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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5264 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 18 04 September 2010 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I thought I would write this log for those who, like me, may have had Spanish in high school, did well, but never
took it further. It's been some time since I realized how useful knowing Spanish would be. I intend to work in the medical field and it is very useful to know the native language of patients, especially those who know little or no English. Furthermore, I am a great fan of literature (my favorites being ancient Greek, British, and Russian). I have read all these works in translation, but very few works by authors writing in German, American, Italian, Spanish, French, Japanese, and other languages. There is some value in reading a text in the original language, a sense of excitement, so my first attempt towards that goal was to learn ancient Greek. I used a text called "From Alpha to Omega", and while it is a good text, I got through only perhaps 1/3 of the way. I realized how extremely difficult the ancient Greek language was, which made me realize how simple, by comparison, Spanish is and how making comparative efforts in that language would yield fruit more easily and more rapidly. I haven't given up on the idea of learning Latin, ancient Greek, and classical Hebrew some day, but not before I tackle a few living languages first. Literature in the Spanish language is quite good - from the poem of El Cid to Cervantes to Marcos - and I look forward to exploring it in the original. Furthermore, learning Spanish will hopefully get me in the mode of systematic language learning and acquaint me with a Romance language, which would be useful for learning other languages that interest me and especially Latin, French, Portuguese, and Italian. Early on, I noticed that my knowledge of both English and Serbo-Croatian as a native helped me get down the phonology of Spanish rather more easily than my other classmates in high school. The Serbo-Croatian vowels, the rolled r, the similarity of ć, nj, and lj (the latter only to some degree) to their Spanish counterparts, as well as the English θ, ð, noun articles, and shared vocabulary from Latin complement each other well. I decided to go with Castilian Spanish because I prefer its sound and I think it would be good to have knowledge of the vosotros form, which can always be dropped when in Latin America. I suppose this is less practical, since most Spanish speakers in the US originate from Latin America, but I am a bit of a romantic and somewhat of a snob. To start learning Spanish again in July of 2010, after a ten year hiatus, I initially chose to go with the Assimil "Spanish with Ease" program from 1991. Initially I was skeptical, but with encouragement from my father (who achieved proficiency in French and German using the Assimil series), I started with some accelerated pace, but dropped it for a few weeks and then restarted. The vocabulary started coming all back, as did the verb conjugations. I am currently on lecture 66 and doing the active wave on the older lectures. I've realized that the Assimil course is not enough, even at the beginning. So I purchased a copy of the Bible (Reina Valera 1960) and started reading alongside the free audio ( http://worldwide.familyradio.org/es/mp3/bible/download/ ). Initially this was to be a listening-reading experience, listening to the Spanish and reading in English, using the Spanish Bible for clarification. I soon realized that I wasn't too keen on the audio because of the accent and pace (which I reduced to 0.75x) and wasn't finding that it enabled me to learn new words. So instead I just went with reading the Spanish Bible alone. I find that due to knowing the stories almost by heart (but not quite word for word) in English, I can easily understand what's being said and thereby learn new words. I can't estimate how many I have learned this way, but I would say probably about as many as in the Assimil. And that's based on Genesis 1 and the first 10 chapters of Matthew. I am less regular with the Bible reading than with the Assimil, however. The language is a bit more sophisticated, more specialized to spiritual topics, but also excellent in terms of learning grammatical constructs and idioms. I see all sorts of tenses throughout, and surprisingly the vosotros and tú forms dominate over their formal counterparts. The subjunctive is everywhere: in the present, imperfect, and future tenses, as are commands, irregular verbs, gerunds and the past participle. I was skeptical of using a flash card system until recently, but I decided to use Anki (10,000 word shared deck). I think it will be less effective for learning vocabulary than extensive reading, but still will be of quite some use. I'm doing perhaps 100 words a day at the moment. I tried to do some straight listening to audio. I downloaded all seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia. I know, and have cherished, these books since childhood, having read them all many times over and knowing their plots and even some phrases. Unfortunately, I could barely understand it, catching words and phrases here and there that I recognized, but incapable of piecing together what was said, despite knowing the subject very well. I suspect that this is because I refuse to let go of words I don't understand, so I struggle to pull out of deeper memory what the word means while the reader continues. Listening comprehension seems to be much weaker for me than reading comprehension, pronunciation, grammar internalization, and vocabulary acquisition. I have no way whereby I might practice spoken Spanish, so I thought I'd try using Lang-8 to get some advice on written Spanish. I composed a few sentences, trying to be fancy with some more complex verb forms and (ab)using the subjunctive (including future subjunctive), but it turns out all I needed to use was the infinitive in most of those places! I'm not sure I'll try again until I have learned more and have more to talk about. I think a penpal format would be better for that, so I signed up to the Language Exchange Community, but they have all sorts of unfriendly restrictions that impede the sort of informal chat that would be most desirable. If others here know of good ways to chat online with native Castilian speakers who wish to learn English (or Serbo-Croatian), their input would be most appreciated. I will update once I make some more advances (perhaps when I wrap up the Assimil?) and would welcome any questions, advice, tips, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6430 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 18 04 September 2010 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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It might be worth making an English-Spanish parallel text for the Narnia books, given how much you love them. Barring that, get electronic versions of the Spanish texts and a Spanish-English pop-up dictionary.
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| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5264 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 3 of 18 05 September 2010 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Per Volte's advice, I did an extensive Google search and found a free copy of Las Crónicas de Narnia in a great pdf version. I also rooted around a bit and found a great and free language exchange website called Rosetta Stone SharedTalk ( http://www.sharedtalk.com/ ). Now, I know Rosetta Stone is generally hated here, and I agree that the language program itself is not worth it, but this is a great resource. I was able to text chat with two ladies in Spain and did so for nearly 8 hours yesterday. Edited by Merv on 05 September 2010 at 3:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5366 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 4 of 18 09 September 2010 at 2:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Merv: great log. I am just getting to a point where I am starting to think about many of the things you are doing. I am on lesson 70 of Assimil's Spanish With Ease and am trying to think about what to do next. One option is the advanced course, but that seems kind of boring. I was just looking for Narnia audio today and could only find three books. Where did you download all seven? Where did you find the pdf? I checked out the first Narnia book and the first Harry Potter book out of the library to see if I like the stories before I launch into doing them in Spanish. I am not at all a reader of fiction, but have heard so many good things about them I am willing to try.
Also, I am curious if you had any reason for choosing the Reina Valera over some of the more easy to understand bibles. I am reading/listening to the DHH Version and reading the New Life Version and am quite satisfied. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5264 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 5 of 18 10 September 2010 at 4:52am | IP Logged | ||
Hi James, Thanks for the kind comments. I downloaded the audiolibros from here: http://www.filestube.com/search.html? q=cronicas+de+narnia+taringa+tutoriales&select=All I found the pdf here: http://www.google.com/search? hl=en&q=Las+Crónicas+de+Narnia+pdf+%22Había+un+niño+llama do+Eustaquio%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq= & gs_rfai= Paste in the above link. Delete the space between "llama" and "do" (> "llamado") and hit enter. Go to the last link on the Google search page that comes up, and right click to Save As. It should get the whole thing (840-841 pages). If you just directly click on it, only the first page will show up in the browser. If that doesn't work, let me know and I'll try to PM you the pdf itself. I chose the Reina Valera because it is the established version used by most Spanish-speaking Protestants and closely corresponds to the English KJV, which is what I'm used to. Edited by Merv on 10 September 2010 at 4:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5264 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 6 of 18 22 September 2010 at 5:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Update: for now I've dropped the Anki. I just don't find that my memory can fix vocabulary easily that has not
been seen in context. I think I'd prefer to just go with reading lots. I got a little bit off track with the schedule, so I am now on lecture 78 of the Assimil Spanish with ease. I'm appreciating only now just how much grammar has internalized, although some of the rarer vocabulary does tend to evaporate from memory. My daily routine: 1-2 Assimil lessons 1st wave and 1-2 lessons 2nd wave, and one chapter from the Bible. Once I complete the Assimil course, I think I will be ready for some native material. Most likely, I will switch to two chapters daily of the Bible as well as a chapter from the Chronicles series and reading BBC in Spanish. To practice writing, I will correspond by text chat with Spanish speakers over the weekends. I think only after having built up a decent vocabulary base and exercised grammar knowledge through writing, I'll feel comfortable with going on to cinema and live conversation over Skype. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5366 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 7 of 18 25 September 2010 at 2:07am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for the links to the Narnia material. I appreciate it.
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| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5264 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 8 of 18 02 January 2011 at 10:48am | IP Logged | ||
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I haven't written in a while, so I thought I'd post something. Well, as I predicted earlier, I reached lesson 107 of
109 of Assimil and then, owing to preparation for my graduate school qualifying exam, dropped it for more than a month. I started all over again at lesson 1 and rapidly went through it in a few weeks. Today I completed the 1st wave and am on the 2nd wave at lesson 61 of 109. I think Assimil is a really wonderful method. I don't know if just one pass would be enough otherwise, or the fact that I've seen many of the lessons twice and some of them three times makes the difference, but it really has helped me internalize the structure and logic of the language. Tonight I spent maybe 2-3 hours in chat with three different persons. The program is called SharedTalk (by the much maligned (for their language programs, perhaps deservedly so) Rosetta stone). I discussed a variety of topics, including Portuguese, engineering, careers, the EU, politics, etc. All of the language partners said they were very impressed with my progress seeing as how I started Spanish in July 2010. Well, to be correct, I revived a ten-year old moribund relic of foggily-retained irregular verb conjugations from my high school days, and now its actually helping me communicate. An interesting point one of them made was that I cannot rely solely on Bible readings because many of the structures are archaic. Apparently it's not OK to say "lo que fue dicho por..." as a way of expressing the passive voice in colloquial speech! Anyway, I dropped listening to the Chronicles of Narnia (CoN) audio because I didn't find it helpful. I'd prefer to build up a rich vocabulary and fund of language structure through reading and practicing writing on online chat. Once the reading-writing axis is there, I'll work on the listening-speaking axis through movies, radio, and Skype. To be honest, I find that the audiobook idea doesn't really hold my attention, so I won't try it. I think Assimil is sufficient to get a grasp of pronunciation and I notice that the more I listen to it, the more nuances I pick up. The final "s" dropping before initial "r" seemed to be a universal rule until my chat partner told me that it's valid to pronounce the "s". I'm paying more attention to shorter and longer accented vowels (clearly there are no pitch accents, as in Serbian, but I still want it to sound natural). I've noticed the terminal "-os" tends to take a more rounded "o" than when the sound shows up in the middle of the word. The "u" (especially when accented) is more fronted than a Serbian "u" but less than an English "u" as in "you" sound. I need to create a sort of fulcrum in between vowels in words like raíz and país rather than diphthong-izing them as I have done previously. And so on. I've been reading pretty regularly the New Testament in Spanish and am currently on Luke chapter 6. Once I complete the Assimil 2nd wave, I'll start reading the CoN in text form (I ordered the book off of Amazon, it was cheap) to learn more idiomatic expressions and additional vocabulary. One of my chat partners suggested an online website called Instituto Cervantes which has an online library with beginner, intermediate, and advanced literature levels. After I get through CoN, I think I'll go through these online texts going up in level to eventually advanced. So my tentative plan is the following: 1.) Five 2nd wave Assimil lessons along with one chapter of the Bible every day. 2.) Once Assimil is completed, 2 chapters of CoN (highlighting unknown idioms and words and checking them at the end of the reading), with one chapter of the Bible every day. 3.) Once CoN is completed, start reading books off of Instituto Cervantes (or getting the hard copies through my university library) and reading alongside one chapter of the Bible every day. 4.) While reading these books (3), practice chatting every weekend online for several hours. 5.) Once I reach an advanced level with the reading (which will allow vocabulary acquisition and grammar assimilation), switch to watching movies while reading the newspapers and magazines. Hopefully classics of Spanish cinema, Latin American movies, El País, etc. 6.) Finally, practice speaking over Skype. 7.) Next language, God willing: French! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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