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Lucas’s 3WC -Finish box of cards by Nov 5 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6201 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 18 10 October 2007 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Lucas's 3WC - 1st 500 - Starting Date: October 10th, 2007
I've got a box of 500 flashcards. They are, in theory, the 500 most-used Spanish words (as said by FlashCardCo.com). In going from the Spanish side (target language) to the English side (native language), I've got about 70% of them learned, and going from the English side to the Spanish side, I've got about 35% of them learned. My birthday is November 5th. Roughly three weeks away. Here's my official goal: Be able to translate in, either direction, all the cards by November 5th. The prize: I will buy myself a Spanish audio book with a hold-in-your-hand Spanish text to go with it. And a new box of flashcards. I will try to do regular updates to this learning log, and at minimum, work on my flash cards every day. Thus begins Lucas's Three Week Challenge! (3WC) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6201 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 18 10 October 2007 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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This one is just to set some minor goals. If I don't hit them just right, it's okay, but they're the plan.
Currently, I need about 150 more in the Spanish to English side and 325 to learn English to Spanish, so a total of 475 in one direction or another. So... subgoals... 128 per week for three weeks, five days. Date: Wednesday, October 17th Goal: 347 Left Date: Wednesday, October 24th Goal: 219 Left Date: Wednesday, October 31st Goal: 91 Left 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6201 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 18 11 October 2007 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Día dos de veintiséis (Octubre Once, dos mil siete <- is that the correct way to write the year?)
I'm only doing the counting cards on the sub-goal days, but I think today went very well. I spent an hour straight on the cards, as well as two or three short sessions where I could fit them in (before work, right after work, while waiting for my parents to come over -- I had them over for supper tonight). I'm finding that I learn more by switching between the computer flash cards and the paper ones. Like, the combination does better than either one separate, but using the paper flashcard words typed into the computer. Today, it was the computer. Time to watch a movie in Spanish and them go to bed. [EDIT: I decided to go against what I just typed and spend a half hour -- two hours total for the day, now -- running through the whole box Spanish-to-English, seeing how many I still didn´t know, and I´m down to 62. I expect the English-to-Spanish will take lots of time, so I´m not counting chickens, but it´s encouraging. By the way, the 150 number given earlier was just an estimate, but it´s still exciting!!!!!) Edited by Principiante on 11 October 2007 at 8:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6958 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 18 12 October 2007 at 6:35am | IP Logged | ||
The year is fine, but perhaps the date should be "once de octubre". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6201 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 5 of 18 12 October 2007 at 6:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Día tres de veintiséis (doce de octubre, dos mil siete)
Short post before work: listened to an hour of BBC Mundo Live and did 20 minutes of flash cards. [Still same day, with more] So I just found myself thinking that I had just wasted the evening without doing my Spanish, until I looked back to what I had spent my time doing... turns out I´ve been doing Spanish music research and found my new favorite song (or at least one I really really like). It´s called ¨Bendita Tu Luz¨ by Maná and Juan Luis Guerra. But yeah, so even though I wasn´t flash-carding, it turns out that I at least deviate towards Spanish stuff, even when I´m not trying to :-) But yeah, time to go do those flashcards that I am supposed to do. Edited by Principiante on 12 October 2007 at 8:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6201 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 18 13 October 2007 at 7:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Día cuatro de veintiséis (trece de octubre, dos mil siete)
Another pre-work post: I did about 20 minutes of computer flash cards today. This should be a day I´ll get a lot done after work, because I´ve got a short work day (5 hours). I was thinking of making the final goal day be closer, because I´m making faster progress than I was expecting, but I keep not getting the gender right, and I don´t necissarily know how to spell everything -- like, I say the word correctly, but not be able to spell it. So, on that note, the goal day is still set at Nov. 5th, but the challenge will now include gender and being able to write out all the words instead of just saying them. [Continuing the pattern of editing today´s instead of making a new one] Well, I didn´t have as much time as I thought I would. About 15-20 minutes doing flashcard review on the computer, and then running through the whole box of paper flashcards for review, Spanish-to-English, one time through. This time (and all times from now), when I say I have this many left, it means that I have that many that I didn´t have to think on. Yesterday, if I was close on a word, I counted it, but strict from here out. Anyway, I have 82 left Spanish to English, and I haven´t tested the other direction. I´m hoping to be pleasantly-suprized, but you never know, eh? ----------- Okay, so I just tested English to Spanish and I have 179 left. Of course, on any given day, my numbers might change one way or another, but that is a total of 261, which puts me about a week ahead of schedule. *cheers* But my next couple days will involve having company over, so we´ll see how much Spanish I´ll be able to get into those days. Oh, and one more quick edit: If you include all the testing time (which I would, because it´s flash card time), I´ve done like an hour and a half total today :-) Edited by Principiante on 13 October 2007 at 10:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6201 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 18 15 October 2007 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Día Seis de veintiséis (quince de Octubre, dos mil siete)
Since I had five of the guys from the youth group at church over to my house last night, I didn´t get a large amount of studying done, but my brother came over to visit this evening, and we played Spanish Sorry (basically, we had a pile of about 25 or 30 flash cards, and when it was our turn, we looked at the top flash card, and said what was on the other side -- like if a Spanish word was on top, we´d say the English word, and vice versa. If you got it right, you got to draw a card and take a turn playing Sorry. If you got the word wrong, you missed your turn) for about an hour and a half. We went through about 50 flash cards going each direction twice. He´s not amazing at Spanish, but he´s at least farther along than I am, to the point that he can at least make sentences on his own. Also, after he went home, I did about a half hour of flash cards on Mnemosyne, the computer flash'card program. Edited by Principiante on 15 October 2007 at 11:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Principiante Senior Member United States lucasgentry.com Joined 6201 days ago 130 posts - 138 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 8 of 18 16 October 2007 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Día Siete de Veintiséis (Dieciséis de Octubre, Dos Mil Siete)
In terms of actually studying the flashcards, I had a total of about a half hour of computer flashcarding, plus about twenty minutes of paper flash cards -- mainly sorting into groups of words that sound or look alike, so I can begin practicing identifying words that are close. They´re sprawled across my floor in about fifteen stacks right now, but it´s about bed time, so they´ll probably stay there all night. In other Spanish studies, I watched the movie ¨Guardian¨ in Spanish, then went back through it in English, to see how close to getting everything right. I got most of it right, but it seems that wating movies would be perfectly easy to at least get most of the plot of a movie without knowing any of the words. Though, it was fun. On another front, I read the Acknowledgements and Prologue of a book entitled, ¨90 Minutos En El Cielo¨ (90 Minutes in Heaven), which is an autobiography of a guy who was clinically brain-dead, and was brought back to life after 90 minutes -- what he experienced during that time, specifically. It´s pretty fascinating, from what I hear, though as you just read, I haven´t even finished the first chapter. Something to report from that, however! Just being familiar with those 500 words from my flash cards and using my best guesswork and context clues, I think I got about 95% of the information figured out. When I do chapter one, I´m going to make a word list as I go, for important-looking words that I´m not familiar with. On a completely-unrelated note, if people are reading this that have a Spanish keyboard, how do you make quotation marks? As I do it, it involves holding down shift while pressing the accent mark key, then typing the first letter that you want within the quotes (or instead of a letter, the spacebar, if you´re at the end of a quotation). Is that right, or is there a way to make the quotation mark appear free-standing? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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