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Spanish, someday - German probably never! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1 of 48 15 September 2010 at 7:52am | IP Logged |
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Well I'm a bit exhausted from filling out all the membership questions to simply be able to post.
I'm working on Spanish. I guess this is a goal post so I'd really like to be fluent enough to talk to customers on the phone in Spanish and also read popular fiction without wanting to grab a dictionary. My plan of attack for now is to read books that I liked (and still like) growing up in the Spanish translations - I find wattpad is great for this. I couldn't buy the books I wanted online and then stumbled upon wattpad via google by accident. I'll cry when it's taken down for legal reasons which can't be far off. I have a couple resources to help me as well. I use TextAloud3 with some Spanish voices to have my computer read the books to me. I use a couple dictionaries with ifinger to quickly and easily lookup words I don't know. I could use an online dictionary but speed is key so I paid the money instead. And I am accumulating quite a vocabulary list - I'm putting most of them into a computerized flashcard program to hopefully get me to remember them later. I've tried watching TV in Spanish but I am not a fan of TV in general and the Spanish programming is a step below English language programming so look for other ways to learn Spanish. I'm listening to CNN in Spanish while I ride my bike. I just started doing this and I'm surprised it seems to work. In the past I tried listening to audiobooks while working out and found that as I got tired my focus wouldn't stay on the material but so far so good with bike riding. It might be that bike riding is less intense than going to the gym. When I do a bike ride I go out for 2-3 hours so mixing it with Spanish is a great plus. Hmm i have 248 flash cards so far in my vocab list and I just started it a couple days ago. Probably overkill... oh well. Well I'm new to these forums. I'm not really sure how this learning log works - I guess I'll reply to this post with updates. Edited by kraemder on 16 September 2010 at 5:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 2 of 48 15 September 2010 at 6:39pm | IP Logged |
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I'm going to add a little more info to this. As mentioned I was a bit tired last night. I spent the weekend reading the Eye of the World by Robert Jordan in Spanish. I'm about halfway through it and as mentioned I have accumulated 248 vocabulary flash cards. I don't know how other people around my level of language learning handle the large amount of new vocabulary - I might be making more flash cards than I can reasonably expect to learn but I can't really see a better way of going about it.
So I spent most of the weekend reading the book (which I've read multiple times in English over the years and also in German) and it's a great story that I don't get tired of. I find that reading a book I'm already familiar with is easier than a brand new one and I could even skip looking words up if I wanted and still enjoy the novel. I do that from time to time but obviously with the amount of flash cards I'm compiling, I'm being rather thorough. A little background on me - I'm 33 and I stank at studying foreign languages in high school. I was actually weak in English too, not just foreign languages but strong in Math and History. In college I took a trip to Italy and became enamored with the idea of learning a foreign language. My dad studied German in school and we have relatives we've kept in touch with more or less so I went with German. I have no regrets regarding that and I reached the point where I can read a popular novel without a dictionary and have a conversation in German (albeit with a little struggling to find the right word). I later visited France and then decided to study that as well. Looking back I wish I had studied Spanish instead at this point - I have forgotten most of the French I learned and there's nobody to talk to in French where I live. I later tried to pick up Spanish but as the 3rd foreign language I was attempting it was my weakest. Now in my mid 30's I'm taking an interest in foreign languages again and well there's a lot of people who speak Spanish in the states so this is my focus. I have never been to a Spanish speaking country. I currently live in Tucson, AZ which is awfully close to Mexico. If you count a day trip to Nogales which straddles the border then I suppose I have been to Mexico. With all the drug violence in the news regarding Mexico I won't be visiting again anytime soon though. I've studied Spanish slightly off and on over the years but not very seriously at all. Last April or May I splurged on the online version of Rosetta Stone and I spent a lot of time doing that. I have to say that I'm not very happy with it. I find that learning and understanding grammar is really the only way I'm going to have any hope of making sense and Rosetta stone doesn't address this. In the conversations that you listen to and imitate it does attempt to get you to learn certain grammatic constructs but it's anything but thorough and it doesn't come out and tell you how to conjugate a verb. If you've taken a college language course in the past then I would say this course is like trying to learn using the supplemental lab book only and disregarding the main book with the material with explanations etc. At the end of each series of lessons (which take a while and are very boring) you can sign up for a 50 minute tutor session. I jumped right into this before understanding how the process worked and consequently I hadn't studied the appropriate material. There was 1 other student in the room with me who had done everything as you're supposed to. I really surprised them both how I could go from being completely ignorant to very knowledgeable in a heartbeat. All depending of whether I had happened to see the vocabulary before. The tutor was really good and this was a very positive experience. I didn't go for the refund when the month was up. Stupid really but whatever. It was about 1000 dollars for the year which when compared to private tutoring or college classrooms isn't bad but I really disliked learning material. So I got a tutor through craig's list. I didn't know what to expect. It was 15/hour and it turned out she was quite intelligent, charming and very good. I met with her once a week. I had intended to speak only Spanish with her but I lapsed into English a lot and so did she. Meeting with her once a week has kept me from giving up on the language. One problem with the tutor sessions for me is that unlike a course or rosetta stone it's all freeform and we don't follow a lesson plan. I could have purchased some lesson plans perhaps. I don't know. At 15/hour for one on one tutoring I'd say the responsibility is more on me to bring structure to the sessions. Unfortunately this tutor left the country and now I'm back to Rosetta stone. I might go for another tutor we'll see. So as of last weekend I've really buckled down and decided to start studying for real. I spent most of the weekend reading in Spanish and yesterday I had off so I did the same there. I like to read so this is going to be my primary method of learning. And now I have to get going to work so I'll do another update later. After more studying. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 3 of 48 16 September 2010 at 4:44am | IP Logged |
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well nobody's replying to my pontificating about myself and studying Spanish. Dunno what they'd say anyway heh. I'll go ahead and talk some more about myself. I've spent a lot of time studying German in the past. I love the language. I don't know if other people have had this issue but because my German is significantly better than Spanish (or French which I've studied some) I find it's easy to get frustrated and just pull out some German material and go with that instead. There's lots of room for improvement with German too it's not like I could pass for a native or anything. But German is useless in America. And if through some freak occurrence you do run into a German, they speak perfect English. Or damn close to it. They're over educated there. And they take foreign language seriously too. So much so that they're borrowing tons of words and expressions from other languages and English most of all.
Anyway. We here in the US of A are as a whole rather monolingual. Very little borrowings from other languages. I think there's a few books on that I might get. One wonders how in hell we ever managed to borrow words from other languages considering how little we study foreign languages. Well I'm striving to be an exception. Back to reading the Eye of the Word by Robert Jordan in Spanish. I'm going to hit the 250 odd flash cards I've accumulated since last weekend and then read some more and add to them. A word on the flash cards. I have been shocked to find that I do better than expected at remembering the vocab. I study almost exclusively Spanish to English. That is, I look at the Spanish word and then remember the English equivalent. I have briefly tried the opposite and it's so much more difficult which isn't fun. Considering I'm reading a book and a lot of the vocabulary is literary as opposed to spoken it suites me just fine that most of it ends up being recognition only. It wouldn't be practical otherwise, especially with the volume of new words I'm acquiring - or trying to. I'm not sure if people have tried learning a foreign language monolingual style. That is making flash cards with the target language word on one side and a definition and example in the target language on the other. I've tried this and well it didn't work very well for me. It's not that I can't understand the foreign language definition (usually not a problem) but I end up thinking of the English equivalent in my head anyway as a result and for memorization purposes it's just inefficient it seems to not use English. Maybe when my ability gets better the monolingual approach will work better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 4 of 48 16 September 2010 at 5:22am | IP Logged |
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In case anyone is curious I'm using QueCard for the computer flash cards. It's free and available at www.download.com. I used to use a flash card program that came with some language software (living language?) I dunno. It was really good. Actually probably better than this program but for whatever reason it doesn't support the international US keyboad layout and you have to use their awkward mouse click buttons to do special characters like éóñíáö etc. Really dumb. I couldn't take it anymore so I'm using this free alternative instead.
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| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 5 of 48 16 September 2010 at 10:12am | IP Logged |
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Ok. Reading other people's posts I've decided that I need to get certified. I'm thinking of going for the DELE c1 or c2. I'm going to have to give myself a lot of time to prepare as I've got a ways to go in this. Also, it's not available in my state (I live in Arizona) so I'll have to travel to take the test. At first this seemed bad but now it's starting to seem like a plus =). Initially I was thinking I'd travel to LA or maybe back to Boston but heck why not go to Spain for a week and do the test then? Woot!
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 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5645 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 48 16 September 2010 at 10:42am | IP Logged |
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It's a good idea to study a language for a certificate, because it's structured learning and you have a deadline (= day of the exam), which helps your study discipline. I have positive experiences with preparing my language exams.
Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 16 September 2010 at 10:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 7 of 48 17 September 2010 at 5:34am | IP Logged |
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Deadlines are scary heh. I remember the stress of deadlines in school. I'd like the motivation to try to achieve the certification and I'll probably have to settle on an exam date but I really could do without the stress involved. Then again, if I don't pass it's no big deal. Just go back and study some more. I'll be aiming for an exam date next year - I'm definitely not going for this year. Here's what I found on the Spanish C2 exam:
Superior level C2 The "Diploma Superior de Español" accredits an advanced knowledge of the language which allows communicaton in all situations requiring advanced use of the language and a knowledge of cultural background.. The exam to obtain this Diploma is composed of the following parts: Part 1: Reading Comprehension. (60 minutes) Two kind of exercises: a. Nine multiple choice questions based on 3 texts, never longer than 800 words. b. Refer to up to 10 series of texts extracts. Prueba 2: Written paper (60 minutes) Write a formal letter and an essay. No longer than 150-200 words. Prueba 3: Listening Comprehension. (45 minutes) Twelve multiple choice questions on four recordings. Prueba 4: Grammar and vocabulary. (60 minutes) Three kind of exercises: a. A multiple choice text. b. 35 multiple choice sentences. c. Spot grammar errors in one or several given texts. Prueba 5: Oral exam (10-15 minutes) Hold a conversation with the examiners for 10-15 minutes. ----- They don't give any info on C1. I think they're just offering it for the 1st time this year. Maybe they'll put info up later. I'll see how I feel about my progress come the beginning of next year but I'm really thinking that I might as well go for the C2. Although I would love to take a trip to Spain and use this as an excuse I still wish they had something in Tucson/Phoenix area if only to do the earlier tests like the A2/B1/B2. Would be nice to have a barometer of where my ability is and what progress I'm making. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| valkyr Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 4982 days ago 79 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Romanian*, EnglishC1, GermanB2 | Message 8 of 48 17 September 2010 at 8:17pm | IP Logged |
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I'm confused by the pessimistic title of your log. "German probably never" and then you casually mention that you read German novels without a dictionary?? That's advanced intermediate B2! Maybe you should consider renaming it to "German NOW" ;-)
With regard to language certifications, I think you should aim for the C1. The learning curve flattens at that level, which means months of additional effort are hardly noticeable in your speech. I considered sitting a C2 exam for English, but I decided against it since, first of all, there are no institutions that I'm aware of that require C2 level certifications (a good grade on C1 will satisfy language requirements for any university), and secondly, I prefer to learn another language rather than marginally improve my English. This does seem to be the case with your Spanish as well. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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