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Help an imbecile get beyond RS lvl5 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| jago25_98 Newbie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5379 days ago 14 posts - 16 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 3 23 October 2013 at 11:41am | IP Logged | ||
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I first got a basic grasp of Spanish with Rosetta Stone, doing 1 hour a day until all 5 levels were finished. I only got bored by level 3 and the vocab went in like nothing else I know. Of course though, I have very little grammar. I'm not too bothered with this - it's something that's slowly sinking in with time spent in Spain. Since then I've been spending time in Spanish speaking countries. This is an effortless way to learn... but it doesn't seem as quick. Before RS I had given up on ever being able to learn a language - I'm a dyslexic artist type not a wordy newsreader. My memory for things that disinterest me is so bad that I'll sometimes go to look up a word and by the time I've got to the letter it is I'm supposed to be looking up I've forgotten what the word was. Other times I look up a word and then go to use it, the other person says something similar and then I've forgotten what it was. I know it sounds incredible that I can't remember one word but that's how it is for me. I feel I should be doing more so I thought I'd try a teacher but I quickly found that this was like going back to school. She would teach me the words... I'd forget them. Then she'd teach me again. And I'd forget them again. She'd come up with some examples... I'd remember one of the words... and forget the rest again. Basically I came to the conclusion that I'm not going to find a teacher that teaches the way I'm looking for - with full emotional or physical engagement. Speaking of which... the next relationship I have could be Spanish speaking only but I can't handle taking away English if the relationship is already used to this; it's too traumatic for some relationships. I've do reading but the lack of interaction means the best I can manage before getting disinterested is 15-30mins. I managed to get through a few comics this way. In fact some of them I were a bit complex so I thinking about it I'll need to read them again and search for more intellectual or sci-fi comics. Looking for more of that. There must be some computer games that have a lot of text? I do sometimes read Spanish forums and chatrooms but the thing is that I feel like really I should be focussing on learning, feeling like I'm doing something targeted... I just can't find that for more the specialised vocab. While I know everybody has the same problems with language I can't put in the grind I see other people doing when learning languages. I've tried that and it just doesn't work for me. It's not a complete waste of time, more like 15% efficiency compared to Rosetta Stone. It would be great if I could simply continue programming myself with more vocab as I did with Rosetta Stone in addition to time spent in a Spanish speaking place where I can fill in the many gaps RS misses. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 3 23 October 2013 at 11:54am | IP Logged | ||
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I think your problem is less inefficiency (15% efficiency is a lot, I have to keep
looking up the same words) but it's more attitude and self-confidence. Just keep going and persevere. Eventually you'll find you've learned more than you know. You'll feel more confident. Tackle it one by one. Just do what you find fun. You can probably find RPGs around on the internet translated to Spanish. I used to play through Spyro the Dragon in German and French. I don't spend more than 15-30 minutes on individual activities before I switch either. One of our most esteemed members, Solfrid Cristin, is also dyslectic, and she speaks seven languages. So it's not a problem. Edited by tarvos on 23 October 2013 at 11:55am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 3 23 October 2013 at 12:15pm | IP Logged | ||
15 minutes at a time isn't necessarily a problem, provided you can do it often. For example, I copy sentences from ebooks and web articles and paste them into Anki so I can review them later, and this is a pretty efficient way to learn vocab in tiny chunks throughout the day. (And if the source material is fun, the sentences will remain fun.) Comics and computer games are a great idea. Two minutes with Google Translate and flipping through search results suggests that the Spanish translation of "text adventure" is either ficción interactiva, aventura conversacional or juegos de texto. Try Googling each of those terms and poking around; you should find something interesting with a bit of persistence. You might also want to look around for an Assimil Spanish course. These courses are broken into little 2-minute lessons, which consist of L2 audio, L2 text and L1 text. The idea is that you spend 20 minutes reading and listening to each lesson several times, and occasionally read some quick notes explaining the grammar. The text of each lesson is usually a slightly funny little story. I suggest this because lots of people around here have good luck with Assimil, and each lesson is about the right size for your attention span. :-) There's no way around the fact that you'll have to find something you like doing in Spanish. It's entirely possible, for example, to learn a language by reading comics, watching TV, and reading trashy airport novels, or by spending all your time in forums and in games. But even then, you still need to put in the time. I find that vocabulary gets much easier when I'm exposed to lots of mostly comprehensible French. My brain can't be bothered to cram vocab in isolation, but if it's all around me, it's much more likely to stick. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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