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My 3-month Spanish challenge | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| janalisa Triglot Senior Member France janafadness.com/blog Joined 6881 days ago 284 posts - 466 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Japanese Studies: Russian, Norwegian | Message 1 of 15 30 March 2011 at 6:37pm | IP Logged |
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First of all, I have to apologize for signing up for Team TAC 2011 for French and then never posting anything. ^^; I simply realized that keeping a log would be more of a burden than a help to me at that time, and that I didn't really need a log to motivate me to study. I did, in fact, work very hard on French and made quite a bit of progress. I'd say I'm around a C1 level now. I do intend to keep working up towards C2, but I think I'm ready to get started on another language. I do, after all, have a ton of free time on my hands right now-- I've decided to take a few months off to devote to language study and other personal pursuits. So I'll be able to devote several hours a day to my new language.
As you can see from the title of this log, the new language will be Spanish, and I'm going to attempt to learn it (to a C1 level) within three months of intensive study. I've never actually kept any sort of log or journal to document my language studies before, but I've decided to do so this time because this is sort of an experiment I want to keep track of. I feel that I've now more or less developed a good method to learn a language to an advanced level, but my studies have always been rather "sporadic"-- I've never attempted to learn any language from the beginning to an advanced level within a certain period of time. So this will be a sort of "test" of my method and language-learning skills. I'm also interested to see just how easily I'll be able to learn Spanish based on my knowledge of French, since this will be my first time studying a language closely related to one I already know. So, why Spanish? Well, I want to learn as many languages as possible, but since I obviously can't learn them all I've (recently) decided to try to focus on the "major" languages of the world, and Spanish certainly falls into that category. Also, since I'm now back in my hometown in the US, where there are lots of Mexican immigrants and TV stations, books, etc. available in Spanish, I'm in a pretty good environment for learning and practicing this language. I also wanted to choose a relatively "easy" language for experimental purposes, since it will take less time to document my studies and to see the results. Spanish is also a language I find charming and one I've intended to learn for some time. I took Spanish for one year once upon a time in junior high school, and I still more or less remember the basics I learned at that time. (For some reason I can also still recite The Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish, which we were required to memorize for class!) I've also been exposed to quite a bit of Spanish throughout my life, so the sound of it is pretty familiar to me. Thanks to this basic knowledge as well as my knowledge of French, I'd say I can probably understand about 80% of what I hear on Spanish TV, and maybe a little more than that when it comes to written Spanish. So I have a pretty good head start already. As for my method, it's really nothing original at all. Basically I'm a fan of the input-->output strategy that's already been promoted by many people before me such as Khatzumoto, the guys from Antimoon, Doviende, etc. So I'll listen to/ read a ton of Spanish (preferably using content I really enjoy) until I understand most of it and start to develop a good "intuition" for the language. I might go through some grammar books, but I won't try to memorize anything right away. I'm not going to lay out a specific plan here from the beginning because I know I wouldn't follow it if I did-- something wouldn't work as well as I'd expected it to and I'd end up changing it. Specific plans and schedules also just feel really burdensome and restrictive to me. I prefer to just have a general idea of how I'm going to go about things, and improvise from there. I do have a few specific ideas of things I'm pretty sure I want to do (one I will mention is that I intend, at some point, to read 10 novels in Spanish), but I'll spell those out when I get to them. I've actually cheated a little bit because I already started studying Spanish a couple days ago. =P I had intended to start by just listening to a lot of things in Spanish for a few days just to get my ear used to the sound of the language... But I realized this wasn't really necessary since I'm already quite familiar with it. Then I was going to go over some specific points about pronunciation, but I realized I was already quite familiar with those too. I already know how Spanish is pronounced and am able to produce all the sounds. I had thought about going through the FSI Spanish course since I've heard such good things about it on this forum, but I looked through some of the lessons and found them incredibly dull. Again, they were mostly focused on pronunciation concepts that I was already familiar with. So then I tried watching some of the "Destinos" video series and found that quite interesting and instructive. I've watched the first 17 episodes over the past two days and feel like I've learned quite a bit. I also like the cultural and regional information that's included in the videos. So my plan right now is to watch the rest of the Destinos series, and then move on to something else. I'll probably read the Spanish translation of Harry Potter while listening to the audio book. (I'm a huge HP fan and I've read the books in English and French, so I'm quite familiar with the series and I know I'll enjoy it.) I'll probably update again with my progress after I've finished watching Destinos, which should be in a couple of days. Until then! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Li Fei Pro Member United States Joined 5114 days ago 147 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 15 30 March 2011 at 10:01pm | IP Logged |
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Great plans! I will watch with interest since Spanish is next on my hit list.
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| vanillabean Groupie Canada Joined 4999 days ago 53 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 15 31 March 2011 at 1:40am | IP Logged |
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Good luck! I will definitely be following along. :)
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| sash2619 Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4994 days ago 13 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 15 31 March 2011 at 1:57am | IP Logged |
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Good luck janalisa! It sounds like you have a good plan. Also with French under your belt, learning Spanish will be much easier.
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| janalisa Triglot Senior Member France janafadness.com/blog Joined 6881 days ago 284 posts - 466 votes Speaks: English*, French, Japanese Studies: Russian, Norwegian | Message 5 of 15 03 April 2011 at 5:59am | IP Logged |
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To those of you who've commented, thank you so much for your support! It's really cool to know that people are actually following this log, and it actually does help motivate me to keep going and to do my best. =D
So, I watched the "Destinos" series through episode 32 (there are 52 episodes in all) but have stopped there for now because I started to get bored with it. They just keep repeating the same scenes over and over! I also don't like just sitting and staring at my computer screen all day... So I figured I could slow down a bit on this and try some other things. I do like the series though, and I might finish it eventually (unless I come back to it later and it's just way too easy). In the meantime though, I've started reading/ listening to "Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal". I've gotten through chapter 6 so far. I've just been following along in the Spanish text while listening to the audio on youtube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9szAUzZjqlk ). The great thing about this is that I know this book so well (I've used it to study other languages too) that I can understand practically everything without having to refer to the English version. I've just been keeping wordreference.com open to verify the occasional word I'm unsure about. I find that looking up a few words does help to cement them in my memory, but I try not to look up too many, and using the online dictionary lets me look them up quickly enough that the flow of the story isn't interrupted. It's pretty cool because I can really feel my level of understanding "snowballing" as I go along. I couldn't tell you how many words I've learned, but I find it misleading to think about numbers of words, as if they were concrete quantities-- because they're really not. At what point can you say you "know" a word? When you recognize it on sight? When you can produce it yourself? When you can produce one of its possible equivalents in your native language? Or is it when you're familiar with all its nuances, in which contexts it's used, with which prepositions and in which expressions? It doesn't work too well for me trying to learn words in isolation, and even just trying to familiarize myself with isolated sentences (like in Anki) gets to be dull and overwhelming after a while. It seems better to me to stop thinking on the level of "words"-- to stop thinking on the level of "sentences", even-- and instead just keep flooding my brain with content and let myself feel the rush of this "snowball" phenomenon. I don't try to memorize individual words-- I just look them up once, as quickly as possible, and keep going. This way I can really feel the layers building up-- it's easier to understand the more I read. Usually I don't have to look up a word more than once or maybe twice, because it soon comes up again and I remember it. This is why I think it's important to keep going; to get through as much as I can as quickly as possible. I'm not sure if the audio is really entirely necessary in the case of Spanish because I'm pretty sure I can produce the correct pronunciation in my head without it... But if nothing else it really helps just to keep the flow going-- it keeps me from stopping too long to look up words and such. And it's not just the pronunciation of sounds, but also the intonation, the speed, the flow of the language that I want to implant in my head as well as I can. So for a while-- until I reach the point of understanding almost everything (even in unfamiliar context)-- I'll probably try not to read anything without also listening to it. I think it's important to focus on listening in the beginning. The other day I also watched a part of the Harry Potter movie dubbed into Spanish ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv42MQAzmF4&feature=related ) and was quite happy to find that I understood practically everything (maybe 95-98%?). If I had watched this a week ago (before I'd started studying Spanish!), I know I would have understood much less (around 75-80%, I'm guessing). Of course, this is still pretty familiar content to me and I'd probably understand less of something I'd never seen before, but I still see this as evidence that I've made quite a bit of progress in a pretty short time. So I'm going to finish "La Piedra Filosofal" and probably continue with the rest of the series as long as it's still interesting and I feel I'm learning enough from it. I'll update again soon! Edited by janalisa on 03 April 2011 at 6:03am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| janalisa Triglot Senior Member France janafadness.com/blog Joined 6881 days ago 284 posts - 466 votes Speaks: English*, French, Japanese Studies: Russian, Norwegian | Message 6 of 15 06 April 2011 at 5:01pm | IP Logged |
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I finished the first Harry Potter book yesterday, and I was surprised how quickly my level of understanding increased as I went through it. According to my rough calculations, I understood about 90% when I first started. That may sound high, but concretely speaking it means I was coming across an unknown word in practically every sentence. (I was actually able to understand most of these words anyway due to my familiarity with the story, but I didn't take this into account for obvious reasons). And by the time I got about halfway through the book (maybe a little sooner; I'm not really sure) my comprehension level had increased to about 97% (that's about 1 unknown word per paragraph)... and then it stayed there throughout the end of the book. I take this to mean that I've already reached the glass ceiling of the "Harry Potter phase", if you will. =P I expect that if I continue with the HP series in this way, I'll find myself trudging along this plateau all the way until the end. I have good reasons to suspect this because it's exactly what happened to me with French. I read all seven HP books, and though I learned a lot from the first two or so, I didn't feel like I was progressing very much after that. I *did* have a lot of fun reading, but it probably wasn't the most efficient thing to do!
Another mistake I made with French is that I didn't start "activating" my skills soon enough. I was at that frustrating level where I understood almost everything in the books I read, but kept coming across one or two unknown words every page or so. I'm not *quite* there yet with Spanish-- I'll have to trudge through a few adult-level novels first-- but I know I'll be there soon. And I know from experience that once you get to that level, there's not really that much you can do to accelerate your vocabulary-learning rate. You just have to keep reading, and reading, and reading, and looking up unknown words whenever they pop up. Gradually there will be less and less of them. But it doesn't really make much sense to focus on vocabulary at this stage, since it's going to be slow going whatever you do. You also now know enough of the language to start using it-- and learning to use the language correctly, without making mistakes, is another thing that's going to take a long time, so you'd better get started on it as soon as you reasonably can. So yesterday I made a trip to the local library, which fortunately has a pretty decent selection of Spanish books. I borrowed two adult-level books ("Había una vez una quinceañera" by Julia Alvarez, and "Tres tazas de té" by Greg Mortenson), a children's encyvlopedia-type book with questions and answers about animals and nature (seems good for learning some specialized vocabulary), the second Harry Potter book (yeah, I'll explain in a minute), and a grammar book ("Mastering Spanish Grammar" by Pilar Munoz and Mike Thacker). Broadly speaking, I'll be doing three different things at once. The first thing is to continue to increase my vocabulary, beyond the level of Harry Potter, by reading the two books and the children's encyclopedia. I have an electronic dictionary I got in Japan, in which I installed Spanish-Japanese and Spanish-Spanish dictionaries before leaving. (No Spanish-English, but I know Japanese well enough to use the Spanish-Japanese one). After having used Japanese electronic dictionaries for a few years, I'm not sure I can live without one. They can contain huge volumes with thousands of entries and example sentences, and they also include voice recordings, are portable, and allow you to look words up very quickly. So I'll just be reading through these books and looking up any unknown words (if they can't be understood from context) in my electronic dictionary. I'll also be trying to use the Spanish-Spanish dictionary as much as I can, rather than the Spanish-Japanese one. At the same time, I'll be starting to "activate" my skills-- or maybe I should say that I'll be *preparing* to activate my skills. And this is where the grammar book comes in. I'll just be reading through the grammar book, reading the examples out loud to myself and doing the exercises when they seem helpful. I skim through the parts that seem really easy, and for the exercises that feel difficult, I just read the answers in the back of the book rather than trying to force myself to do them. I'll also try to be conscious of the grammar points I've been studying in my reading. I really like this particular grammar book, by the way-- it feels easy to read through, the explanations are very clear, and it even makes note of some key differences with French grammar, which is a huge help to me. Once I get through this grammar book, I might read another one, and I'll start writing journal entries on Lang8 at some point. (Probably when I feel I've reached that vocabulary plateau I was at with French, when I now think I should have started activating.) The third thing I'll be doing is to work on my listening skills. I've found a terrible recording of "Harry Potter y la camara secreta" on youtube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gTeKqpOr2U&feature=related ). I don't know what the deal is with this recording-- this girl must have just decided to record herself reading this for the fun of it, because she can't possibly be a professional. She's a terrible actress, she reads too quickly and she doesn't enunciate her words very clearly at all. HOWEVER, I consider this to be exactly what I need. The recording I listened to for the first HP book was very clear and easy to understand. But in order to improve my listening skills, I need to try to understand people who speak quickly, who run their syllables together, with background noise and other distractions. I tried just listening to this recording without referring to the text and found that I hardly understood anything at all. When I tried listening to the first chapter while following along in the text though, I found that the recording seemed to get "clearer" to me as I went along, and I started to distinctly hear the different syllables and boundaries between words. I listened to some of it again after having followed along in the text, and I understood a lot more. So I think I'm going to continue in this way throughout the book, and hopefully my listening skills will improve a lot. I'll probably also watch some other random youtube videos in Spanish. And I think that's about it for now! I have a lot on my plate, but I'm really encouraged by the progress I've made so far, and I'm having a lot of fun with this language. =D 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| vanillabean Groupie Canada Joined 4999 days ago 53 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 15 14 April 2011 at 4:39pm | IP Logged |
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Glad to hear you're having a lot of fun with Spanish! I'm amazed at the great progress you have made so far. I'm still unable to really comprehend a lot of Harry Potter at the speed of an audio recording... I still have to read at my own (slow) pace! haha. So great job! Sounds like you have an excellent plan in place.
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| tbone Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4982 days ago 92 posts - 132 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 8 of 15 14 April 2011 at 6:19pm | IP Logged |
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You can keep going with the Harry Potter series as there are more challenges ahead. If we have the same audio, the
first narrator is just excellent, but it gets harder after that. The second guy is less animated, the woman for the third (the rest are all women) is almost monotonic so you've got to concentrate much harder. The fourth narrator is quite nasal and swallows her endings ('cerc' instead of 'cerca', for instance). The fifth narrator (the one I'm on) is like an absolute machine gun! Very clear pronunciation, but, man, she's in a hurry! Number six sounds easier and number seven sounds like a really good narrator to end with. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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