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| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5376 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 569 of 668 07 December 2014 at 2:40pm | IP Logged |
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I finished "The Giver" in Spanish yesterday. I bought it a while back on a whim simply because there was the movie out. After I bought I quickly thought I'd just let it sit on my bookshelf, but now I am so glad I read it. I enjoyed it. It was a very interesting read (a bit odd and the ending will certainly strike many people as not satisfying). I am surprised it is used for teaching to young kids as many of the things that happen seem like they would be tough for kids to stomach.
Anyway, I'd say it was perfect reading level for me and roughly on par with Theodore Boone. There were occasionally new words but I almost always just skipped them as to not interfere with the flow of my reading. I think I only looked up two or three words in the whole book. I did notice that the translation did seem very much like Spain Spanish. I've also been working through the grammar book at one exercise every morning I'm in the office which works out to roughly four times a week when I take out holidays and days I travel straight from home. It has suddenly gotten a bit more difficult. The lessons are taking a bit longer. I am not learning anything new, but I'm noticing some bad habits I have and need to fix them. For example, I'd use "que" often in comparisons when I should be using "como." It's going to take a while to get through this book, but it is definitely worth it. It is a level where I am learning but it is not hard or exhausting. I've also been watching episodes of the Simpsons. I'm working my way through the eighth season. Meetup this week was cool. I sat with a new couple from Spain and had some nice talks with them. I'm thinking about my goals for 2015. Finishing the grammar book will definitely be on the list. I'd also like to read a number of books. Getting my reading up to a point where I can comfortably read adult books would be amazing. I'd love to pick up a Grisham book or something like the DaVinci Code and read it as easily as I'm reading these young adult novels. I'm going to not focus as much on watching TV simply due to the fact that I spend too much time already behind a computer. I listen to the VOA news so I do get a decent amount of listening in each week. 2 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 570 of 668 14 December 2014 at 1:39pm | IP Logged |
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I started reading Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express and I cannot put it down. I'm more than half way through it now. It feels almost like an "aha moment." I'm reading a real adult book and I don't really have many problems. It feels basically as easy as the Alex Rider books. My reading is probably improving quite a bit so maybe it is not that easy. Anyway, I love it because this is the only type of novel I have ever really liked to read... mysteries/thrillers/suspense/etc. As I'm reading this I just keep telling myself that if I can just get my Spanish up to a slightly better level where I can read Grisham novels this easily I'll be set! Now that seems within reach. The only downside is that I noted the text I have of the Agatha Christie book is different from the free audio book that is available on youtube. I was going to listen to the first several chapters.
Reading this book is a great example of how reading something interesting really makes a HUGE difference. When I was reading Harry Potter it really seemed like a chore. I'd just read my chapter or two in the morning and that was it. I'd then set it down and not look at it until the next day. With this book, however, I put it in my pocket and often say to myself, "the chapters are short and I have a few minutes right now... I'll read for ten minutes." I also have been reading a bit in the evenings. I still have a large stack of young adult books I have already bought. I'll probably still read them with the exception of the fourth Harry Potter book. I also would like to read the remaining two Hunger Games book. I liked those. So, I figure between three Alex Rider books, two Hunger Games books, one Theodore Boone book and several Agatha Christie books I can get I'll be set with "easy reading" for a while. As Stelle has pointed out, reading "easy" stuff seems critically important. I am really seeing that now. Anyway, I'm still doing the VOA news every morning. I'm trying to finish the eighth season of the Simpsons before the end of the year, but not sure if I'll get it done as I seem to prefer reading now. I did watch a few episodes of the Simpsons. I did a meetup, but it was not really that great. I was exhausted from work and left early. I'm still working through the Gramatica de Uso del Espanol B1/B2 workbook. This week it was possibly too easy. I really did not get anything wrong. Sometimes I'd read the grammar page and really feel like just skipping forward to the exercises. It is covering stuff that I probably should go over, but I really hope it gets into more challenging stuff fairly soon. It has been going over when to use words like otro/otro de, aquel, ese, mi/mio... stuff like that. It is kind of nice because they highlight some fairly fine distinctions that I know intuitively but have never really thought about. I'm realizing my trip to Mexico is getting pretty close. I just ordered another Agatha Christie book to take with me on that trip. I'm hoping it is the same size as the one I have so it is small enough to just put in my pocket. I like to travel super light. I also need to come up with a plan. I still don't have a clue what I am going to do for the week after my conference ends. I've been thinking about goals for 2015. On the reading side of things I've been thinking of setting out a goal to read novels that total 1,000,000 words. By my calculations that should be do-able. I like the idea of saying I'll read 12 novels or something like that, but I don't want to give myself an incentive to read short novels. I also want to have flexibility. I'd like to have objective/measurable goals that are not too specific. For example, I don't want to set out exactly what books I'll read because my tastes could change quickly. I'm also thinking of setting out a goal to do some things in Spanish that may eventually help me learning French. For example, I'm thinking of just reading through all of the Spanish translations in the Assimil French book. I figure it is reading in Spanish and should be somewhat interesting so why not do it. Eventually if/when I do the French Assimil I'll have already read the translations a few times. I'm also thinking of watching the Extr@ TV series in Spanish for the same reasons. That may be a good program to watch if I ever learn French. Unfortunately, it does seem like a very basic/low level Spanish that won't be too challenging. 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 571 of 668 20 December 2014 at 6:31pm | IP Logged |
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Well, I just finished Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. The book was good and certainly kept me turning the pages. It was fairly easy for me to read and I rarely looked up words. If I encountered an unknown word I'd usually just skip it. If anyone is looking for a good "easy" series for adults to start reading in Spanish this would be a great option.
I feel like my reading ability is skyrocketing right now. I am all of a sudden hitting a new level. I'm tempted to move on to just adult books now, but think I'll read some more young adult books. I was so excited I bought a bunch more books. I really need to stop buying so many books before I need them. My bookshelf is overflowing. I'm still doing one lesson every work morning of the Gramatica de Uso del Espanol. It is starting to get a bit tougher. Yesterday the lesson was on the use of le/lo/la with direct v indirect objects. This was something I needed work on. For the most part I did fine, but it was really helpful to work through the exercises and think about the various usages. The book is great and it will certainly help with my grammar... but, it is going to take a long time to get through it. It is really a ton of work. I love the way it is set up because I can do a lesson in roughly 20 minutes so timing-wise it is perfect. I just hope I don't get sick of it before I finish. I'm still listening to voa noticias every morning on the way to work. I'm going to a meetup every week. I don't really have time to do Skype talks anymore so the only real talking I get to do on a regular basis is at the meetup groups. The cashier at the local Dunkin Donuts had an obvious Spanish accent so I spoke to her in Spanish. She was very surprised. It was a good day for my Spanish too so we had a nice short talk while I waited for my food. That was pretty cool. I really felt like I was just speaking in Spanish with her because we could both speak the language and not just for my practice or because "I'm studying Spanish." I'm not sure what I'll do next. Probably another Alex Rider. 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 572 of 668 28 December 2014 at 3:07pm | IP Logged |
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I'm still chugging along with my Spanish. A little bit every day is how I operate. Progress is slow, but it is there.
Since my last post I've read 14 of the 17 chapters in the third Alex Rider book. I'm enjoying this book more than the second. It takes place in Cuba. There is a former Russian Cold War General who lives in Russia and gets a hold of a nuclear bomb. Alex works with the CIA to go down and infiltrate his compound. It is neat because it takes place in Cuba. Anyway, I'll finish it very soon. I'm amazed how fast I am reading this book. It is not a small book with 302 pages and I'm going to finish it in barely more than a week. I'm only reading two chapters a day. Anyway, it is a great series. I note something I find very interesting about the Alex Rider series. I am reading this one immediately after the Agatha Christie book and it is noticeably harder to read than Agatha Christie. It is still a fairly easy read and I am only looking up about one word chapter, but I find it quite interesting that book for teenagers is harder for me to read than the Christie book for adults. It really makes me want to move on to adult books. The other thing I am realizing is that at a pace of a book every week and a half I'm going to go through this type of book really fast. I'll finish off what I have in terms of books for teenagers and then I'll move on to adult books... even if the adult books are "easy" like Agatha Christie. For my active work with Spanish I'm doing the grammar book. I'm somewhere just over lesson 30 (out of 116). People talk about needing a tutor to correct you in order to get to high levels in a language... I'm not so sure that's totally necessary. Working with a resource like this seems to be very efficient and thorough... and much cheaper. I'm only doing the grammar lessons when I go to my office in the morning so I've been doing fewer lessons during the holidays and I'll also skip them when I travel to Mexico. I'll then get back on pace after Mexico. I feel like a broken record. I just do the same thing every week with the exception of which novel I'm reading. I, of course, am listening to the VOA news every morning on my way to work. It's a great habit and it is getting to be very easy to understand. I chuckle whenever I hear President Maduro speak. I wonder if he sounds nutty to native speakers. The way he enunciates everything when he talks about the US being imperialists just sounds strange. It sounds like he is on Saturday Night Live or something. I had a couple good short skype talks with new language partners because I had a bit more free time. I have not been doing many skype talks lately and need to get this going again. No meetups this week, but I did have a nice long talk with someone who owns a "Spanish for Business Owners and Executives" type business. It was quite interesting. She was an American but obviously spoke Spanish at a very high level. In our talk my Spanish was very good. I even impressed myself. It was a cool talk and I got a lot of good ideas about things to do with Spanish. My family bought me a kindle for Christmas so now I have a new language learning toy. I have resisted buying a kindle because I just did not see the major benefit of it. The books I buy off Amazon are usually in the $4-5 range total so I could not see the point of buying a kindle and then buying kindle books for $5-6. Anyway, I have been searching and there are some good deals on kindle and also some books that are simply not available in el cheapo paperback. I'm also excited to use the pop up dictionary that people talk about. Hopefully I'll be able to figure it out. I've had a little bit of time to think about my trip to Mexico. I cannot believe it is only a week and a half away!! I still don't really know what I am going to do. I'll be in Cabo for four days and then in Mexico City for a week. I'll be working pretty hard for the work conference in Cabo, but I plan to take a lot of day trips to some of the outlying areas when I'm in Mexico City. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4252 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 573 of 668 29 December 2014 at 6:30am | IP Logged |
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Hope you like your Kindle! I joined a Facebook group, Libros Gratis Kindle, that has free Kindle books. Many of them are public domain books, but there are some that are new as well, just like some of the free Kindle book groups in English.
Enjoy your time in Mexico. Edited by Lorren on 29 December 2014 at 6:30am 2 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 574 of 668 30 December 2014 at 2:40pm | IP Logged |
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It seems like Kindle could be dangerous. I already buy too many things on Amazon. Now it will be instant! Finding free books will be great if I can find something interesting. I've already been searching for good cheap Spanish books on Kindle. The Agatha Christie books are mostly about $2.50 each which seems good.
I finished the third Alex Rider book today. I liked it. It was well done. I now feel like I am done with Spanish for the year and I'm going to spell out my goals for 2015. I'll do that in the next post. 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 575 of 668 30 December 2014 at 3:03pm | IP Logged |
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After much thinking I have decided on my Spanish goals for 2015. They are as follows.
1. Finish Gramatica de Uso del Espanol B1/B2. 2. Read novels totaling 1,000,000 words. 3. Listen to Spanish every morning on the way to work. 4. Watch any 100 30 minute TV episodes. 5. Write 12 letters or memos for correction. 6. Read the Spanish side of Assimil's New French With Ease (Spanish Base). Discussion: I thought long and hard about these goals for 2015 and I think they are good goals and very "do-able." Regarding finishing the grammar book... This is helpful to consolidate grammar and do a bit of active studying a few times a week. The only concern I really have with this is that I find this book a bit too easy at times and I hope I don't dread this as being just a waste of time review of grammar I already know. I am already on lesson 32 out of 116 and the lessons have been quite easy. They are useful, but easy. I keep thinking they will get more challenging. I think they will. Anyway, I do like this book and I'm looking forward to finishing it up, hopefully, before the middle of the year. At about four lessons a week I should be able to do that. Each lesson seems to take me about 20-30 minutes depending on difficulty and how many mistakes I make in the exercises. Regarding reading 1,000,000 words... I really struggled to define my reading goal. I, of course, thought about setting a goal of number of books (like this year) or total pages like many people do. I ended up deciding to do total words. I want to have a maximum amount of freedom in choosing what I read. Some books are radically different in the amount of words on each page and/or total words in the book. Counting the words seems like the most logical thing to do. I think it is also a very reasonable goal too. I did some random counting and determined that I really should be able to do this. It will be a challenge, but a good challenge. Regarding listening to Spanish every morning on the way to work... this is something I am doing now without a problem and it has turned into a great habit. I just listen to the VOA news every morning. I just want to keep this habit going and make a comment every week when I do my log update. This does not feel like work to me and it is something I would do in English every day. I had a real hard time finding something that worked for my morning commute and this works. I figure if I listen to the news (or something else) for 20 minutes a morning five mornings a week for a year my listening skills will get even better. That's what I really need. As an aside, I might switch to listen to something else if I can find something good. I have the "La Tremenda Corte" episodes in mind for this, but I think they might be too challenging for me right now. Regarding watching 100 30 minute TV episodes... this is basically "watch four more seasons of the Simpsons" but giving me the freedom to change my mind and watch something else if I want to. This should be easy. Although, lately I have not had time at all to watch Spanish in the evenings like I used to so I'll have to find ways to squeeze this in. Maybe I'll try watching Chavo this year too. Who knows. I may also mix in Caso Cerrado episodes as I think they are great for learning Spanish. Regarding writing 12 letters or memos for correction... I have totally and completely ignored my writing. It is time to pay a little attention to it. I don't want to do something too challenging, but I think this is good. I do need to write letters and memos for customers at work and eventually if I do more work with Spanish speakers I may need to write to them via email or letter, etc. I'll probably just write some short letters in Spanish to imaginary customers and put them up on italki requesting input. They can be very short and I am not holding myself to any requirements other than to just do it. I am sick of feeling embarrassed to write Spanish in any setting other than informal skype texting. Regarding reading Assimil French in Spanish... I don't want to make any formal goals for French yet because I don't want to take away from my Spanish time. I figured this is something I can do that will eventually help me with French somewhat, but will be spent entirely in Spanish. Each year I also like to have what I call a "beach book" that I just take with me in my car wherever I go and read it when I have a few extra minutes. This will be good for that. I have no illusions of learning French from reading the Spanish side of the book, but hopefully it will get me a bit more interested in pursuing that other goal. I think it should be fun too. So, that's it. Goals for 2015 are now set in stone. Edited by James29 on 30 December 2014 at 3:12pm 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 576 of 668 04 January 2015 at 2:01pm | IP Logged |
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Well, this has been a bit of a different week. I'm not reading a book right now. I've decided to take an Agatha Christie book with me to Mexico and read it on the plane, etc so I'm waiting for my trip before I get started. Also, with the holidays VOA has not been playing the news as much and I've been home a few extra days in the morning instead of the office. I've also been a bit under the weather.
Anyway, I have been doing a lot of Spanish. I got a couple more lessons done in the Grammar book. My gut tells me this is going to continue to be pretty easy for me... but worth it at the same time. Most of the lessons are a good review and really solidify the natural instinct I have. Every now and then, maybe every five lessons or so, there is a lesson with some little stuff that I always ignore and really need to get fixed. For example, this week there was a lesson on the specific cases on when and when not to use cual/que/quien. It is something I usually get right through instinct, but I have never felt confident with it. I've also been watching La Corte del Pueblo. I like the show but could never find a good place to watch it because all the episodes on youtube are of such low audio quality. There is a blog that seems to have tons of shows with quite acceptable quality. lacortedelpueblo.blogspot.com The show is just much more realistic than Caso Cerrado. The judge, however, is brutal. It almost makes me uncomfortable how rude he is to many of the people. The episodes/cases range from 5-25 minutes with most of them being in the 10 minute range so it is quite easy to bang out cases. In fact it is quite addicting to just keep saying... oh, I'll just watch one more. I'm guessing I've watched 20-ish episodes over the past week and there was only one I did not really understand (it was about two transvestites that worked together in a show and one sold the other one a herb to make his/her breasts grow but the herb did not work). No meetups this week, but I did get invited out to dinner by some folks from Peru and Chile. We were chatting for a full hour and a half in Spanish and it felt totally natural for everyone. I was a big part of the conversation and thinking back I'd say I was more involved in the conversations than anyone else as much of the focus was on my business and my Spanish group. This was a dinner I'll remember for a long time because I really felt like I was just part of the group and not an outsider who had some difficulty with the language. I watched a few episodes of the Simpsons this week too. I'm almost done with season 8. I'll stop for a while when I finish the season. I did have a short skype talk and texts but these are just difficult for me to organize into my day. I think all the time I spent on reading over the last year has made a huge difference in my listening/understanding. My vocabulary is going up quite a bit and my brain seems to get used to processing the language fast. When I hear things on the radio or TV my brain is able to process them and think better in Spanish. Reading a lot has been wonderful and I'm going to press on with it for another good year. I do, however, think it is critical for me to have some listening/watching mixed in because the spoken language is so very much different than books. In a strange way I'm not as excited to go to Mexico as I was to go to the Dominican, Ecuador and Spain. With those previous trips I decided where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. With this trip to Mexico I've got to go for business and I'm just going where the conference is. After the conference I'll take a week in Mexico City after the conference for my Spanish journey, but it does not seem the same. I really need a vacation and this conference will be great, but it won't be vacation or relaxing. In a way I feel like this is being forced on me (yeah, I'm on my soapbox complaining about something that I really should not complain about)... Cabo San Lucas was nowhere on my list of places to go for Spanish. In fact, Mexico City wasn't really on my list either. I'm not really a big city person so I hope the week in the City goes well. Hopefully I'll be able to make the most of it. There is a guy from my meetup group that lives in the City and we will get together for dinner at least once so that should be nice. I'm also planning to go to the pyramids for a day. Hopefully I'll be able to figure that out. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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