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Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 73 of 120 03 August 2009 at 9:13pm | IP Logged |
Spanish:
Not much. I've been trying to review FSI at least once every day, but it's pretty hard. I haven't been able to find work since I arrived here in Arizona (almost three months ago) and have been spending pretty much all day the past week looking for work. I might just head back to the east coast. Kinda bummed out, but I suppose what can you do? Anyway, I'm on Unit 51 in FSI (so close to finishing it too!) and will probably be here a while until I can find work. Oh, and of course I didn't finish my 500-word in a month goal. Still sitting at 2870 in the deck, and really I feel like I'm forgetting more than I am remembering. I need to either find a new way to input cards or just give it up altogether and spend that time L-Ríng or something else that will help me maintain a larger vocabulary.
French:
I haven't really moved anywhere with French either in the last week, right now I'm on lesson 75 of Assimil.
German:
I've stopped German for now. I just don't have the time or motivation to do it (I probably have the time, I'm just too stressed out).
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While looking/waiting for work, I've had several opportunities to finally use Spanish (a couple to even use French!) and so that has been pretty exciting. I realize now just how far from fluency (in Spanish) I am, but I do think it would be safe to say that I am "conversational", in that I can have basic conversations on a broad variety of topics, but can't really discuss any of them in detail (I was stumped trying to explain "rhyming" to someone). But mostly, the past week or so has been frustrating and demotivating.
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| ExtraLean Triglot Senior Member France languagelearners.myf Joined 5998 days ago 897 posts - 880 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German
| Message 74 of 120 03 August 2009 at 9:32pm | IP Logged |
Hey Crush,
good to see you still carrying on despite the difficulty. Your journey with German reflects mine rather well so I don't feel so bad about it now. Not too many lessons of assimil French to go, trust me just plough through it, the feeling of compeleting the first wave is nice.
Thom.
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 75 of 120 13 August 2009 at 2:25am | IP Logged |
Well I just moved back to Virginia so hopefully this means back in shape with language studies. Travelling back here I went through every Assimil Francés lesson (including ones I haven't officially done) and read through a French grammar book I'd picked up a while back but which I'd only read the first couple chapters. In Spanish I've been doing lots of conversations online and a few on Skype. I've also been listening to some audiobooks from librivox.org quite a bit. I spoke with a kid from Haiti who was studying in Chile, and he told me my French sucked but my Spanish is pretty good :) Most of my time has been going into trying to make some authentic parallel texts, but it is taking a LONG time. I finally finished the English portion of it, which took about 15 hours to do. I'm a few chapters into the Spanish book and hopefully I should have it done within a few days. If anyone's interested in it PM me. Haven't really touched FSI since the start of August, who knows if I'll finish it. I'm kinda interested in trying out other methods of studying now, though I'd like to go through the FSI unit on the vosotros forms (recognizing them in reading is no issue, but in the spoken language and when trying to use them myself I just don't know them).
There's my one huge jumbled paragraph update for today, good luck everyone and keep pounding away!
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 76 of 120 14 August 2009 at 4:57am | IP Logged |
Haven't really done much lately, mostly just working on finishing up this parallel text. I've only got a few paragraphs to go, if anyone is interested in it (Spanish-English) PM me :) I think I've figured a more accurate way to scan the text in, so hopefully future texts that I make will have fewer spelling mistakes and stuff.
Also, I've been lining them up paragraph by paragraph, but one of the other books I have which I'd like to L-R has huge paragraphs (a paragraph might last several pages). I suppose I'll just break up the paragraphs into smaller parts, but I'm curious how others break up the book's text when making a parallel text?
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 77 of 120 15 August 2009 at 2:28am | IP Logged |
Today I did about 4 straight hours L-Ring (the first 7 chapters), though as strange as it seems for me to say this, the book I'm using is probably too easy for what I'm trying to do. I have Cien años de soledad as well which I'd like to read through. Now I'm going to take a nap (my brain is really tired) and try to do some more L-R a little later.
EDIT: Ok, I just finished another 5 and a half hours of L-R (aka finished the book). Today I looked at the English side, which is really difficult, or rather really confusing. In the end it seemed to be a bit easier, but I think tomorrow I'm just going to read the Spanish and look over at the English when I'm unsure of a word or a phrase. There weren't really that many new words, most of the words I didn't know were variations of "so-and-so said": he whined, she growled, they stuttered, they gasped, etc. I'm going to try to find a book that has more new words for me (I have a feeling Cien años de soledad will be good for me, also I never finished Dos damas muy serias, which if I can find the audiolibro for would be good too).
Buenas noches a todos!
Edited by Crush on 15 August 2009 at 9:10am
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 78 of 120 19 August 2009 at 6:49pm | IP Logged |
I've gone through the book again over the course of two days (half one day the other half the following) but since then I haven't had large chunks of time to dedicate to L-Ring, so yesterday I went back to FSI. I'd really like to try this (L-R) with French, where my vocabulary is much smaller...
I've found myself a lot busier lately and so I think I'm going to have to drop down to 100% Spanish again (no French/German). So much for TAC goals, right? We'll see. If life weren't constantly changing maybe I'd be a little closer to my goals, but then if life weren't constantly changing I'd have no need nor the desire to reach them anyway.
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 79 of 120 24 August 2009 at 12:02am | IP Logged |
I L-Red my book once more, doing about 6 hours yesterday and the final few chapters today. I'm going to try to set up a new parallel text for Cien años de soledad, and maybe do a little L-Ring with one of the French parallel texts I downloaded yesterday from a link on this site... Ah from here. I was able to find the audio for most of those books pretty easily, though I haven't checked the "quality".
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 80 of 120 27 August 2009 at 5:39am | IP Logged |
And now, the moment you have all been waiting for this past month:
Unit 51 is DONE and 52 STARTED! And for those of you not in the know, Unit 52 is a massive unit, I'm not sure how long maybe an hour and a half? The dialog itself is about 45 minutes, so I will be breaking this unit up. One day reviewing the dialog twice, the next the drills twice. Then going back and forth until I have it all under my belt.
Oh, and I did Leçon 78 in Assimil today. I think ExtraLean's suggestion of finishing the passive phase is good advice. I really don't have the time (or something) to fit in both parts right now (30 minutes passive 30 minutes active). French has been dragging its heavy little feet for so long now. I really don't feel like I've made any progress. I can read it pretty well but writing or speaking it just seems impossible. I think this mostly has to do with Spanish and how desperate I've been, trying to activate what I know and get to where I can say "Yes, I speak Spanish." Not there, yet.
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