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Summer Goals

  Tags: Goals | German | French | Spanish
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altito425
Triglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 5951 days ago

65 posts - 70 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, French

 
 Message 1 of 1
13 May 2011 at 3:03am | IP Logged 
Since I'm going to have a ridiculous amount of free time on my hands this summer (no summer classes, no job) I've decided to make the most of it and set some language goals to work toward for the next three-or-so months. This thread will be a way for me to track my progress and maybe ask for advice on specific languages from time to time.

SPANISH:
Current Level (according to this site) - Advanced Fluency
Goals - I'm actually pretty satisfied with my current level in Spanish but I still feel compelled to make little improvements here and there, in particular, my vocabulary. I'm very comfortable speaking in Spanish but I know that I'm not always as accurate as I could be with word choice and I'm not as expressive as I'd like to be, which can put a damper on the conversation when I'm speaking with natives, so this summer I'm going to work on developing a more precise and nuanced vocabulary.
Methods -
- Using Spanish Vocabulary - the king of all vocabulary books (in English anyway). It includes about 25,000 thematically organized words, and in three different dialects.
- Native Material - I plan to continue doing what I usually do in Spanish; watching TV and movies and reading, though this summer I'm going to make myself read 6 books (which is more than I usually would in that time frame), watch at least 12 movies and about 3 seasons of a Spanish TV show.

FRENCH
Current Level (according to this site) - Basic Fluency
Goals - I've made a lot of progress with my French this past year but I've still got a lot of work to do; in particular, I want to work on my fluency and listening comprehension. I feel like I have a decent vocabulary and a good grasp on the grammar and with enough time I can say pretty much anything in French with reasonable accuracy. The problem is that in the time it would take me to organize my thoughs into French and think of all the right words the person I'm talking with would already be bored to tears, so I need as much speaking practice as I can get this summer. As for comprehension, I can understand everything my French professor says and almost everything I hear in dubbed French, but if a person speaks too quickly or with an accent that even slightly deviates from the 'standard' one, I get lost very easily. In a nutshell, I'm shooting for Advanced Fluency by the end of the summer, though that's quite a lofty goal.
Methods -
- Using French Vocabulary - the French counterpart to the above mentioned book.
- Schaum's Outline of French Vocabulary - more vocabulary, but leaning more on the practical side and with lots of example dialogues (which the Using X series lacks)
- Guide Pratique de la Communication - a conversation guide with loads of example dialogues and everyday expressions
- Native Material - about the same as in Spanish only the TV show will have to be an American show overdubbed into French (the last few months I've been watching overdubbed Friends episodes), and since comprehension is my biggest issue, my goal is SIX seasons of a TV show.

Studying alone should take two to three hours a day at least, reading and watching TV and movies should take up another two or three good hours; looks like I won't have so much free time this summer after all.

Edited by altito425 on 16 May 2011 at 8:40am



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