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Reading with Spanish Readers | ||
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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 1 of 27 17 October 2012 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you are reading this journal and you're interested in studying Spanish, you are invited and encouraged to comment or ask questions about my progress. No matter what your level of learning, your opinions are welcome.
Firstly, my Spanish level: unlike other languages (German, Mandarin, etc.), my abilities in speaking, reading, writing, and listening, are, imo, at strangely disparate levels. I'd say my strongest ability right now is in reading, and as the title suggests, that's what this log will focus on. I'd say that, although I'm doing focused grammar work in the subjunctive and irregular verbs, I can understand most grammatical structures (Spanish isn't overly complex on this front). The grammar work I'm doing is more for sharpening my output abilities, and will not be a part of this blog. Goal: vocabulary expansion. My main problem for reading is my lack of vocabulary and idioms. I think one reason for this is that , initially, I was overly concerned with learning only Latin American/Mexican/universal idioms and vocabulary. I've now come to the realization that it's inevitable that all learners will at some point learn vocabulary that is not understood or used in the region whose dialect he/she is most interested in learning. This seems especially true in Spanish. Now that I've come to this conclusion, I fully plan on bulldozing my way through several hundred pages of material and expanding my vocabulary through annotated/translated texts before losing the crutches at some point next year. I guess my ultimate goal is to have >95% comrehension by next summer. I will also be reading native materials, but this will not be part of this blog. The Material: I have at my disposal well over a dozen bilingual texts and readers. I plan on spending at least a couple of hours a day going through them. The log is to keep me honest, and maybe help others with reviews or inspiration. If I slack off y parece que me tragó la tierra (many moons ago I made an aborted attempt at a German learning log that I got too busy for, even though I continued to study German) please don't hesitate to ask where I am and why I haven't contributed. I'll try not to let that happen often! I will make at least one entry a week, hopefully more often. The method: I plan to read small chunks silently, until I have full understanding, then read the selection aloud. For some of the sections in some of the books I have audio, and I plan on shadowing those. If my reading comprehension goes up significantly at some point, I may stick to just reading it aloud the first go. I'll adjust this plan if I need to. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5711 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 2 of 27 18 October 2012 at 7:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Today I read the last 8 pages of book one (De Todo un Poco) of Castillo and Sparkman's Graded Spanish Readers. I then started book 2 (Sigamos Leyendo) and read 14 pages of that. I read everything intensively and silently until I understood everything, then aloud until I could wrap my tongue around things. I've noticed I can do larger and larger chunks at one time, and hopefully I can keep that trend up.
One thing I think I may need to adjust is my time intervals for study. I might spread these readings throughout the day a bit more, not because I'm having trouble processing things, but because my tongue gets tired. I've also noticed that my silent reading is becoming very fast, which is encouraging, but also likely due to the fact that the material hasn't yet crescendoed into extreme unknown territory yet; all the material is pretty much review so far. Other things I did today: - Shadowed lesson 35 of Living Language - Beginner Intermediate - Did 1 hour of translation on a telenovela script - Watched Spanish tv for about an hour, but I do a lot of that between study breaks anyway - don't really consider it study unless I'm looking up words. Edited by Rout on 18 October 2012 at 5:18pm 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 3 of 27 18 October 2012 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Where do you/did you get a telenovela script? :)
steve 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5711 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 4 of 27 18 October 2012 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||
I typed all the Spanish subtitles out myself. :)) I know, it sounds crazy, but I've tricked myself into believing this is doing me good (and just between you and me I think it is!!). Plus it didn't take THAT long and I'm learning SOOOO many idioms, and after doing (now 2 scripts) my Spanish orthography and typing skills are perfect. I've always believed in translation as one of the best things you can do for learning a language - it forces you to concentrate. I also ripped the audio and cut out all the gaps, so after each episode I'll have 40 more minutes of pure, natural, speech with accompanying bilingual text. It's pretty labor intensive, but it gets easier and easier and I plan on making the scripts available. I got the idea from here. This is also another useful link. It's basically similar to the "anime method" for learning Japanese. Supposedly you can find the transcipts of movies, etc. floating around somewhere, but I didn't have any luck when I searched briefly. You probably can find them. 3 persons have 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 5 of 27 18 October 2012 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hmmn. I thought of that, but thought it would be too much work. I wish that more telenovela's had subtitles... Of course I could just listen repeatedly until I get it all... Hey, that sounds like a great listening activity.
This might be fun though. I've always thought that if I could understand and produce that language in telenovela's, I might be able to call myself, "speaking." steve 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 6 of 27 18 October 2012 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Emk has opened up a whole new world of resources for me with his use of subtitles in language learning. It is quite easy to find subtitles for a lot of TV series and films. One that I've been using lately is the recent TV series "Pushing Daisies", which has good Portuguese subs. I download the subs from allsubs.org as an .srt file and then open the file with open office writer. I then copy the text and open up another document in which I insert a table with two columns and one row. I paste the Portuguese on the left side and the English on the right side and make my own bilingual text. I also print the Portuguese text to make my own script pdf and read it on my tablet.
I love emk's subs2srs method for making study cards. To me this is a really good method to learn colloquial language and usage. To think, I could've been using this all along! emk- French: Taking it to the next level Edited by iguanamon on 18 October 2012 at 8:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5711 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 7 of 27 21 October 2012 at 2:19am | IP Logged | ||
This is exactly what I want to do with Spanish but I can only find translation subs for Spanish movies (e.g. a Spanish film will have a script/subs available in German/Dutch/Portuquese/etc. but not for Spanish). I want Spanish subs for the Spanish voices! You can get this on TV or Hulu but there's no way to copy & paste; you have to resort to typing the whole thing out, which is arduous and exhausting (but has some side benefits which I mentioned). Are you aware of any (at least one; preferably a handful) Spanish movies/shows with subs that I could just copy & paste into a word doc? I would anoint the man's feet who could present me with such information! Thanks, Jerrod Edited by Rout on 21 October 2012 at 2:20am 1 person has 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 8 of 27 21 October 2012 at 3:37am | IP Logged | ||
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You don't have to anoint my feet! Maybe you won't like my tastes, but here's where you can find half a dozen from my collection to get you started:
¿Quién dice que es fácil? Spanish Subtitles La mujer de mi hermano Spanish Subtitles Volver- Spanish Subtitles Los abrazos rotos - Broken Embraces Spanish Subtitles Los lunes al sol - Mondays in the Sun Spanish Subtitles El laberinto del fauno - Pan's Labyrinth Spanish Subtitles My collection tends to skew towards Spain. You're right, they're not that easily found but some do exist. You can always rip your own from your own dvd's (provided that they have Spanish subtitles) if you want. ¡Buena suerte! Edited by iguanamon on 21 October 2012 at 3:50am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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