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the old man and the platiquemos | ||
Tags: Platiquemos | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 73 of 91 13 February 2013 at 6:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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Platiquemos/FSI, 2/3 of the way through Unit 11.
I'm moving quickly through Unit 11, and I'm feeling a lot more positive about this whole process. I had some pretty good Spanish roll out of my mouth today during a conversation with some students. I am much more fluent with the parts of Spanish I have already covered. I still am early in the course, so there is a lot more to cover. The Spanish on the radio continues to become clearer and clearer each day. I actually have noticed some good effects from my little flirtation with anki. I keep hearing words that I am learning from my anki deck. Maybe anki is a good adjunct to FSI/Plati. I suspect the reviews will kill me eventually, even with only 20 new words a day. There are a lot of good words in my mechanically produced opensubtitles/Chilean print deck. I know a lot of the words already, what with Assimil and cognates, so maybe I can keep it up. I've never heard of anybody running through 13000 (I deleted a bunch of proper nouns) words just with anki. I think Unit 11 is easier than the past few units. I'm not going to try Assimil again for a while. If I need a break from FSI, I will probably work through some CEFR test prep materials. steve 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 74 of 91 20 February 2013 at 5:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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Platiquemos FSI Unit 12 about 1/4 of the way through
I had an annoying experience the other day; I realized that I have gotten rusty on the past tenses; probably on all the tenses that I have not been practicing in FSI drills. So at the same time that I am definitely moving ahead with my automaticity in the present tense, I'm losing my meager skills in the other tenses. I tried doing some shadowing of Assimil to review what I learned there, but I didn't like it and I felt like I was wasting time that I should be spending on FSI drills. I also feel like I should be doing more review than I've been doing -- to keep what I'm learning out of FSI fresh. I also want to finish FSI within a year or so... I decided to add FSI Programmatic to my study. I'm going to start doing two of the Programmatic lessons after each of the Basic lessons up until the point where I'm on the same lesson in each course. FSI Programmatic covers grammar points in a different order than Basic/Plati, which will offer a kind of review. When I get to Unit 30, I plan to start reviewing one Unit from the beginning before each new Unit. Adding programmtic to the mix will slow me down, but not as much as reviewing lessons before each new lesson, and Programmtic starts off with the preterite tense, which will help keep other tenses in my mind. I realize that the programmtic course starts off strong and gets weaker as it goes along, but it is an interesting, easy addition at this point. steve 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 75 of 91 22 February 2013 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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FSI Unit 12 about 2/3 of the way done.
I'm having some motivational problems. One day, programmatic Spanish looks like the perfect supplement (I still think this may be true, at least for the first few units), the next day I think I should start reviewing Assimil and work up through Using Spanish. And then there are those practice tests from TELC and DELE that I downloaded... Maybe I should do some of the DLI course materials; they seem to emphasize comprehension... I keep fooling around with distractions; it's kind of hard to face another year of plowing through this stuff. It's not that it is so hard; it is just that it seems to go on forever, and I don't see much progress in my abilities lately. I must concentrate; there will be time later for other things. Maybe I can fool around with my Anki deck and perfect it. No, no, I must concentrate... steve 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 76 of 91 22 February 2013 at 11:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Whenever I hit a rough patch, I've found great value in the following observation from FSI:
You've done a huge amount of Assimil shadowing, and a truly impressive amount of drilling. I was similarly persistent—if not so intense—with Assimil, once upon a time, and it paid off. But after a while, that well was dry, and I needed to go elsewhere to make fast progress. During my four-month push from A2 to B2, I ended up needing to change techniques every month or so. Have you considered other techniques? Perhaps some extensive reading and listening, or more time devoted to conversations or writing? I don't know what technique would work for you, but it might be worth setting aside some time to experiment, and pursue smaller goals. Edited by emk on 22 February 2013 at 11:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5261 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 77 of 91 22 February 2013 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Since you started this journey here, I've been following your progress. Everyone here wants you to succeed, myself included. You've done very well with studying but, Steve, I honestly think it's time for you to back off the amount of formal studying you're doing for a while and start using the language. Read, listen, write and speak- repeat often. When you find something lacking, work on it. That's my advice, for what it's worth. Whatever you decide to do, ¡buena suerte!
Edited by iguanamon on 23 February 2013 at 12:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 78 of 91 23 February 2013 at 12:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think you're right; I'm sure that I would learn a lot from rushing through FSI, but I'm not sure if it won't drive me crazy.
I have to remind myself that I'm doing this for fun. Let me think about what to do next. I can continue FSI, but at a slower pace. Trying to set up a tutor online has been a comedy of errors; I think I'll do that next. It's probably time to read a book also. And a swing through some Assimil material that I am not already burned out on might be good... steve 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 79 of 91 23 February 2013 at 4:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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OK; today I spent only a half hour on FSI. I fiddled around with a reader for another half hour (so far).
It feels much better. steve 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 80 of 91 02 March 2013 at 5:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been reviewing Platiquemos and fooling around with Tardy's Easy Spanish reader.
I think I've been trying to hurry through Platiquemos, which is impossible. I think I need to just do as much as is fun, and leave myself time to do other things. One of the simpler things I've done is to change as much of my web content as possible to Spanish. I actually want to read the news sometimes, and if I have it in Spanish, I will read it in Spanish. I've been sort of shocked at how good my Spanish reading is, although I tend to be overconfident about my passive skills. Easy Spanish Reader starts out very easy, and I fooled around with it a bit before I started Platiquemos. It is part of a series of readers that gets very difficult (to my eye, eventually). I have shifted gears several times in my Spanish, and each time I have experienced a surge in my Spanish. I have tended to think that this is because whatever new program or procedure I have just started is "better" than what I was doing before. But what if it is the changing programs that causes the surge? I tried Assimil because some people said that it was the "best" way to learn Spanish. I pounded away at it long after I was making optimal progress. I started shadowing Assimil and I had a surge, then I shadowed it way past the point where I was learning very much. I did Michel Thomas at this point and had another burst of improvement. It's so short that I didn't really burn out with MT. When I started Platiquemos, I had another burst of improvement, but I've started to feel that I'm not getting as much out of it as I was the first few weeks. Looking at the above, what seems to cause my feeling of rapid improvement is a change of program. I suppose any course, procedure or program one does has strengths and weaknesses, and when one switches to a new program, it feels good because you start to exercise different parts of your spectrum of language skills. So my guess is that any program will eventually lose its effectiveness, and the way to keep learning at a boil is to keep using a variety of programs as long as they are different enough. Wow,I've rediscovered the "multitrack" approach! Platiquemos is a wonderful program, but it is not complete; no program is. It probably is closer to complete than most programs, but I think I need more variety. The drawback of Platiquemos is that it is so huge that if you only have an hour or so a day for concentrated instruction, it you don't spend all of your time on it, it will take forever to finish. I'm going to start think of Platiquemos as an open ended project, not something that I am going to complete any time soon. I suppose that you experienced polyglots know how to pick a mix of activities that are optimal for your learning style and ability level. When I learned languages before, I was in immersion situations where I had my target languages shoved down my throat on every track possible whether I liked it or not. This learning languages on my own, without immersion, is a different animal. It has been an exercise in humility. I have a lot to learn, not just Spanish. steve Edited by sfuqua on 02 March 2013 at 5:36am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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