day to devote to Spanish, it is much simpler to use to time to devote to a course and/or a book. I've decided not to worry about it and keep improving on what I can work on easily. I'll talk fluently when I get there; I'm not under any deadline. My spoken Spanish is still halting enough that I need a patient native speaker to interact with. I can say "anything," but I need a little time to spit it out sometimes. I'm pretty sure that my use of the subjunctive is very flawed, and I get the imperfect and the past mixed up sometimes. I come up with some pretty shockingly good sentences from time to time. There are plenty of opportunities to speak Spanish here in California, and I try to take advantage of any chances that come up. Since I'm usually dealing with Spanish speakers who are also fluent speakers of English, sometimes the conversation gets switched to English. I'm pretty sure that a week in Spain or Mexico would bump my Spanish up to a higher level, but that doesn't seem likely this year (whine, whine :). I've been reading three books by Hemingway in Spanish. Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises), and Por Quien Doblan Las Campanas (For Whom the Bell Tolls) I have read before, but the third, Muerte en la Tarde (Death in the Afternoon), I never read before. I'm especially enjoying Muerte, a book on bullfighting, and I'm quite surprised. It has a lot of description of Spain back in 1932, and a lot of advice how to enjoy yourself there. He includes advice on which hotel is nice to stay in if you are having an affair, and where you should sit at the bullfight if you think you won't like it and may leave early ( You should sit in the most expensive seats. That way somebody who knows how to appreciate bullfights will get a good seat for cheap when you leave early.). Hemingway often gets dismissed as sexist, hypermasculine fool by modern college professors. I think they don't know how to take a joke. Anyway, I know nothing about bullfighting; I'm quite appalled by the whole idea of it, but I find Hemingway's book on it quite interesting. A usual day with Spanish goes like this: 1)Read through a new lesson in either SwE or SwT, saying the meaning of each word in English in my head. 2) Read the "conversation/passage" part of the Assimil lesson aloud in Spanish three times. 3) Read through each of the exercise sentences, repeating it aloud without looking at the book. 4) Read something else, a book or news article, first saying the meaning of each word in English in my head, and then read it aloud in Spanish, maybe three times. If I'm reading a book, I work through it a page at a time. If the book is simple enough, I just read it aloud. edited to clarify a sentence Edited by sfuqua on 25 June 2013 at 5:16am 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 36 of 36 09 July 2013 at 6:17am | IP Logged |
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I've continued on with Assimil and random reading, about 45-75 minutes a day. I continue to be happy and I continue to feel that I'm making progress. I did testpodium again this month and I dropped back to B1 on their scale. I'd be discouraged, but didn't I just post about not taking any one day or one result too seriously :) What did I say? Back to work!
I had a little breakthrough with the subjunctive... It just seems to make sense a little bit more. I remember having a breakthrough with the Samoan equivalent of the subjunctive after about a year in country. I could use the Samoan structure in set phrases or when taking a grammar test, but I still remember the moment when all or a sudden it fell into place... I was in the library and there were some whales frolicking offshore. I always got more excited about whales than Samoans did, and I was talking about how great it was to see the whales from the library. The librarian used the Samaon structure talking about how whales need library cards before they come to the library, and the whole thing fell into place in my brain. I swear I never made a mistake again or hesitated using that Samoan structure again. The Spanish subjunctive is much more complex, and I'm a few "aha!" moments away from using it easily. I'm still amazed at how much there is to learn from Assimil. Spanish without Toil is enough different from Spanish with Ease that I'm learning some new vocabulary. I wonder how many total vocabulary words there are in Spanish with Ease, Spanish without Toil, Using Spanish, and LA PRATIQUE DE L'ESPAGNOL (I may fool around with the last on after I'm done with the others). I read a lot of newspapers this week. We had a plane crash here in the San Francisco bay area, so it made a easy topic to read, where I already understood what was going on. Terrible thing though; my son was driving by when it happened. He's an EMT, but was off duty. I have to pick a novel and stick to it. I keep reading ten pages and then starting another. If there was a challenge for starting books, I'd be doing great. When I started learning Spanish, I thought that it would be great to read La Reina del Sur in Spanish. A few months ago I thought I was getting close to being able to enjoy it, but I still find it too hard to be fun. I've got to keep working. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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