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James29’s Spanish Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5376 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 489 of 668 10 August 2014 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, I am continuing with Grisham's El Intermediario. I am on page 196 out of 330-ish. I now understand some of the criticisms. The star gets secretly relocated to Italy and much of the book is about him learning Italian, struggling to order food in restaurants and walking around town with his tutor. I can see why people might get a bit bored by the ongoing nature of this. I, however, kind of enjoy it because I can relate to the language learning and exploring issues he encounters.
I have been reading the ongoing thread about quantifying "understanding" and thought I'd do a little experiment. For the last 5.5 pages I read I marked words I did not know. This part of the story has the star walking around town with his Italian tutor. I immediately noticed that determining if I "knew" the word was actually a difficult task. There are numerous words I'd never use in active speaking, but I can clearly recognize and understand them. There were a lot of these words and I only marked the first few... esculpida, Obispo, embellecimiento. When I see these words in reading at first I have to think, then I say "duh, I know that" or "duh, that seems obvious after I think for a second." But even in these three words, I'd say I probably "know" Obispo. If someone asked me how to say "bishop" I'd certainly remember. Moving on, I marked anular, matanzas, despejado, estribaciones, abrasarse, arcadas, porticado, pantorrillas, aminorar, gremio, soberbia and sendero as words I did not know and needed the English translation. With these words, I am certainly able to use other words for the same thing when speaking. I note a curious thing with the unknown vocabulary. It seems to come in spurts where there will be a paragraph with three-ish unknown words and then a page or two with no unknown words. Interesting how that works. anyway, there are also some other short phrases they use, often when speaking, that I need to double check the English. They don't use tricky words, but, rather, constructions that I don't quite grasp. For example, they used "que va" for "of course not." I don't recall ever seeing that used like that. I'd say this sort of thing screws me up more than the vocabulary. I also note that I barely use the English anymore compared to the beginning of the book. With many of the unknown vocabulary words above I could safely skip them and not really miss much about the book. This book is definitely helping a lot with my vocabulary, confidence, reading, etc. I'll keep reading for a while. I'd like to track down some more parallel texts for similar type books. I have 100 Years in Solitude in parallel text, but I don't think I am ready for that yet. We'll see. Maybe I'll do it next. In terms of other Spanish this week, I listen to the full episode of Desde Washington on VOA Noticias every work morning. I like it. I note, that one cool feature is that when someone is speaking in English and being translated (quite often) they play a decent amount of the English before starting the translation. It is cool and very useful to see how they translate things. I watched a few episodes of Caso Cerrado... maybe 5 or so. I actually watched full shows instead of just one segment. I really prefer the youtube versions. Also, for anyone else who watches this show... if you are like me and the recent wild and crazy episodes are too much to handle, I suggest going back a few years and watching shows from 5-6 years ago. They are much more tame and "realistic." They don't have women secretly breast feeding their pet Chihuahuas like I recently watched. I have done some Skype text chats, but not much. My language exchanges seem to have been lacking lately due to crazy work schedule and simply being busy with other things in the summer. I'm probably not the best language partner considering that I am somewhat demanding as to when I can talk. I still often go to my Mexican restaurant and chat with the staff quite a bit. I got some great compliments from some of the guys about my Spanish. I had dinner at the Mexican restaurant with an acquaintance who has been living in Argentina for about six months (this might have been last week). We spoke in Spanish quite a bit and it became clear that my Spanish was superior. I don't ordinarily like to compare my Spanish skills to other people, but he brought up the subject and we had a fairly detailed discussion about it. Anyway, that really surprised me. This guy has been living in BBAA for six months and using Spanish every day... and he is a really bright/smart motivated guy. He pretty much got the basics down pretty solid and then learned through constant use/immersion. His grammar was lacking and he commented several times on how he was very impressed with my "perfect" grammar in the sense that I always used the subjunctive correctly and verb tenses/conjugations. Obviously my grammar is not "perfect". I have been reading about demographic shifts and how much the Spanish speaking population of our country is shifting toward Spanish speakers. I find it quite incredible. Spanish speakers really need my type of business and I am always shocked how few businesses like mine in my general area focus on pursuing the business. It seems so basic and obvious to me. In fact, it is kind of scary because it does not seem like it would be that hard to so if a business simply hired one employee who spoke Spanish it would be easy. I don't have the luxury to hire someone new right now so I cannot do that... and my Spanish is not at a level where I feel like I could take on a ton of work for Spanish speakers. There is also no way I could personally do all the work for more than a few Spanish customers at a time. If I am serious I need to have someone else who can do the day to day work for the customers. My hope is to grow the business a bit and then when I need to hire someone new be sure to hire a native speaker. Then, I'll be off to the races pursuing Spanish speaking customers. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5023 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 490 of 668 13 August 2014 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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James, I think it is interesting what you said about your friend living in Argentina for 6 months. I had the same experience several times when I was in South America- that people who had been existing in the language for months just couldn't talk quite as well. The only difference I could identify is that I had worked through all of the good courses, and they hadn't. In particular I think having put in the hard work with FSI is what really made the difference.
It seems that a bit of hard work doing FSI drills is easily worth, say, 6 months or so in country. What do you think? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5376 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 491 of 668 14 August 2014 at 2:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, it is indeed interesting. In fact, it was not the first time I experienced this. At a meetup I distinctly remember a woman coming immediately after she spent six months in Spain and I still remember being so surprised at the low level of her Spanish.
My theory is very similar to what you are suggesting about FSI. I think a good solid base (like FSI) really makes a difference in how fast you advance in the higher levels. I think of it as the bookshelf that you later fill with the advanced knowledge/books. From reading so many logs and posts by people who have native speaking spouses, I have come to the conclusion that merely being "immersed" does not really make too much of a difference if you do not "study" hard and really figure out how the language works. Depending on the "immersion" I'd say that thoroughly working through FSI is going to be a lot more valuable than floundering around in an "immersion" environment. I remember when I was in the Dominican I got to know a young American guy and we talked about this. He had no experience with Spanish and was asking for advice. he was going to be there for a year and wanted to advance as fast as possible in the language. I was working through FSI for the first time at that time. I remember thinking (and still believe) that the ideal situation would be to be immersed AND study the language for a few hours ever day. I could see someone advancing super fast if they went to a country where they could spend every day like this: One hour of Assimil, eat breakfast or break, one hour of FSI, take bus or walk to class, three/four hour with a tutor at Spanish school, rest of the day living in the country. This could be done very cheaply. Anyway, I agree with you dbag. Good old fashioned studying with efficient resources is the best way to advance at the early stages of study. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 492 of 668 14 August 2014 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with the point about studying and immersion: at meetups I've met more than my share of people who've spent months, years, or even in a couple of extreme examples, a decade or two in the country who have fairly unimpressive levels considering the time. I'm sure a combination of both would be powerful, but as we all know here by now, immersion in itself isn't magical.
Anyway I've been meaning to ask you about FSI Spanish, since I know you're a fan of it. I'm wondering if it might help speed up development of my active skills. In Italian I work on my active skills mostly just through lots of conversations and some Anki work, and it works but I don't think it's been very efficient. In particular, it's taken a couple of years to get things like verbs and gender and number agreement with the article/noun/adjective consistently correct, and even at that I still make mistakes, plus my speaking still doesn't feel very automatic a lot of the time. I'm not one of these people who can develop good active skills just from lots of input. So I'm wondering if FSI and its drills might help speed up the process for Spanish. What are your thoughts? I wasn't keen on FSI French as the language in it seems a bit old-fashioned, and the Italian one by all accounts is awful, but I hear great things about Spanish. I'm also wondering if it might be overkill considering my knowledge of similar languages and general language learning experience; maybe it would be better to just pick and choose lessons that I feel would help me rather than working through the whole thing. Edited by garyb on 14 August 2014 at 5:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5376 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 493 of 668 14 August 2014 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think the Spanish course is great and would be wonderful for you to do. I am not clear what level you are at, but I think it would be useful at a fairly high level... certainly for activating things.
Now, to actually address your question... FSI is great for drilling in grammar and making it automatic... even the stuff that does not become automatic, it will make it come into your mind with a little bit of thinking. I do note, however (and I don't think I have ever said this), that it does not make full sentences and regular conversations come automatically. It drills clauses, phrases, etc, and those things will come out quite nicely. When you need a short question or a short answer or conjugate something with pronouns, etc you will do great after FSI. But I found that when I was in a real conversation that I still struggled with full sentences coming automatically. The only thing that helped with that was just talking and talking, etc. FSI will make the shorter things come out well and I highly recommend it. The cool thing with FSI is that you can just turn on the audio and go... give it a try. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 494 of 668 14 August 2014 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the answer, it does sound very useful to me. I wasn't expecting miracles in terms of conversation but if it helps make all the little grammatical building blocks more automatic then that's great. I should have mentioned my level: I'd say advanced beginner or low-intermediate, my passive skills are decent but I'm not great at speaking yet, mostly as I just haven't done a whole lot of practice yet. It's not my "priority" language so I'm taking it slowly and mostly focusing on passive skills right now, but I'll want to do more active work sooner or later, hence asking the question.
I might also seek out something similar for Italian... Even though my level's quite high, as I say I still make far more relatively basic mistakes with verbs/pronouns etc. than I'd like when I speak, so it would be good to make it more automatic. EDIT: Was also meaning to ask, is it the "Basic" course or the "Programmatic" one? Edited by garyb on 14 August 2014 at 6:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5376 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 495 of 668 14 August 2014 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Definitely the "Basic" course. It will be perfect for what you need. And, I think you are at a great level to do it. I think it would be a tough long haul for a beginner. Being at an intermediate level is perfect! Feel free to post additional questions.
3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BOLIO Senior Member United States Joined 4659 days ago 253 posts - 366 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 496 of 668 15 August 2014 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | ||
That is me. I thought being around my wife's family would help me. Nope. And the truth of the matter is that after learning some on my own, I have zero desire to speak the kind of Spanish they speak anyway. Their speaking habits are very informal and would not work very well in a business environment which is what I am shooting towards. My wife has a higher level of speech than her family only because she uses it at work in a professional setting. However, getting her to "Immerse" our family in Spanish at home has proven much harder than Assimil, FSI or any other course you have ever heard of. Yesterday for example, every question I asked her for the entire day was in Spanish. Every answer she gave me was in English. Finally after the 5th set of questions, I asked her why she was answering me in English. She had no idea that the conversations were consisting of two languages. No clue. Her auto-response to me is always English. It is sad really. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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