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Tibbles Is Learning Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5196 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 23 02 May 2011 at 9:11am | IP Logged |
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I started learning Spanish about 6 months ago, but today is my first journal entry. So here is a recap of what I have done so far.
First I listened to Michel Thomas and starting doing Rosetta Stone beginning in Nov 2010. I did the basic and advanced MT but skipped the vocabulary builder and other supplemental stuff. Maybe I'll come back and do those soon. I completed all 5 levels of Rosetta Stone v3 in about 6 weeks or so. I thought it was okay and gave me a decent starting base of vocabulary. I was definitely glad to have done the MT first because RS is terrible for picking up grammar. I didn't have to pay for RS, and I would probably have a more negative feeling for it if I had shelled out many hundreds of dollars for those 5 levels. I took a free on-line test at some site after completing RS, and it pegged me at "high beginner." However, I didn't feel I had any confidence in speaking, much less to formulate my own independent sentences. Late December and half of January were filled with holidays, recovering from the flu, and other things that took away from language learning. However, I did go through the Notes in Spanish - Inspired Beginners podcasts. Those were fun and gave a gentle introduction to trying to listen on my own. In mid-January I started 4 activities simultaneously (1) Assimil With Ease, (2) Watching Destinos, (3) reading a local Spanish newspaper, (4) the Practice Makes Perfect verb and pronoun books. Some Assimil lessons in the beginning were slow and easy, and I doubled up and did 2 passive lessons per day here and there. As far as Destinos is concerned, some parts were slow and repetitive, but overall I enjoyed the process and after completing it watched Sol y Viento (also developed by Prof Bill van Patten). The local Spanish language newspaper I have been reading is called Washington Hispanic and is published every Friday. My intention was to read through and use a dictionary as little as possible. I found that I was able to get the gist of most articles pretty easily, and it was satisfying to see words from Assimil in the newspaper or vice versa. With the Practice Makes Perfect books, I do as much as I can stomach because the written drills can get a bit tedious. Oh, I also tried my hand at Anki using the 10000 Spanish words deck. I set it to do 100 new words per day. Because of all the cognates this really amounted to only 15-20 new words per day. For those new "hard" words I used Iversen's word list approach to learn them because I feel I need to write the words for them to sink in. Unfortunately, the Anki word reviews have started piling up like a snowball rolling downhill. It isn't any fun having to review 700 words just to get to the 20 new ones. So I need to rethink the Anki strategy some. So things have been chugging along with Assimil and I just finished lesson 103 passive and 54 active. About 2-3 weeks ago I joined lenguajero and immediately found a chat friend living in Spain. We converse 1-2x per week via Skype, and in the beginning it was rough (as I posted elsewhere). I was at a near total loss for words, and I felt bad for the guy on the other end of the Skype connection! Anyways, it has been getting better with every conversation. As for listening I am doing the Notes in Spanish Intermediate and occasionally watching episodes of El Internado. And the Practice Makes Perfect books are roughly 50% complete (but not a high priority). Most recently I hired a tutor, and we had a 1 hour session 4 days ago. We conversed for the entire hour in Spanish, and I thought it went very well. Maybe the earlier Skype disasters helped here? The tutor actually commented that he was surprised at my ability, having had only 6 months of learning under my belt. Anyways, I like the tutoring sessions because he is able to lead the conversation in a manner that exposes and addresses the areas where I need work. Also I told him that my #1 goal for my sessions with him is to work on conversation skills. I'll attend 8 more tutor sessions over the next 2 months. Looking ahead, I to need to figure out what to do once Assimil is complete. I have the Using Spanish course but may do other stuff before getting to it. At this point I don't think I could stomach going back to square one to do Platiquemos or FSI even though I know that those are highly regarded courses. I really like doing new stuff as opposed to drilling and reviewing. Maybe I will increase the amount of native materials such as books and magazines and get away from using learning-oriented resources completely. Also, I have been contacted by roughly a dozen other lenguajero users interested in language exchange, so there is the opportunity to really ramp up the conversation practice with native speakers. Edited by tibbles on 02 May 2011 at 9:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Leftcoaster Diglot Newbie China Joined 5036 days ago 22 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Russian | Message 2 of 23 02 May 2011 at 12:14pm | IP Logged |
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About how far have you gotten into the grammar? Moving into native materials will definitely help accelerate your learning, but just make sure your have the grammar background to keep up. If you already have about a dozen potential language exchange options then I would use your tutoring time to work on grammatical points (while continuing to talk in Spanish of course).
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| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5196 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 23 07 May 2011 at 8:17am | IP Logged |
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Thanks Leftcoaster for the suggestion. I suspect that there are some major, gaping holes in my Spanish grammar. Anyways, to address this shortcoming I have bought the Practice Makes Perfect - Advanced Spanish Grammar book and am working my way through it. Plus my tutor assigns me an article to read which I must then respond to by writing a commentary, so that is bound to uncover a whole bunch of grammar issues. I'll see next Wednesday when I turn in my first assignment.
Today I reached a minor milestone: I completed the final Assimil Spanish lesson #109 (passive phase). I know it's silly but I felt a slight pang of loss, like saying good bye to a friend, knowing that there are no new lessons to be heard. And another small milestone is that I have pushed into the advanced level podcasts of Notes in Spanish. These dialogs are a lot faster than the intermediate level, as well as more natural in flow with interruptions and other characteristics of natural conversation that never seem to make it into the pristine dialogs of formal learning materials. So my studies are chugging along, and I am putting in probably 1-2 hours of effort every day. When I was 15 my French teacher told us about how he had struggled day after day at some summer camp for French language and then suddenly woke up one morning thinking and speaking in French. Language learning is an interesting process, and I am curious to see how my goal of thinking in Spanish develops. Will it appear suddenly like it did for my French teacher, or will it manifest itself gradually? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Leftcoaster Diglot Newbie China Joined 5036 days ago 22 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Russian | Message 4 of 23 07 May 2011 at 2:52pm | IP Logged |
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Having a written assignment each week is a great idea. My last Chinese tutor had me keep a diary and required 3 entries per week. Doing 1-2 hours a day will also help out quite a bit. With regards to getting into the more advanced Spanish grammar and native materials, PMP seems to be a great start. The 501 Spanish verbs book is mostly known as a vocab builder, but it also has a pretty thorough grammar section.
I studied Spanish in high school and university (7 years total), the main problem I encountered was making the transition past the beginner level. I felt that I wasted at least three years just going over and repeating the beginner level material (my first two years at uni basically recovered what I learned in high school) and that left very little time at the intermediate and advanced levels. You seem to have a great handle on self-learning, hopefully you won't run into the same problems that I did (stupid American educational system!). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5196 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 5 of 23 18 May 2011 at 7:36pm | IP Logged |
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Okay, here is another update. I have just been chugging along with the Assimil active wave and just finished lesson #70. A few of the lessons in the 60-70 range presented quite a bit of new vocabulary, so I went the Iversen word list route to make them stick before attempting the English->Spanish written translation.
Last weekend my tutor emailed me the pdf of the workbook for the FSI Spanish Programmatic Course and suggested that I proceed through it. So far it is very easy, but I don't mind the review. Also, I am writing out everything in longhand as opposed to only filling in the blanks. My tutor is not a fan of the Practice Makes Perfect series of workbooks which I have mentioned in prior posts. He has suggested that I obtain Workbook in Everyday Spanish: A Comprehensive Grammar Review by Andujar and Dixson. Here is a tinyurl link to it at Amazon: Workbook in Everyday Spanish and it has pretty good reviews. I was able to get mine for less than half the retail price by locating a former student who had abandoned his university Spanish course only days after signing up. I'll post my impressions of that workbook after I have had a chance to go through a bit of it. I handed in my first written summary of a Spanish newspaper article, and the tutor applied corrections to it. While it did not need major revisions, it did highlight quite a few of my failings such as (a) applying gender/count agreement to participles, (b) situations such as que vs lo que, porque vs por la que, etc, and (c) pretérito vs imperfecto indicativo. On the last one, I understand the technical difference in meaning between the two, yet I think there is some component of the Spanish language thought process that I haven't absorbed yet. For instance, it would be difficult for me to know when to say "Tenía que ir al dentista" vs "Tuve que ir al dentista." And it doesn't help to think about it in English since I would just say "I had to go to the dentist" and wouldn't think of saying "I was having to go to the dentist". Other than the above, I am still doing Skype chats and listening to Notes in Spanish Advanced podcasts. And I'll try to fit in another episode of El Internado this week. Edited by tibbles on 18 May 2011 at 7:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5196 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 6 of 23 21 June 2011 at 8:24am | IP Logged |
Just a quick update about what I have done for the past month. I have completed up through:
Only about a week or so to go there with Assimil. The final 20 lessons are actually easier than some earlier ones because they are mainly covering irregular verbs at this point. Tutoring and skype are going fine as well. One of my tutor-dictated tasks each week in addition to grammar exercises is to choose an article from El País and write a commentary on it. When I do this, I usually end up exploring several older articles and wikipedia in Spanish in order to understand the background better. My tutor says my writing is good, and in terms of progress I can see that I am committing fewer fatal errors now than I did in earlier writings. My speaking ability still needs a lot of work though. The words that I want to say aren't coming to me automatically yet. Sometimes I have to search for those words, and the end result is a halted speaking style. Both the podcasts and El Internado episodes are sounding clearer now, so I will continue with those. On the podcast side, I will probably have exhausted the final Notes in Spanish episode within the next couple of weeks. So I'll need to search for a source of new material to listen to pretty soon. Edited by tibbles on 21 June 2011 at 8:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5027 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 23 26 June 2011 at 1:12pm | IP Logged |
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Hello Tibbles. I am impressed with how far you have managed to come, in a very short time.
I have a question. You mention that your tutor is not a fan of the practice make perfect workbooks. What is it she doesnt like about them?. I would like to know as I have just bought some. Also, have you thought of trying Platiquamos? It is very thorough. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5196 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 8 of 23 27 June 2011 at 9:08pm | IP Logged |
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Okay, today was a small milestone in that I completed the final active wave lesson of Assimil - Spanish with Ease. As I mentioned in the previous update, the final lessons actually got easier and easier to the point that I was able to do two lessons per day several times. I haven't figured out what I will do to replace the Assimil component of my learning yet. I did listen to lesson #1 of Assimil - Using Spanish, and I found it a bit challenging with it presenting like a dozen different usages of the verb andar. So I may hold off on the next Assimil for a few weeks or so. For the time being I plan to spend more effort on my workbooks, including the ones that my tutor hates. :) Oh, speaking of tutors, my Peruvian tutor got promoted to teaching some group classes and is being switched out for someone from Bolivia. I will meet her for the first time on Wednesday, so it should be an interesting change.
dbag Thanks for the compliments. Also, congrats on the progress that you have made to date. I continue to be envious of the fact that you had the opportunity to test out your Spanish in Madrid a few months back. I really don't think I have advanced that far yet. Learning Spanish reminds me of hiking in the desert. I see a mountain in the near distance and start walking up and towards it. After a while I realize that while I have made some progress, that mountain is bigger and more interesting than expected, and the summit remains out of reach. Okay, enough of that cliche. The big milestone that I am working towards is to think totally in Spanish. I don't know if this will be an epiphany moment when everything suddenly clicks or if it just gradually manifests itself. I kind of suspect it will be the latter in my case and that maybe one day I might realize that I have it but not be able to put a finger on when it happened. Edited by tibbles on 27 June 2011 at 9:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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