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Spanish LR Log | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Scratch Groupie United States Joined 5238 days ago 45 posts - 57 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 65 of 88 30 June 2011 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | ||
In my experience, there are 2 kinds of reading to do in a foreign language that you're learning. The first kind, and probably the one I tend to enjoy the most, is to read what you can already understand, take whatever little bits you pick up on from context, but just read and try to follow the story. Don't get bogged down in the details. But as you've noticed, you also have to sometimes spend some time on doing the second type of reading, and that's the kind where you try to figure out all the details, figure out the structures that don't line up with what you know already, look up all the unfamiliar vocabulary. That's probably the kind of reading I ought to do more of, but I struggle with it because it doesn't fit my natural style of reading in my native language. Good luck. It sounds like you've been making very good progress. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ymapazagain Senior Member Australia myspace.com/amywiles Joined 6962 days ago 504 posts - 538 votes Speaks: English* Studies: SpanishB2 | Message 66 of 88 03 July 2011 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi Supertom,
I just wanted to drop in with some words of encouragement. I haven't seen you around the past couple of days, but I'm sure you're still working hard! Keep up the good work and I'll be eagerly awaiting to hear how you're progressing! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4997 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 67 of 88 13 July 2011 at 6:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thnx!
You are right, I wasn't around for a few days. Had a little vacation so to say:) Was nice, now I am back on track! Día 30/60 2 hora Assimil lecciónes 22,23 3,75 horas Michel Thomas Advanced CD1, CD1, CD2 4,25 horas LR L2-L2 Harry Potter y la Cámara Secreta Total 1: 42 Total 2: 92 horas Back to business here. Glad I am again on a more constructive path. Hadn't logged for a while, even though I did do a little. The first few days of my absence I did MT Advanced CD1,2, assimil lecciones 22,23 and a few hours of LR. Then had a vacation of about 11 days and today got back to my studies. I started with a little recap op Assimil 22 and 23. Just to get into the grove again and don't immediately start on new stuff. So both lessons took me about 15 minutes to recap for a total of half an hour. Did the first CD of Michel Thomas Advanced again. Was nice, not to difficult. Second time for me that I do this CD, so nothing new, but nice anyway. 75 minutes is a long time to listen to him though..:P As always, I did some nice reading. Only need to read 5 more chapters in La Cámara Secreta to finish it, then I can finally move onto book three which I haven't read ever. Closing comments, I am glad to be back. I do feel my brain used its time off pretty well and that I can now start again fresh! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4997 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 68 of 88 14 July 2011 at 10:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Día 31/60
1 hora Assimil lecciónes 22,23,24 1,25 hora Michel Thomas Advanced CD2 2,5 horas LR L2-L2 Harry Potter y la Cámara Secreta Total 1: 46,75 horas Total 2: 96,75 horas Started with my Assimil. I wont be going through Assimil as fast as I used to do. I noticed that things just didn't stick as well as I would have liked. Started mixing things up to much because I just learned too much new grammar in one day. Maybe when I finish MT I can do more than one new lección per day, but now I just can't hack it. Lección 24 covered the -ando and -iendo forms, which I already saw in MT, but now for the first time on paper. So that was nice. Michel Thomas was nice too. CD2 covered the future tenses using will and would and also covered the past simple. Much grammar in this one, so that was nice, nothing new, but nice recap! Then I went on to read. I got into the story again and just finished the whole second book today, Yay me! This means that tomorrow I can start with listening-reading to HP3 using Spanish audio and Dutch text. Looking forward to it, as it is the first time I will read the third book:) All in all, a good day. Tomorrow, I may just break the 100 hours barrier! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6001 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 69 of 88 15 July 2011 at 1:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Any words of advice for those of us doing L-R?
It can be frustrating that at times I feel I can map every word in a sentence to the audio, but, take away the book and I can't even pick out one. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4997 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 70 of 88 15 July 2011 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think the best thing to do is to keep at it and keep mixing things up. Listening Spanish while reading English, Listening Spanish while reading Spanish, just listening Spanish without reading along. That along with some 'serious' study such as Assimil/Michel Thomas/FSI should set you up nicely. However, I am also still new to all this language learning, and am still learning how to best learn a language, so please don't take my word for bone.
Día 32/60 0,75 hora Assimil Lección 25 + recap 0,75 hora Michel Thomas Advanced CD3, tracks 1-14 3 horas LR L2-L1 Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban Total 1: 51,25 Horas Total 2: 101,25 Horas Wóót, broke the 100 hour barrier! Will write something about this tomorrow or something. Today, I started with Assimil as always. Not much new grammar in this lesson, but it did had some new vocabulary and idioms, so that was good. Only did 45 minutes of MT today, as I didn't feel like doing the whole CD (75 minutes). Was a good CD so far. We dealt with the past simple, future, some more on the gogo-verbs. All in all just many many conjugations of the verbs, which was nice. Most of the tenses are starting to get familiar and are started to get to me quick enough to keep it flowing. Also when reading Spanish, I now only need a little time to figure out what tense a certain verb is, instead of having to really think about it. So I guess that a few more weeks should give me a firm handle on the basic grammar. Reading was really nice, as I never read this story before. I didn't know whether to just LR this third Harry Potter book using L2-L2 or to start of L-reading it once using L2-L1. Chose for L2-L1, but I am really wondering what my comprehension would be were I to go strait into LR L2-L2 an unfamiliar book. Any thoughts on this? This third book is 14,5 hours long, so that is a lot of new story for me! I do notice that my enthusiasm is higher for reading a new book than reading a already familiar book. Hence, I hope to get to a point quickly where I can just LR in L2-L2 from the get go, instead of first having to read it in Dutch. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ymapazagain Senior Member Australia myspace.com/amywiles Joined 6962 days ago 504 posts - 538 votes Speaks: English* Studies: SpanishB2 | Message 71 of 88 16 July 2011 at 3:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi supertom,
Congrats on making it to 100 hours! It sounds like you're doing an amazing job, and once again I'm jealous of your ability to focus for such an extended period each day! You'll be flying past me in no time ;o) I would imagine that by the time you're ready for the 4th Harry Potter book you could probably give it a try L2-L2 straight away...by that stage I imagine the relevant vocabulary should be much more familiar to you, and once you've finished the MT Advanced course you should have a pretty good grasp of most grammatical concepts. I'm interested to see how it goes! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4997 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 72 of 88 16 July 2011 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Milestone 1
100 hours of Spanish It has been quite a journey so far. I never thought I would make it this far this fast, but here I am nonetheless. It has been great so far and I would like to thank everyone who has supported me so far and has given be advice about how to proceed. Sounds like I won an Emmy or something :P But alright, what have I done so far? When I started out I did a lot of Listening-Reading to get me started. After that I used a combination of LR, Assimil and Michel Thomas to get me to the 100 hour mark. Let me just give you a quick outline of the hours spend on each of these: Hours Spend Listening-Reading L2-L2: 20 hours and 15 minutes L2-L1: 45 hours Listening L2: 8 hours Reading L2: 1 hour and 30 minutes Total: 74 hours and 45 minutes Michel Thomas 13 hours and 45 minutes Assimil 14 hours and 45 minutes Scriptorium 1 hour Notes on time spend As one can see, I spend about 75 hours on LR and about 25 hours on 'active' study. This mainly comes from the 50 hours of pure LR I did when I just started out. As it seems, the second set of 50 hours were pretty evenly split between the 'active' study elements and the 'passive' study elements. I call LR passive, because it takes a lot less concentration to complete than listening to Michel Thomas for example. LR L2-L2 is a pretty relaxed study method, L2-L1 takes more concentration, but just for the time being, I call it passive study. My thoughts on learning a language When I started learning Spanish, I had no experience what so ever learning a language on my own. Even now I am still a beginner at this, but I think I have learned loads about how to learn a language. Learning a language should comprise two main elements. Element one: Active study. Element two: Passive study. The active study should comprise some sort of method book like FSI, Assimil, Michel Thomas or some other classroom method. Time spend on these methods is very valuable, but very intense. Hence, one can't study them for long periods at a time. Some can, but most will just burn out and stop learning al together. However, most manage to spend about an hour of concentrated study a day on those methods and I think that is more than plenty. Following a certain method from the beginning to end is key here in my opinion. And a structural approach to these methods is key too. One should do a little each day of active study. Everyday language doesn't use very complex tenses very often, so almost all of what you need to learn to cope in 95% of the situations is a good understanding of a course such as Assimil with Ease or FSI. And by doing about an hour a day, most people will manage to get a firm handle on everything these methods have to offer in about 6 months. The passive study should comprise of as much in your target language as possible. I am talking about things like reading, watching TV, flipping through pages on the internet. The more one sees of the target language a minute, the better. That is why I think listening-reading is the best method for ones passive study. With LR, one gets a lot of information each minute in the target language, at proper speed and with proper accent. No other passive method can match this. The passive study is not only fun (reading Harry Potter is no real struggle for me, as I really like the stories. Other people can use other books they really like), but it help you tremendously to close the gap between classroom learning and real life. How many times does one hear that one understand Spanish pretty well, but that Spanish people just talk too damn fast. This is in my eyes exactly the problem of people who have spend too much time on active study and too little on passive study. One must get acquainted with the speed of real Spanish and this takes time. But my guess is, that when someone has 200 hours of LR behind their belt, they don't complain about speed. Nor do they complain about the fact that they can't understand every little thing they hear. They are used to that, as that is exactly what they encounter doing all those hours of LR. The uncertainty is something one has to accept and learn how to cope with. This isn't done during active study, as that is in a controlled environment. Learning to cope with speed and uncertainty is learned through hours and hours of living in that uncertainty. I said 200 hours of LR and that may seem like a lot. But most people hold the target of about 600 hours to get to a reasonable level in a new language, so if one spends 200 hours on LR, one still has 400 hours to learn grammar and stuff. And from what I have so far learned in those measly 25 hours of active study, I can already tell that I won't need 400 hours to really grasp the grammar. More like 100 hours to be able to use all of the basic grammar naturally. So that is most of what I have to say about the active/passive method I use. The most important thing I haven't yet told about it, is that this method is very fun. There is hardly any pressure, as one only has to complete an hour of active study a day. All the time one has left, one can spend on LRing things he/she likes. This fun is key, as it is what makes people continue with their studies. Without the fun, people quit. So please, do as much of the fun stuff as you can. You will be better because of it. Many have posted in my log about how good they find my motivation as I continuously am able to clock huge hours. But in fact, only the active elements require a real effort. The LR part is becoming more and more fun. The Future For the next 100 hours, I want to keep on going with my Active-Passive method. Finishing Michel Thomas Advanced and doing it again at a later time. Keep on plugging with Assimil and trying to suck up most of its wisdom. Aside from this, I hope to get to a point during the next 100 hours where I can LR L2-L2 without to much trouble without knowing the book before hand. At the moment, I still first LR L2-L1 before I LR L2-L2 that book. This isn't optimal, as I enjoy the first time I read a book more than the second book. I think I can get to this stage during the next 100 hours. I also know that my writing and speaking skills are lacking in comparison to my listening and reading skills. This problem will probably still be there after the next 100 hours, as I don't plan on doing too much of the writing and speaking skills. I am not worried about this though, as I think that speaking and writing will come much more natural to me once I have a more thorough grip on the Spanish language. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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