Alanjazz Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4821 days ago 65 posts - 129 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese
| Message 1 of 18 05 March 2013 at 5:21pm | IP Logged |
Hello everyone, I am going to try out a personal super challenge. Based on a personal experience, I have made a
very difficult decision - I would rather speak three languages extremely well than seven poorly. So for the
moment I am dropping Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese and German. I will come back to these other languages, but
for the moment I want to become an expert in Spanish, European and Colombian. To achieve this, I am going to
log 10,000 hours of time doing activities in Spanish. I am going to count active and passive learning, because if I
didn't, I wouldn't complete this goal until I was in my 40s. I'm going to try to complete these hours as quickly as
possible, to be able to try out other goals. So here goes!
Yesterday:
Film: Lucía y el sexo de Julio Medem. 2h
Writing: Chat with a friend from Ecuador on Skype 45m
Today so far:
Reading: HTLAL forum in Spanish 1h
Active study: Por and para, reading and quiz 1h
Total 4h45m
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Alanjazz Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4821 days ago 65 posts - 129 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese
| Message 2 of 18 06 March 2013 at 12:48am | IP Logged |
Today continued:
Reading/vocabulary search: El Cairo Nuevo de Naguib Mahfuz - 3h5m
Total: 7h50m
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James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5381 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French
| Message 3 of 18 06 March 2013 at 2:40am | IP Logged |
Wow, what an ambitious goal. Good luck. What is your current level? A full time job is 2000 hours a year, isn't it? You should be able to speak Spanish "extremely well" after much much less than 10,000 hours.
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Alanjazz Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4821 days ago 65 posts - 129 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese
| Message 4 of 18 06 March 2013 at 4:32am | IP Logged |
James - I may revise this goal if the 10,000 starts to be evidently excessive - maybe I will feel an intense enough
mastery after 1000 or 2000 hours to never hesitate when speaking and know a ton of expressions and
regionalisms from Spain and Colombia. Also, knowing a lot of cultural references is important too - having seen
key films, knowing some jokes.
I started off by putting 10,000, because a number of people have written about how becoming an expert on
something can be attained with 10,000 hours of effort. Perhaps a silly reason, but I want to speak Spanish
incredibly well. I want to sound like a native in both accents. I would guess that my current level is around B1 or
B2 in all areas, but recently my Spanish has been suffering from lack of practice, and pollution from Italian,
Portuguese and even German. My writing and speaking is perhaps closer to a B1, and listening and reading closer
to a B2.
I am not sure what a full time job is in a year, but I plan to live in a Spanish-speaking country at some point in
the near future, in order to have 24/7 immersion.
Film: Viridiana, dirigida por Luis Buñuel. 1h30m.
Total: 9h20m
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Alanjazz Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4821 days ago 65 posts - 129 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese
| Message 5 of 18 06 March 2013 at 5:10am | IP Logged |
After having done some math, 10,000 hours is a massive amount to log. It would be a little over 9 years at 3
hours
per day. I can't think of maintaining a log for a single language that long.
My new goal: as much Spanish as possible, until I am at a very high plateau and speak Spanish at a near-native
level. I think that even 1000 hours would be a great accomplishment, and I would probably speak Spanish at a C2
level at that point. With the other 9000 hours I can improve my French and take up the other languages I want to
learn one at a time. Goal revised: setting it to 1000 hours. This goal could be achieved at 3 hours/day in just 334
days, not even a year.
Chat with a friend from Colombia on Skype, reading jokes: 1h
Total: 10h20m
Edited by Alanjazz on 06 March 2013 at 5:12am
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Alanjazz Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4821 days ago 65 posts - 129 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese
| Message 6 of 18 08 March 2013 at 6:26pm | IP Logged |
My Spanish friend has been here visiting for the past two days. That said, we communicate primarily in French,
and so out of all of it I would only say that we spoke in Spanish for around two hours. Also - another way for me
to incorporate the number 10,000 into my goal (instead of hours) will be to read 10,000 pages of Spanish. This
would be around 50 200-page books. So now I am going to keep a page count.
Conversación con mi amiga: 2h
Total: 12h20m.
Pages/paginas: 150
Mi amiga española me vistaba estos últimos dos días. Eso dicho, comunicamos a menudo en francés, así que
diría que pasamos solo dos horas hablando en castellano. Me di cuenta que podría usar el número 10,000 - leer
cuantas paginas en castellano. Quiere decir, leer alrededor de 50 libros de 200 paginas. Empiezo a contar
también las paginas.
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Alanjazz Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4821 days ago 65 posts - 129 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese
| Message 7 of 18 09 March 2013 at 2:36am | IP Logged |
Film/película: The Sea Inside. Mar Adentro. dir. Alejandro Amenábar. 2h5m
Total: 14h25m.
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Alanjazz Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4821 days ago 65 posts - 129 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese
| Message 8 of 18 12 March 2013 at 12:11am | IP Logged |
Reading/Lectura: El Cairo Nuevo, por Naguib Mahfuz. 4h40m.
Total: 19h5m.
Page count/paginas leídas: 250
Edited by Alanjazz on 12 March 2013 at 12:28am
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