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Minder’s Spanish Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Minder Newbie United States Joined 5753 days ago 11 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 1 of 4 04 May 2009 at 4:53pm | IP Logged |
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Minder's Spanish Log
---------------------------------------- Well, I decided that a log would be a good kick to get back to learning Spanish. As a bit of background for anyone reading this I took about 6 years of Spanish during middle/high school, but barely got anywhere (really... really... crappy...). Hopefully it will give me a good enough base to start getting into native material. I'm going to be using the AJATT method, obviously modified for Spanish. Most of my "studying" is going to be doing a lot of sentence mining for my SRS off of random websites online. I'm really curious to see how this method will pay off after a lot of sentences have been put in. My audio training for now is just going to be having stuff streaming in the background. My logic at the moment is I have a good enough ear for the sounds of the language that if I really rocket forward the vocabulary and grammar the listening will follow very naturally. I just had my last exam today, so its a perfect time to get a start on these sentences. Hopefully I'll have a post later today with how many sentences I managed to add. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Minder Newbie United States Joined 5753 days ago 11 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 2 of 4 05 May 2009 at 3:17am | IP Logged |
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Well, I got 33 sentences today (probably more will be added later tonight). It feels like a bit of a low number, but all the experience I got today will more than make up for the low number. The starting source I used was CNN en espanol, but eventually started moving from dictionary entry to dictionary entry.
I started trying to use a Spanish->Spanish online dictionary, but I realized I'm definitely not at that point yet. So, I switched to Spanishdict.com, which I found out gives lots of example sentences based on the different ways each word can be used. This looks phenomenal, and I think this is going to be a huge sentence-mining resource for me in the beginning. In irrationale's Spanish Log, he mentions wikipedia's word frequency lists. Although I believe in the AJATT methodology, I definitely feel that the more targeted and streamlined the approach, the faster one can learn. I'm going to be inputting phrases and sentences I get from Spanishdict.com, when I look up each word from the frequency list. I think after I've gone through all 10,000 (3-5 months or less) I'll be at a phenomenal point and moving to native material should be a breeze (though frequent dictionary look-ups are still expected). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Minder Newbie United States Joined 5753 days ago 11 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 3 of 4 06 May 2009 at 1:51am | IP Logged |
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End of the second day.
Added 70 cards today, and I reviewed the first 60 out of the 103 now in the deck. I'm now at 130 in wikipedia's Spanish word frequency list. I'm finding that a lot of the words have a bunch of different meanings or usages, including some idiomatic phrases. I think these different phrases are going to be awesome for moving out of the purely literal one-to-one translation type thing. So far I'm breezing through the list because I know most of the words I've seen so far. A lot of extra vocab is in those example sentences though, so my 103 sentences account for a lot more vocab and grammar than one would expect. Well, I'd say it was a successful day 2. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Minder Newbie United States Joined 5753 days ago 11 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 4 of 4 22 May 2011 at 9:04pm | IP Logged |
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2 years later...
I just recently graduated from college and in the interim I thought it might be nice to boost my Spanish up to a level that was resume worthy -- "proficient in Spanish" or something like that. I've realized in the past with my language learning efforts - this log and unlogged attempts- that I am too focused on getting everything I can from whatever I'm doing, to the point that the activity becomes mentally draining instead of invigorating. I'll try to describe what I am doing to change that throughout this log. I love reading fiction, so I began practicing my Spanish last night with a short 30 minute Listening/Reading session of Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. I knew generally what was going on, but I didn't know a lot of words and would have been completely lost if I didn't already know the story. To keep this fun, I'm only looking up words when I feel mentally compelled to do so. If it becomes irritating to no longer know what a word means, I look it up. If I'm looking up words so frequently that I feel bogged down and irritated, I just go back to listening and reading. I'm using the metaphor of driving a car: when the car is going straight down the road, you just keep going until a correction is required to keep you from crashing. Time to get back to LR! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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