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6WC: un poco de español | ||
Tags: 6 Weeks Challenge (6WC) | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| getreallanguage Diglot Senior Member Argentina youtube.com/getreall Joined 5474 days ago 240 posts - 371 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Dutch | Message 33 of 41 23 May 2011 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Also: in Argentina we also say '¡qué bárbaro!' and 'con ganas'. We also say 'tener mala pata', and instead of 'con el Jesús en la boca' we say 'con el corazón en la boca'.
You seem to be doing a very good job with your 'active passive exposure', as in taking notes as to how, when and why certain forms are used. You have an eye for detail and I predict it will pay off handsomely. This will come in handy when you tackle the subjunctive. Don't be afraid of the subjunctive. It's just a nuanced way of expressing, in detail, what English does in a morphologically simpler way through modal verbs, turns of phrase, 'irrealis' use of the past simple forms, whatever is left of the English subjunctive, etcetera. Of course, sometimes Spanish uses the subjunctive for things that English seems to not distinguish one way or the other. It's just a more nuanced way to express certain qualities and personal perceptions of the action carried out by the verb. Oh, and here's a correction of something you wrote more than two weeks ago and nobody caught yet: "Esto me preocupa mucho porque quiero aprender mucho español y me preparar para a volver al trabajo el viernes." Debería ser: "Esto me preocupa mucho porque quiero aprender mucho español y prepararme para volver al trabajo el viernes". Edited by getreallanguage on 06 June 2011 at 9:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6952 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 34 of 41 26 May 2011 at 10:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@PhantomKat,
Thanks for your kind words! That's awesome that we both think the same way about grammar :D By the way, I loved Curious George as a kid too, but it seems that they've given him a makeover recently so he looks pretty different in the newer books. The original one is much cuter! @getreallanguage, Thanks for the correction, and for your take on the differences between the words I was having trouble with. How do you like Anki? I'm almost religiously dedicated to it myself :) Since discovering it last year, I've come to view it as indispensible for my language studies. Re: the pronouns, my reference book still hasn't shipped from overseas yet, but I've decided to stop stressing out about it so much, at least for the time being. I've already started to get a feel for how to use them by exposing myself to more native materials, so I'll continue to go that route and then give the textbook stuff another go somewhere down the line. At that point, I'd be thrilled to take advantage of your pronoun charts. (By the way, are you a Spanish teacher, or do you do these things for fun? Either way, I'm impressed!) Re: reflexive pronouns specifically, I'm familiar with the concept from German, so I've already resigned myself to the fact that it's not always going to be logical :) However, at least German is consistent as to which verbs are reflexive and which aren't (there are some verbs that have both reflexive and non-reflexive varieties, but the meaning changes so they can be considered separate words.) What I seem to be seeing in Spanish is that some verbs are "optionally reflexive" without necessarily changing the meaning. For example, I've seen both "voy" and "me voy", and I can't discover any semantic difference between them, which frustrates me. I know it can't just be completely random! Re: dialectal variation, I'm just beginning to realize the scope of this! I had figured that it would only be a matter of learning a few regional words and pronunciations here and there, but a few experiences testing out something I learned from a Castillian Spanish podcast on my Peruvian friend and being met with an "I've never heard that in my life" has suggested otherwise. Come to think of it, I'm sure there have been times when I've told my English students that some perfectly normal Australian or British word or phrase was outdated, strange, or completely unfamiliar to me due to my own unfamiliarity with non-American varieties of English, so I guess I can't expect all Spanish-speakers to all adhere to the same ideal "neutral" variety of Spanish, either... Edited by Lucky Charms on 26 May 2011 at 10:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6952 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 35 of 41 26 May 2011 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Update: 3 weeks, 5 days
The challenge is halfway over - almost 2/3 over, in fact. I've been sitting comfortably in 4th place, with three seriously motivated competitors miles and miles ahead of me! Great job, guys!! It doesn't look like I have any hope of overtaking them in the next few weeks, but I'll be more than happy if I can keep my current position as 1st in español ;) Today is the 26th day of the challenge, and when the day is over I should have about 75 hours logged. This averages out to just under 3 hours/day. The top competitors, on the other hand, are averaging just under 4 hours/day in their target languages alone. So there's not such a huge gap, when you think about it, but those hours add up! Thinking about it this way really makes me want to try harder to put in those extra few minutes wherever I can. Today I finished Lesson 30 of Assimil, so I've been averaging more than 1 lesson/day. Here is my favorite way to approach new lessons lately: 1) Listen to the dialogue a few times before reading to catch as much as I can 2) Read the dialogue with the translation and notes 3) Read along once with the recording and make a mental note of which parts are hard to keep up with 4) Read each sentence aloud (separated into "chunks" for complex sentences) until I can do the whole line from memory at a comfortable speed. Do this for each line. 5) Listen to the audio again, and like magic, every word will be clearly audible! Listen to it a few times throughout the day (and once again the next day), shadowing when you can, to help it sink in and become automatic. Steps 1-3 are more or less what I think most people on this forum do, but Step 4 was a new one for me. It's a lot less time-consuming than it sounds (it takes maybe 20 seconds for each line), and the effect it has on my listening ability is amazing. I've continued to watch BBC's video series Mi Vida Loca, and have learned a lot from the English/Spanish dual subtitles. Basically, I've been wearing out the "pause" button and copying down phrases that interest me. Here are a few: esta vale this one will do sígame follow me Comprobemos la lista Let's check the list te vaya a recoger she's going to pick you up ¡Que te diviertas! Have a good time! Venga conmigo, le acompaño Come with me, I'll walk you there Puede sentarse Have a seat ¡Que alegría! That's great! Que descanse(s) Have a good rest ...and about a hundred more. This is going to be a goldmine for Anki material :) I'm currently on episode 15 out of 22. My favorite reading material lately has been Historias de México, a parallel reader with fairy tales/folk tales from Mexico (both pre-Columbian and from colonial times). MP3 recordings of the stories are also available for download on the publisher's website. It's been so easy and enjoyable that I'm thinking of getting at least one other from the series (they are, off the top of my head, Historias de España, Historias de Puerto Rico, and Historias de Latinoamerica). I'm continuing to study from Notes in Spanish (Intermediate) and SpanishPod (Newbie). NIS Intermediate is still a little fast for me, but I find I can understand a lot (most?) of it when I concentrate really, really hard (ouch!) Without the rather pricey transcripts, this is not a series I can just have playing in the background. I hope to spend some more intensive listening time on it from now on. Edited by Lucky Charms on 26 May 2011 at 10:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| getreallanguage Diglot Senior Member Argentina youtube.com/getreall Joined 5474 days ago 240 posts - 371 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Dutch | Message 36 of 41 26 May 2011 at 12:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You're welcome. Anki and me are getting along famously. I've also subscribed to a daily email list called 'het woord van vandaag'. This morning I learned the word 'overmorgen' ('the day after tomorrow').
I teach ESL to adults. I'm looking to get into the Spanish as a foreign language field sometime in the near future. I'm also a linguist in training and I would like to understand my native language in theoretical terms, too. So I study some of this in school and also read up on it on my own. Your question was a great excuse to read up on third person pronouns in Spain. This is a source of some perplexity for us, too, even though we understand them when they speak. Honestly I think our system is so much more straightforward, but that's probably what they think about theirs. Regarding grammar explanations, I know full well they don't teach the language, only explain it, but some adult learners like a grammar explanation sometimes. It puts them at ease. It arrests panic and perplexity. And once that is taken care of, learning can continue. Grammar explanations are a sort of diplomatic maneuver in that sense, after which normal exchanges between the countries can resume. And I am absolutely of the opinion that trained linguists should be able to give as good a grammar explanation as a trained foreign language teacher, if not better.
There are always semantic differences when a verb is pronominalized if there is a non pronominalized version of the same verb. The thing is that some of these meanings are quite nuanced and some of them are not in the dictionary. 'Voy' and 'me voy' (ir/irse) is one of the verbs with reflexive and non-reflexive versions which significantly change the meaning and they are both in the dictionary, or should be in any dictionary worth a damn. Here's, roughly, the difference: ir = to go irse = to leave. The reason you haven't been able to spot the difference is probably the fact that 'leaving' usually also implies 'going' in a way that is so obvious, that a learner might take 'going' as the 'important chunk of meaning' and skip the 'added value' of 'leaving'. Here is an example: -¿Vas al cine hoy? -Sí. -¿Te vas dentro de poco? Necesito que me ayudes con algo. -No puedo, tengo que irme ahora, la película empieza en veinte minutos. -Are you going to the movies today? -Yeah. -Are you leaving soon? I need you to help me with something. (IMPLICATION: you're going somewhere) -I can't, I have to leave now, the movie starts in twenty minutes. (IMPLICATION: I'm going somewhere) Further confounding the fact is that in English you can say 'going' to mean 'leaving', as in 'I have to go now'. In Spanish, if you want to say that, you have to say 'tengo que irme (ahora/ya/etc)' or 'me tengo que ir' (same referential meaning, by the way; the difference is in nuance, which is expressed by the word order). Bueno, me tengo que ir a trabajar. To be continued! There is of course more to be said about pronominalizing verbs. Edited by getreallanguage on 26 May 2011 at 6:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6952 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 37 of 41 06 June 2011 at 12:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@getreallanguage,
Sorry, my reply has been overdue for a while! I'm also a linguist by training, and I feel the same way as you do. In one of my favorite language books, Making Sense of Japanese, the author Jay Rubin makes some comment about linguists to the effect that they must have so much potentially useful knowledge for language learners, but that they are effectively hoarding it all to themselves by publishing this knowledge in such esoteric language as to be inaccessible to any non-linguist. I want to be able to bridge that gap and be able to communicate the knowlege I've gained as a linguist so that it can be useful to anyone. I understand your explanation about ir vs. irse. I've realized that the problem is my dictionary. I'm using the Harper Collins dictionary app for iPhone, which is otherwise excellent but unfortunately doesn't include the reflexive verbs as separate headwords; for example, "irse" is listed under the list of usages for "ir". But I think that at least in this case it's easier to think of them as separate words, as you say. There's one sentence from Assimil I'm still not sure about, though: Yo me paseé mucho por la costa. "Pasearse" isn't in my dictionary and doesn't even show up under "pasear". What kind of nuance does the prenominalization add here? Edited by Lucky Charms on 06 June 2011 at 12:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6952 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 38 of 41 07 June 2011 at 7:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Update - 5 Weeks 2 Days
The challenge is over for me in less than a week. I haven't put in 100% effort over the last few weeks, a big reason being that three birthdays in the family (including my 25th!) were within a week of each other. But despite being busy catching up with work this week I hope to make some real progress during the final sprint. My current ranking is 6th place overall, 1st in Spanish. I'm almost 11 hours behind MultiMae, and 23 hours ahead of oylem_goylem. I know I've already said it a couple of times and been proven wrong, but this time I really don't see myself moving out of this spot, which is demotivating for me. I've been surprised throughout this challenge by how much I'm motivated by competition, despite having always considered myself a non-competitive type of person. I've reached Lesson 43 of Assimil, and I would love to be able to reach Lesson 50 by the end of the challenge. I've also continued hanging out with my friends Harold (Perú) and Abe (American-born Mexican). I find that I can understand the bulk of their conversations when listening along, but that it takes too long for me to formulate a sentence, so I can't join in very easily. This indicates to me that my listening is on the right track (despite being able to understand hardly anything on the radio) considering the short time I've been studying. We've actually hired Harold as a Spanish teacher at our language school, so we'll be seeing much more of him from now on, and he and I have set up a language exchange to begin this Friday. This week will involve a lot of getting outside of my comfort zone. Besides forcing myself to converse with natives, I want to transition into using more materials for native speakers. This means YouTube videos, podcasts, books, and websites. I'm going to keep reading and listening even if I don't understand, because it's the only way to get used to it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6952 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 39 of 41 12 June 2011 at 5:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The challenge is over!!
This week I was able to defend my rank as 6th overall, 1st in Spanish. My final time was 104 hours and 52 minutes for Spanish, averaging about 2.5 hours of Spanish per day. I was quite hopeful and confident at the beginning of the challenge that I would end up in the top 5, but considering how dedicated and focused the other challengers were, I'm quite satisfied with 6th. Hats off to everyone who participated! Before the challenge, I took the following test to determine my level: [http://www.spanishabroad.com/leveltest.htm] The result is displayed as a chart listing the levels "Elementary", "Lower Intermediate", "Upper Intermediate", and "Advanced", with a colored bar showing how far you are along the scale. The first time I was rated as being about 60% through "Elementary", and upon taking the test again today after 6 weeks of study I was rated at about 50% through "Lower Intermediate". This is consistent with what I feel my proficiency level to be: on the CEFR scale I'd rate myself a B1. I've been able to follow conversations between native speakers, and I've learned all the grammar in a college-level textbook (except I haven't gotten the past subjunctive down yet). I've reached lesson 48 of Assimil, have automated much of my theoretical knowledge of grammar over the past few days with the 8-disk Michel Thomas course, and now find myself at the perfect level to benefit from the oft-recommended Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish. All along the way, as in all my languages, the cloze-deletion feature of Anki has been my best friend; it has helped me turn the exposure I have gained from Assimil and SpanishPod into active knowledge. Some things I haven't been able to do well or haven't really tried to do yet are writing, enjoying media meant for native speakers, and (most disappointingly) conversing myself without falling back on another language. Most of my "conversation practice" has consisted of me listening to others while providing limited linguistic feedback, or initiating a Spanish conversation/translating something someone said into Spanish, only to have to language of the conversation switch back a few minutes later. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that we're always in a group with people who can't speak Spanish, so I hope my Friday language exchanges with Harold (which won't start until next week due to unavoidable personal circumstances) will provide an opportunity to flex my Spanish muscles for longer stretches at a time. Besides spoken fluency, another area I want to target from now on is vocabulary building. I can recognize almost all the grammar I encounter in books, but my comprehension is severely limited by my vocabulary. When I listen to a native podcast for the first time, I can recognize some words and phrases that "jump out" at me, but it's hit-and-miss as to whether I'll understand the gist of the topic being talked about. All in all, it's been a rewarding and eye-opening 6 weeks, and I thank everyone who's offered me encouragement and advice along the way! I plan to continue studying Spanish actively, but now it will be sharing time with my other languages (especially German). You can follow my progress from now on at my main blog (now officially titled "Better than Nothing: 日本語/deutsch/español"! Yes, I've upgraded my Spanish from "un poco" ;) ) Soon I'll be posting my lessons learned from the 6WC, my future gameplan, and a review of the Spanish Michel Thomas course. [http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=22949&PN=1&TPN=1] See you there! ¡Muchas gracias por leer! Edited by Lucky Charms on 12 June 2011 at 5:35am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dearwanderlust Newbie United States youtube.com/dearwandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5274 days ago 38 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 40 of 41 23 January 2012 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've really enjoyed reading your journal. I'm about to begin a 6WC Challenge studying Spanish and hope to work as hard as possible. What you have written has been very inspirational!
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