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NO PROGRESS IN Spanish!! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Toufik18 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Algeria Joined 5746 days ago 188 posts - 202 votes  Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (classical)*, French, English | Message 10 of 27 16 August 2009 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||
Wow, you are offended.. I apologize, I didn't mean to disrespect you, at all. But in my defence, I also quoted from the admin : If Spanish is your first foreign language and your mother tongue is not a Romance language, you should be reasonably fluent with 300 hours of study. In my opinion, an hour of serious study every day for a year is more than you need. I made my point :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rhian Moderator France Joined 6499 days ago 265 posts - 288 votes Speaks: English* Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 27 16 August 2009 at 4:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Guys please stay on topic. Cad40324 was asking why he seems to be making - what he feels - is very little
progress with his studies. If your post is not answering that question, kindly create a new topic in the appropriate sub-forum. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 13 of 27 16 August 2009 at 8:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Cad40324: I think you will have a bit of trouble understanding TV until you have a larger vocabulary and absorbed the grammar a bit more. If you aren't really familiar with the vocabulary/grammar/structure of the conversation you will just keep getting lost (and it will sound really fast). Even if you recognize a word but have to translate it to English, the time it takes to process it may make you miss the following word. Take something like:
"Por qué no lo haces tú?" "Porque a ella no le gusto, y a mí no me gusta". You are probably already familiar with all of these words, but in the first part the word order is different than it would have been in English ("Por qué (why) no (don't) tú (you) haces (do) lo (it)"), and while you are rearranging the order quickly in your head, the next person has already started speaking. This phrase is also quite different than in English. "Me gusta" probably doesn't give you much trouble, because you can just interpret it as "I like", treating "me" as a subject and "gusta" as a transitive verb (unlike a more literal translation: "it pleases me"). But with "le gusto" you can't translate it like that. All of these things that are still new to you will take time to process while the conversation keeps moving forward (unless of course there is a sufficiently long pause after each sentence for you to catch up). Really, until you recognize more words per sentence and have a better grasp of the grammar/structure of the language, it WILL be really difficult to understand Spanish TV simply because you don't have much time to absorb what is being said. As for the administrator's "statistics", maybe that would be the case if you had the opportunity to speak the language every day (in an unscripted fashion), but I haven't had that pleasure so I can't say. I have definitely passed the 300 hr mark and I am happy with how I've progressed in Spanish. I had expected to be fluent in Spanish by now based on these "number of hours required" figures, but I'm not. I don't think the numbers of hours put forth is really an accurate way to gauge your progress in a language, and I realize it isn't intended to be anything more than an estimate, it just seems like some people find themselves disappointed (or think they are doing something wrong) when they have spent a certain amount of time studying and haven't reached a certain level. So, Cad40324, I think for now I would try to speak online over a site that offers IMing (or if you can find someone to actually speak out loud to) and listen to audio that has transcripts to try to help my comprehension and shorten the time it takes me to process the spoken language. Also, for something a little easier to understand, I've found that animated cartoons (dibujos animados) generally are spoken more clearly and have simpler dialogues. I watched «Avatar, la leyenda de Aang» and was understanding entire paragraphs before I could make out single words on Spanish TV channels. One last thing, I'm sure with these two and a half months you've spent studying Spanish you could probably test out of the entire first year of Spanish at school :) It's not that you haven't learned anything, being able to understand Spanish TV is a pretty difficult thing (understanding a conversation between two other people is harder than one between you and someone else -- a conversation you're having with someone else can't progress unless you both understand). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ccclemons Newbie United States Joined 5581 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Polish Studies: Esperanto | Message 14 of 27 16 August 2009 at 8:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Cad40324, I am with you on this one! I truly admire the polyglots on this site. I have studied Spanish for a couple months now as well (although not quite as extensively as you have) and I can understand my Spanish-speaking co-workers when they talk to me --- slowly! When they speak to each other - I'm always like "hold up there amigo - slow it down because I have no idea what you are saying!" They laugh and encourage me by helping me along. Reading and writing a language is completely different than speaking it. I know this all too well - because my family is from Poland and I am Polish background however - I cannot speak it. I do - on the other hand - understand it being spoken to me and can comprehend much of what I read in Polish. I never understood why this is exactly - you can hear and comprehend but cannot speak it for yourself? Wierd - but apparently extremely common.
I also took 3 years of French and Advanced Honors French in school --- unfortunately -- don't remember a thing! Point is -- everyone is different and the beauty of self-study is that you decide when you need to go back or forge ahead. It may take me and you longer -- but I see it as being kinda like potty-training -- some kids do it earlier and "get it" faster than others -- but in reality -- it's not a contest to see who can do it faster and when it's all said and done -- they won't be 18 and running around diapers still, so don't push it - just go with the flow - enjoy it and things will fall in their place soon enough. Hope this helps you in some way -- at least to not feel like an "outsider" or that something is "wrong" with you. You are fine and you'll get it, just keep it up because it sounds like your a bright kid to me! Good luck in your future studies! :) editted to say: you can definantly tell that I am a mother on this post, huh!? lol ;) Edited by ccclemons on 16 August 2009 at 8:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| artistscientist Diglot Groupie United States artistscientist.blog Joined 5756 days ago 49 posts - 49 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 15 of 27 16 August 2009 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that you are doing great for your "first" language. Like others have said, consistancy is the key. I am also working on Spanish currently. It all has to with how you study and what you are training for. It apears as though you are not training at all for listening comprehension which is why your listening comprehension is not where you want it. Pimsleur does very little to help. You also need a vast vocabulary to understand Spanish TV. My goal has been to understand Spanish Radio and TV so I practice by listening to Spanish music when I drive and watching DVDs with the Spanish audio on.
Being a Mormon I also have listened to 3/4 of the Book of Mormon in Spanish while reading along in the Spanish text. I am very familiar with the book in English. I started this understanding very little of the Spanish but knew what the underlying meaning was. I understand almost everything now (in the Spanish Book of Mormon that is). The other day I turned on the Swiss Family Robinson in Spanish on DVD for my kids and understood almost every Spanish word and grammar construction. Everything just clicked. I am sure I will not understand other movies nearly so well, but I am now seeing significant progress and I have been studying very consistantly since Febuary of this year (with prior classes in Spanish in college and in high school from which I remember little). My suggestion is for you to get an audio book in Spanish of a book you are very familiar with in English (Harry Potter, the Bible, etc). Just start plowing through it and you will see significant gains over time. The key once again is consistancy. Don't expect to understand much of anything at first. Make this part of your study time. Do not pause of copy down any words at first (I never do and never have) just listen. I expect you will not see consistant growth, but you will have eureka moments where things suddenly click and you have 40%, 60%, 70% understanding where a day a two before you had little to none. Here is what I have done so far in language study since Febuary: Learning Spanish Like Crazy 1 and 2 (repeated 1) Book of Mormon reading Spanish while Listening to Spanish 3/4 finished Many DVDs in Spanish (start with Spanish audio and subtitles and now only use audio) Spanish Radio every once in a while with Spanish music on cd in car FSI Basic Spanish up to unit 7 Assmil (just started last night) About 200 hrs since Febuary (but remember this is my 3rd language and have studied Spanish in the past as well as traveled to Honduras and Dominican Republic for total of 3 weeks spread out over several years - huge boost to the language by the way) Keep us updated with your progress. Edited by artistscientist on 16 August 2009 at 2:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Aeroflot Senior Member United States Joined 5604 days ago 102 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 16 of 27 16 August 2009 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | ||
For how long you've been studying that is a lot of vocabulary, but I probably have twice as much vocabulary and I still barely understand anything without subtitles. 1000 words is a great achievement, though. You've done lots of work, and for people like me who burn out too easily, that is an enormous feat. Don't get yourself down, because you've put in tons of effort, and I'm sure with just a few more months, maybe even weeks(!) you'll begin to understand a lot more. Just have Mexican TV on in the background 24/7 and listen to it actively whenever you get a chance. Soon you'll be able to pick out single words, and then sentences. One problem about not understanding TV is that you're vocab isn't up there yet. It's not really that the Mexicans are speaking too fast, it's just that your ears haven't heard the all words, so all of what they're saying is turned into jumbled garbage. However if you feel that they're speaking too quickly, try watching those cheesey telenovelas from Northern Mexico--they're pretty easy to grasp on to, and they got hot chick in 'em to help you understand more =P I find that Mexicans from the North in general speak slower than their southern counterparts. Just keep going. Only other thing I might want to recommend, if you're already reading so much, is to check out All Japanese All The Time .com and read all the articles in the Table of Contents. That really helped me grasp language learning more than Teach Yourself and similar books have. Just apply as much as you can to your Spanish learning. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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