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the old man and the platiquemos

  Tags: Platiquemos | Spanish
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dbag
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5021 days ago

605 posts - 1046 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 25 of 91
09 December 2012 at 11:37pm | IP Logged 
I love the replacement and variation drills! Often, I genuinely enjoy doing them. I
find it helps if i'm doing something like driving or the dishes etc. Just sitting there
doing drills is where it becomes boring.

I would be interested to know your thoughts re: shadowing vs audio-lingual drills when
your a little more into the course. I once started a thread on the topic but it didn't
really go anywhere. I'm reluctant to spend much time shadowing for the very reason you
identify, that you don't have to create original utterances. What do you think
shadowing is good for?
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Rout
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
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326 posts - 417 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Spanish
Studies: Hindi

 
 Message 26 of 91
10 December 2012 at 5:07am | IP Logged 
dbag wrote:
I would be interested to know your thoughts re: shadowing vs audio-lingual drills when your a little more into the course. I once started a thread on the topic but it didn't really go anywhere. I'm reluctant to spend much time shadowing for the very reason you identify, that you don't have to create original utterances. What do you think shadowing is good for?


I agree! Shadowing is self-limiting in this respect. I do think shadowing as good for getting acquainted with the language in the beginning though. I think Professor Argüelles mentioned that himself; shadowing is good for getting a foothold in the language. Other methods are necessary once you reach an intermediate stage. I think audiolingual drills are a great follow-up but (for my tastes) are a bit hard without at least some familiarity with the language. Of course I guess Pimsleur (which I like) is in a way just a huge set of audiolingual drills, but you're really only fed bitesize chunks of information at a time which are a lot easier to swallow.
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sfuqua
Triglot
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United States
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581 posts - 977 votes 
Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 27 of 91
10 December 2012 at 7:55pm | IP Logged 
Platiquemos Unit 4, track 1

I redid the conversation stimulus with Platiquemos; on reflection, I don't think my shadowing of the original fsi audio did the same thing. The conversation stimulus drill took a little effort the first few times through, but after 7X I was pretty much perfect.

I still am not sure how big an impact drills are going to have on my Spanish. It seems hard to believe that it will not be profound.

I love shadowing, and I did a ton of it with Assimil, but I think that it isn't complete.

I think shadowing is similar to reading aloud. I think it has a big impact on comprehension, and blind shadowing requires that you process audio input at the speed of the audio. I think it also has an impact in speeding up speech and reducing the number of those "tongue twister" words.

I think my current Spanish reflects how I have practiced Spanish. I can read aloud much, much better than I can talk. When I talk, I can almost feel the weak link in my brain:

understanding strong/fast -->
building original sentences weak/stumbling/slow -->
talking strong/fast-->

I have that that the many opportunities to produce new sentences that I will get from fsi drills will help me fill in the weak part of my skill set. I even dream of it having a big impact quickly.

Since Platiquemos does not have an album cover image in the download version I bought, I installed a picture of Ximena Navarrete from the swimsuit competition when she won Miss Universe.

I hope it improves my motivation and attention while doing Platiquemos :)

steve
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sfuqua
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4764 days ago

581 posts - 977 votes 
Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 28 of 91
13 December 2012 at 12:50am | IP Logged 
I lost another post that I thought that I put up here. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong that is complicated or just forgetting to hit submit.

I've had a couple of bad days speaking; I'm not sure if it is me or the native speakers I'm interacting with. It's annoying. I started another thread about repetitions and review with FSI/Platiquemos. Most people (who responded) don't seem to repeat as much as I have been doing. I don't trust myself very much deciding when to review and when to move forward. When I did the first part of Pimsleur, I would count how many total errors I did each session, and repeat if I had more than 10 errors. I think this is a lot more accuracy than the 80% that Pimsleur recommends, but it felt like a comfortable level of mastery. This of course means that a bad 30 second patch in a lesson can have me repeating a 30 minute lesson. This seems wrong, so I decided not to do it this way with FSI/Platiquemos.

I've been thinking about using the "rewind" button on the app I use to go through the course. I can program the rewind button to go back and arbitrary number of seconds that I want to. If I make an error, I will only repeat the part of the lesson just before the part I missed. While this will lead to some repetition of material that I have already mastered, it won't be as bad as repeating a whole unit or track. This will also mean that I will be able to move quickly through easy material and more slowly through hard material. I did this with Michel Thomas, and it seemed to work OK; with Michel Thomas Foundation Spanish, I had to do about half the course 2X and very rarely I needed 3X. My plan for Platiquemos would be:

1) Read along with the course audio 1X through each drill or unit (I'm still deciding this).
2) Work through the course with the audio only, hitting the rewind button whenever I make a mistake. Research on short term memory suggests that it decays after 12 seconds and is gone after 30 seconds (this is way oversimplified, of course). If I set my rewind button to back up 30 seconds, it will mean that I am actually redoing the part of the exercise I messed up on, instead of just remembering the right answer.

I'll try it tonight and let you know whether I think it is a useful strategy or not.

steve
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Rout
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5711 days ago

326 posts - 417 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Spanish
Studies: Hindi

 
 Message 29 of 91
13 December 2012 at 6:51am | IP Logged 
sfuqua wrote:
I lost another post that I thought that I put up here. I wonder if I'm doing something wrong that is complicated or just forgetting to hit submit.


I always write it out in Word beforehand (which has a better spell-check than the forum) or copy the whole thing (ctl + c) before hitting submit. I've lost one or two myself.


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luke
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United States
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Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 30 of 91
13 December 2012 at 11:00pm | IP Logged 
One of the reasons I split the FSI audio up into smaller peices was to help with repeating difficult drills. E.G., many of the replacement and variation drills have 6 parts. Platiquemos has the advantage of making those a single mp3, rather than a 30+ minute chunk of tape, but splitting all the, say, 8 minute replacement drill into 6 drills of 1 minute 20 seconds would allow me to repeat a difficult one enough times to feel comfortable without going through the easy drills the same number of times (which would be mind numbing).

For the most part, I looked at the FSI book for the intial dialogue, illustrations, grammar points, and readings (when they started having those later in the course). I didn't look very often at all at the book for the drills. I usually did those while walking the dog or driving. Seeing the book though would occasionally unlock a, "so that's what they're saying" moment, but I didn't use the book that much. It may have helped if I'd used it more. I.E., instead of having to listen to a drill a few times to hear exactly what they are saying, just look and see and know.
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sfuqua
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4764 days ago

581 posts - 977 votes 
Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 31 of 91
16 December 2012 at 5:41am | IP Logged 
I worked through the first three units using the rewind button. For now, I've been rewinding one minute on each error/stumble. If I keep to Platiquemos, I can do this fairly independently of the print material. I had a couple of heavy days at work, and I didn't get as much done as I would have liked.

I seemed to have more fluency the last time I spoke Spanish, things rolled off the tongue easier than usual. Of course, I have had plenty of up and down days before, so I can't declare this Platiquemos project a success. I'm just at the beginning. I actually like much of the FSI drills, and I can't imagine not finishing.

I wonder if FSI isn't best for people who are not in an immersion situation, or who don't have a native speaker of the target language in the family. Doing FSI drills is definitely harder than Assimil. I find myself starting to fade a bit after 45 minutes or so. I suspect if you could use the language all day, Assimil might be enough "studying" to get you to an intermediate level. For those of us, who are too shy, or who lack opportunities to practice with native speaker, FSI may get us further than Assimil alone.

steve
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luke
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Senior Member
United States
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Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 32 of 91
16 December 2012 at 9:51am | IP Logged 
sfuqua wrote:
I wonder if FSI isn't best for people who are not in an immersion situation, or who don't have a native speaker of the target language in the family. Doing FSI drills is definitely harder than Assimil. I find myself starting to fade a bit after 45 minutes or so. I suspect if you could use the language all day, Assimil might be enough "studying" to get you to an intermediate level. For those of us, who are too shy, or who lack opportunities to practice with native speaker, FSI may get us further than Assimil alone.


I very much agree with all of that.


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