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the old man and the platiquemos | ||
Tags: Platiquemos | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5711 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 49 of 91 04 January 2013 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
I can make some recommendations. PM me if you're interested. 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 50 of 91 09 January 2013 at 7:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Unit 8???
My family had one of those amazing financial crises that hit families from time to time (especially right after Christmas), so I'm waiting a couple of weeks to get a tutor. Payday will be a better time. Unit 7 has been annoying. I seem to be quite unable to do big chunks of it at the speed of the drills. I can do it with the pause button. I think I'm going to go over it carefully one more time with the pause button and then move on. Maybe I'll do better when I review it. I may just move through the rest of the course with the pause button. I can feel the learning going on in my brain when I do it with the pause button and build the sentences in my head. The whole, "keep trying until you can do it at native speaker speed" idea is pretty alien to the way I was taught to play music. I spent a lot of time playing slowly enough to play perfectly, and eventually playing like lightning was pretty easy. Or at least my lightning; Marion Verbuggen or Yuja Wang I'm certainly not. There is probably some benefit to learning to listen to rapid speech; I doubt if the fastest way to learn to speak a language quickly is to try, over and over, to speak quickly. Perhaps it is better to speak well. I'm a little discouraged right now, but that may have something to do with being back to work after winter vacation. Work does take a lot of energy. I remain very hungry to improve my Spanish. I was thinking of supplementing Platiquemos with another course, perhaps between levels. This might make the already lengthy course last too long however. Harry Potter does have 7 books, and they would fit nicely after each level of Plati, especially since I know that I can "sort of" read Harry Potter 1 in Spanish already. Of course books will be there if I head right through Plati/FSI also. One of my Mexican students corrected the way I pronounced something the other day (I always thank them when they correct me); I realized that what he was correcting was a Tagalog accent on my Spanish. I tend to pronounce Spanish words which are a part of Tagalog the way that they are pronounced in Tagalog, and this leads to some amusing mistakes. Tagalog demands a lot of palatalization of consonants after front vowels, and I have not corrected this for some of my Spanish vocabulary. It is sort of funny how unconscious some Tagalog speakers are of the palatalization they do. Take the word "tiyan" (stomach). If an English speaker were to spell the way this word is pronounced in Tagalog, they would spell it "chan". Many Tagalog speakers would swear that this word is easy to spell, two syllables, "ti yan" which is not the way it sounds to nonnative speakers, at all. My wife's native language, Cebuano, pronounces the word as a two syllable word, but it is "all crunched together" in Tagalog. It reminds me of how most unsophisticated speakers of English would swear that they say iNcredible in normal speech instead of the iNGcredible that we all use unless we're thinking about it. Anyway; I've got to watch my palatalization in Spanish. This is exactly the type of thing a tutor can hear and correct. Hmmn... I'd better quit writing and start working. But first, a glass of port and a night's sleep :) steve edited to take out a paragraph that isn't about the subject :) Edited by sfuqua on 09 January 2013 at 3:30pm 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 51 of 91 10 January 2013 at 2:16am | IP Logged | ||
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Platiquemos Unit 8 start
I think that stress and fatigue have a big impact on my language learning. My progress is pretty predictable as long as I am not under a lot of pressure and am healthy. When stress in the rest of life adds up, language learning suffers. I seem to be doing fine today. I studied during lunch and then a bit after school before I came home; I'm planning to do my regular hour after supper, too, for a total of 2 and a half hours today. 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 52 of 91 10 January 2013 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Platiquemos (reviewing quickly up to Unit 8)
I realize that I have been doing the "dialog for fluency" exercises wrong. I have been repeating the Spanish instead of answering the Spanish. Drat. I'm going to do a quick review through to be sure that I can do this, over the next couple of days. I want to be sure that I have done Level I correctly before I move on to other levels. 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 53 of 91 12 January 2013 at 6:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Platiquemos (almost done reviewing back up to Unit 8)
I am almost done doing my quick review, finally doing the dialogs for fluency correctly. It's happened too often now to be a fluke, so I think I can report it as a fact. The first impact that Plati has had on my Spanish, other than destroying my Castilian accent, is to improve my listening comprehension. The people on the radio are speaking more slowly and clearly than ever before. The kids talking to each other in Spanish where I teach are a *lot* easier to understand. I haven't suddenly picked up 5000 words of vocabulary or anything, so of course I miss things, but my processing speed on Spanish sounds is better. Definitely. I haven't covered much of the grammar, so I haven't really seen that much of a change in my speech. It's funny; Unit 7 seemed very hard when I first tried to get through it; it isn't hard at all after I quit it and went back and reviewed a little bit. Finish Unit 7 tomorrow, do Unit 8 over the next few days, then call Level I done. Off to Level II. I am encouraged. I actually enjoy Plati, and it seems to work. B1 by the end of the course seems to be possible. We'll see; I'm enjoying the ride so far. steve edit: Oops level I has 9 units... Edited by sfuqua on 16 January 2013 at 6:23am 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 54 of 91 13 January 2013 at 5:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Platiquemos grinding away at the Conversation stimulus section of Unit 7
Well, Unit 7 seems to be my Nemesis. I got bogged down in the Conversation Stimulus section, and I've decided to call it a night. I've got a cold, so I'm sort of groggy, and I think it will go faster if I'm rested. I was just looking at how far I have to go before I get to the preterite, and it looks like I'm about halfway to it. I've got a huge amount to do before I get to the end of the course. I wonder if I should just skip reviewing until I get done with the whole course, but I have a feeling I will forget everything if I don't review it. I don't really have a feel for how much review the course has written into it. Should I do programmatic Spanish or something on the side? I probably should just keep it simple and chug through this thing. It's going to take a long time to complete Plati thoroughly, and if I want to get it done, I've got to keep my forward momentum. I wonder if there is something "global" I could do along with Plati, so that all of the tenses and structures come up from time to time. Every thing I think of would be a project in itself that would take a lot of time away from Plati. When I get a tutor (the family CFO says that my "Spanish budget" has been replenished), maybe what I should do will become obvious. Perhaps working with the tutor will fill in the "global" factor that I feel I need. steve 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5021 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 55 of 91 13 January 2013 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I had a bit of a run through unit 7 the other night, and I'm sure it's recorded at a faster speed than a lot of the other units, I also did some of the same unit on the fsi site and I'm sure its a lot slower than that found in platiquemos.
I would suggest that the bit of the unit that focuses on conjugation of present tense verbs is something you want to get down really well, so the answers fly out of your mouth with no conscious thought at all. This would lay a good foundation for dealing with the other tenses. I had some of the same anxieties as you at the same point in the course. Its difficult not to be intimidated by the mountain of work ahead, but the important thing is just to be consistent, concentrate on one step at a time, and be confident that everything will come together in the end. Be assured that a lot of level 2 is a lot easier than level 1! From what I remember, some units are laughably easy. Its a funny course like that, there are some very easy stretches but there are also drills which will make you want to through the course against the wall. If you get really frustrated with something, give it a go, and then move on. The trouble at the moment is you are just dealing with bite-sized sections of grammar, things come together a bit after the end of unit 30, which is a review drill on everything you have learned previously. I definitely think regular review is important (i did, and do loads of it) but at this point it may help psychologically to knock a few units down quickly before doing some review. You are 100$ right regards the need to do something global alongside the course, I wish I had cottoned on to that earlier. Espanol podcast is great. remember to click on "ver transcipcion"! Have you got Margarita Madrigals Magic key to Spanish? That could be a good book to do the occasional exercise in, just to keep you working with different aspects of grammar. Good luck and keep at it! It sounds like things are coming along nicely! Dale 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 56 of 91 16 January 2013 at 6:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been very sick, and I only finished reviewing Unit 7 today. I waited until my wife wasn't looking (she thinks I'm obsessed) and sat up in bed and just pounded through that conversation stimulus section. (Sorry, honey, if you're reading this) It took about an hour to get it down perfectly, and I felt pretty sick afterward. I pulled the covers over my head and recovered.
Thanks for the advice dbag; maybe I'll just plow ahead toward Unit 30 and that big review. I can start a second wave through the course at that time. My earlier thoughts about several simultaneous waves were way too ambitious. I wouldn't finish the course before I'm 90. I do have Madrigal's Magic Key. Maybe I'll work through it in parallel; it might make more sense than trying to do a different oral course. I can't wait to get through a few tenses with FSI drills. Now, back to bed... steve 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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