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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Shn Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5593 days ago 8 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 3 31 January 2012 at 11:19am | IP Logged |
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It's been a while since I've been to this forum, but since I was last here I moved to Germany (from England), while there met the women I am now married to, then moved to Portland, Oregon, USA, where I currently live. I haven't studied German for a long time now, I reached about basic fluency as defined by this site but I don't really have the motivation to work on it any longer and without being among German speakers I find hard to improve anyway. I've decided to restart my language learning again, but I'm going to start learning Spanish.
Now I've decided to learn Spanish for two reasons:
Hopefully since I have a natively Spanish-speaking wife I will have an advantage. I'm going to try to use the words I learn each day on my wife to internalise them. After I get a bit of proficiency maybe I can get some real conversations going too. I plan to start out kind of slowly since I'm quite busy with other parts of my life. I've done the first unit of Pimsleur today, which was really easy. I didn't manage to speak Spanish with my wife because she got home late and wanted to go straight to bed. It'd be a bit weird to ask my wife if she understands English anyway. I'm going to attempt one unit of Pimsleur per day, which is what I did with German. I'm also going to add vocab words to Anki as I learn them from Pimsleur. I've decided not to use Michel Thomas as I did when I learnt German because I've seen a lot of people complaining about his accent and I want to get as close to perfect pronunciation as possible. I've been told by a native speaker that I have almost no accent when I speak German, so hopefully I can achieve that with Spanish too. I'm writing this log mainly for myself to track my progress, but hopefully it will be useful to someone else too (assuming I manage to stick to this, I'm just starting training for a new job so that's going to take up a lot of my time too). Since I don't really know how fast my progress will be I'm not really sure what my goal should be. For the moment I think I'm going to try for basic fluency in 6 months, but I have no idea if that's feasible or not with the time I have. I'm relying a lot on conversation with my wife to speed my learning along. I may modify my goal up or down as I get a feel for my learning rate. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Heather McNamar Senior Member United States Joined 4785 days ago 77 posts - 109 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 2 of 3 31 January 2012 at 7:44pm | IP Logged |
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¡Saludos, mi amigo! I'm just starting Spanish after a thirteen-year absence, starting from the beginning. Perhaps we can compare notes and offer each other advice as we follow our paths. In any case, mucho gusto de conocerlo. ¡Buena suerte con el estudio del español!
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| Shn Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5593 days ago 8 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 3 31 January 2012 at 9:49pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks! I think you have a bit of a head-start on me, I only know two verbs (which I have no idea how to conjugate other than first person and formal second person) and a few nouns.
Just completed unit 2 of Pimsleur. I'm getting a bit tired of saying I'm an American, but I guess that's the target audience. I'm a bit confused if this is only teaching me Spanish from a South American perspective, would a person from Mexico really refer to a US American as "norteamericano"? I'll have to ask my wife later. She says a lot more people (in the US at least) call Spanish "español" rather than "castellano" too, so maybe I should get into the habit of saying that. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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