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James29’s Spanish Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| getreallanguage Diglot Senior Member Argentina youtube.com/getreall Joined 5267 days ago 240 posts - 371 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Dutch | Message 9 of 668 13 February 2011 at 5:23pm | IP Logged |
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¡La mejor de las suertes con tus estudios de castellano!
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| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5171 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 10 of 668 20 February 2011 at 2:54am | IP Logged |
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This week was probably the worst week of 2011, but, in actuality, it was still a decent week. I missed one day and there was another day I procrastinated a little bit with getting started with my lesson for the day. This was the first time since I started learning Spanish that I can recall having a feeling that I did not want to do a lesson. I think I have been successful precisely because I look forward to doing a lesson every day. This is concerning. The day after that procrastinating day I decided to work with Cajas de Carton. I listened to the first disc (70-ish minutes) and followed along with the Spanish text. This was different and kind of fun. I could mostly follow the stories because I had read them in English and I could also understand much of the text and audio. I still don't think I could understand it too well with just the audio. I note that I also had one day this week where I did a marathon skype session, but did not do a LL BTB lesson. I had a couple skype sessions that were not worthwhile due to a partners that did not show up or had technical problems. The marathon session was with a partner that is very helpful and it really helps with my confidence and two hours passes like it is nothing. I am amazed how I can very easily talk with some people and then with some others I feel like an idiot because I have absolutely no clue what they are saying and they don't understand me. So, I did not make too much progress with LL BTB this week. I am feeling like I want to finish it and move on to something else. By next weekend I should be almost done with it.
In terms of my secondary methods it was an o.k. week. As noted above, I did some good skyping (and some waste of time skyping). I think I would like to find a couple partners that are good to work with and then see if we can have a regularly scheduled time to talk. We will see about that. I finished the appendix of LL BTB. It was a good summary of intermediate grammar and I am glad I read it. I did some more reading of Cajas de Carton in English, but not too much this week. I also had my night class. The class is o.k. and I will continue to go, but I doubt I will take another one of these classes. I went to the library briefly and looked through some resources. I looked at Living Language Ultimate Spanish Advanced. I looked at it about 8 months ago and remember thinking it looked amazingly difficult. Now it did not look too bad. I don't think I will ever do it, but looking through it made me feel good about my progress. I also looked at Living Language Portuguese. I had never seen text in Portuguese. I can see what people mean about how similar it is to Spanish. Eventually I may want to study it, but that won't be for a long time. I still want to do a third round of Assimil Spanish with Ease and also do Using Spanish. One of my reasons for starting this Spanish log was to keep myself motivated this year. I feel like I really need to do Using Spanish this year and I feel confident I will get to it. Edited by James29 on 20 February 2011 at 2:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5171 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 11 of 668 27 February 2011 at 11:03pm | IP Logged |
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This was a very good week. I did a lot of thinking and realized I need to get back to simply having fun with learning Spanish. Recently, with the "active" wave of LL BTB it felt like too much work. This week I went through the lessons a little faster and without as much worry about whether I was doing them as fully as I originally wanted to. So, this week I had a good day with LL BTB every day. I did lesson 19 today so I should be done soon. I will do a review of the last 4 lessons and also do some sort of general review of the entire book. The dialogues near the end of the book seem easier than the first half, but the exercises and grammar topics are more difficult. This book has a lot of material on the subjunctive which is something I really need. I am still quite happy with this book and think I may come back to it again sometime in the future as a review.
In terms of secondary methods it was a good week also. I had a few skype sessions. I find it difficult to find a good partner. This week I spoke with two people that are very reliable and good to work with so I really mostly focused on helping them with English. Hopefully I can have some consistent talks with these folks. I have finished The Circuit (English version of Cajas de Carton). I foget if I did this week or the week before. Good book. I am looking forward to reading the Spanish and using the audio. I went to a meetup. It was good and I will continue if the group keeps it up. It was 100% Spanish which is good. I need practice with my listening. I watched an online economics course in Spanish and I could understand most of what was going on (I think). It was nice because I would really like to take this course sometime and I could probably watch it now and get a lot out of it. It was a great test and made me feel great about my progress. I have not watched an episode of El Internado for a long time, but I think I will watch one tonight. I have been doing a lot of thinking about my Spanish goals this week and I will probably do a separate post about what I would like to do over the next year. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5171 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 12 of 668 06 March 2011 at 1:28am | IP Logged |
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This was a different week. It was a good week also. I finished Living Language Spanish Beyond the Basics. I was quite satisfied with it, but I think it caused some problems with my "fun factor" of learning Spanish. I did one lesson per day and it was simply too much for what I am trying to do. I never wanted this Spanish learning journey to be a chore or feel like work. It is just about fun for me. I wanted to do something productive with my free time. Initially I wanted to learn Spanish and then read other things that interest me in Spanish rather than in English. It is much harder for me to learn Spanish than I originally thought, however. I have not gotten into "fun" native material before this week.
After finishing LL BTB I decided to do a review of Assimil Spanish with Ease. I am glad I did. It is a great course and it is fun. I have now gotten through lesson 9 on an active wave and it is still fun to do. I am going to love this third review. The first 9 lessons are more challenging than I thought they would be. I am getting some good knowledge out of it on this third wave. I will do at least one lesson per day until I get through it. I will probably do two or three per day, but I am not going to push it. I am also going to do some other things that are simply "fun." Since I have been doing this third wave I have had that good feeling every morning when I close the Assimil book. I feel like saying to myself "I like learning Spanish." I am glad I have that back and I am determined to never lose it again. In addition to finishing LL BTB and doing the first 9 lessons of Assimil I did many other things this week. I watched a full 75 minute college course on economics from a Guatemala University. I quickly realized that I did not totally understand what was happening so I took the Spanish transcript and put it through google translate and read the English text. I then listened/watched the Spanish and followed along with the Spanish text. This was great and made me feel like I am FINALLY doing what I originally wanted to do... do something I would do anyway, but do it in Spanish. I think I will keep doing these courses when I have the time. It is harder to understand than I thought it would be, but by reading the google English version makes it very worthwhile. For now, I will skip the classes that do not have the transcript. I have about 12 hours of class with transcripts. I also did quite a bit of skyping. I found another good partner who can talk in the morning when it is most convenient for me. This is good. It was also good because my skype talking was all in Spanish this week. My new partner simply did not want to speak English yet. I did do quite a bit of English text skyping with all of my partners. I feel kind of silly for finally figuring out why skype is not too efficient. It is, of course, because half the time (usually) I am speaking and listening to English. The "fun" factor does make up for this to some extent because it does not feel like "studying" at all as evidenced by the fact that "time flies" when skyping. I do not have a lot of free time so skyping is not really that great for me and I think I need to reduce the amount of time I spend on skype for now. I am not going to talk with any new partners for a while. I watched an episode of El Internado. It is a good show and it is something good I can do when I relax in the evening (when I have the time to relax). It has a very good and detailed summary of previous episodes at the beginning of each episode. My night class was decent. I have a teacher from So America and I am seeing some important differences with Spain Spanish that I have learned from Assimil. I finally checked out Anki. I read about it here on this forum, but did not think it was for me. It is pretty neat, but I doubt I will do it too much because it is not my style. I did if for about 30-40 minutes. I am simply amazed when I think back to last year at this time. I was doing Pimsleur 2. The more I think about it the more I realize I simply need to slow down and continue to have fun... and do a little every day... but do it every day... and have "fun." 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5171 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 13 of 668 09 March 2011 at 2:24am | IP Logged |
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I am breaking with my weekly update and doing a mid-week update because I am starting to do a whole bunch of different things and I think I will forget some things if I wait until the weekend. I realized that for the last several weeks I have been listenting to the Assimil dialogues in the car on the way to work (about 20 minutes). I don't shadow them or anything, I usually just listen to them. And, I don't do it every day. I think this is quite helpful and I am surprised I keep forgetting that this is part of my day.
Anyway, since my last post I have been working through Assimil as my primary method. I did lesson 17 today. I will end up doing 1-3 lessons per day until I am done. I am getting a lot out of it. I had a skype talk scheduled and the person did not show up. I was kind of surprised. I am still of mixed emotions about skype. So, instead of skyping I watched the first half of the economics class I mentioned before. I got more out of it this time around and I really enjoyed it. Yesterday I had to take a drive and I listened to the first short story in Cajas de Carton a few times. I understand it, but I need to go through the book carefully to pick up the details I am missing. It is a neat little book and fun to read (and re-read). That will be a great secondary source and it will keep me busy for a long time. I did my night class tonight. I am learning a lot about English grammar. I obviously know English quite well, but I never really learned all the formal grammar words and what they are. I still definitely want to go through Using Spanish. I probably do not "need" to, but I "want" to do it in order to make my "studying" of Spanish complete. I am also starting to think about taking a trip next winter. For work and family reasons I need to plan way in advance. The big question is "Spain or Latin America?" 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5171 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 14 of 668 14 March 2011 at 1:46am | IP Logged |
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I have now finished lesson 23 in Assimil. There is more in these lessons than I remembered. I think I just missed a ton of stuff when I did it the first time. I kind of chuckle now when I see a verb ending in the subjunctive and remember the first time through thinking it was a typo. I am doing the lessons pretty thoroughly. I read through the Spanish carefully and, if necessary, I check the English. That has not really been necessary yet. I then read through the notes. I then re-read through the dialogue at regular pace. Then I do the exercises. Then I go back and translate from English to Spanish. Then I listen to the audio a few times and shadow without the book.
I have noticed something quite interesting. I remember where I was (physically) when I did the lessons for the first time. For example, I think "oh, this lesson I was at my parents' house and I showed my dad how Assimil works... this one I did in a park trying out Prof A's pacing technique and people thought I was crazy... this one I did on the beach sitting next to people that were speaking French and I was wondering if they could understand me shadowing about the guy who died slipping on the bannana peel." It surprises me that I can remember where I was 8ish months ago. This third wave is going to take longer than expected. That is fine. I am just here for fun. I do want to do at least one lesson per day. Now that the lessons are more of a regular length I think I will probably just stick with one per day until I am done. I feel better this way because I don't want to feel like I am pushing myself too much like I did with LL BTB. By doing just one Assimil lesson per day I have some extra time to do other things. Since my last post I have listened to the first two stories in Cajas de Carton. Between knowing the story and knowing Spanish I can follow the stories and enjoy them. I definitely am not getting everything. I miss quite a few words and miss a few sentences here and there. I even miss one or two full paragraphs per story. I went back and read the English version of the first story two more times to get more of the specific details down. This is a great book for Spanish learning. The stories are all stand alone stories, but they carry over and have a general full book feel also. It is a perfect level for what I need now. I went to a meetup. It was quite nice. I spoke/listened to Spanish for two solid hours. No English was spoken at all. Most people were native English speakers and they were easier to understand than the native Spanish speakers. This concerns me a little. I don't want to have a problem understanding native Spanish speakers and I want to try to have a decent Spanish accent. I will keep up with the meetup. It is different and kind of fun. I feel like I got a lot out of the "immersion" factor to the extent that it was 100% Spanish and I started thinking in Spanish a little bit. Everyone takes it very seriously. I am also finding that I am not as shy about speaking in Spanish. Assimil is great for vocabulary and knowledge, but I find myself thinking of Michel Thomas when I am grasping for words to put my thoughts into spoken words. The meetup made me realize I really need work with listenting comprehension. I can get by saying what I want to say and being understood (though I definitely butcher the language), but with some people I simply don't have a clue what they are saying. I watched the children's video movie on the Jesus video project. It was an hour long and dubbed in Latin American Spanish. It has the ver batim transcript along the bottom of the screen which was very helpful. I am only learning Spanish, but I must comment that that website is simply AMAZING. They have translated the regular two hour movie into something crazy like 2000 languages. If I ever wanted to be a polyglot (which I do not) that would be a very helpful site. Also, it is useful for learning very obscure languages. I spent some time reading through a couple of the Assimil Using Spanish lessons. They look great and exactly what I need/want to do. They look quite challenging and it looks like they pack a ton of advanced vocabulary into the lessons. As long as I get Using Spanish done this year I will be satisfied. I will probably start it later in the year than I wanted to, but I am confident I will get it done well in advance of the end of the year. At the latest I will start it on July 1. That is when I started With Ease last year and it was a good time to start. Ideally, I would like to start Using Spanish earlier, however. I like the idea of starting on the first of a month because it makes it easier for me to track my progress. I think I will end up shooting for June 1 as a start date, but we will see. I would really like to find an interesting half hour show I can watch in the evenings. I cannot study at night, but I could do something very passive like watch a show online. I like El Internado, but am not able to devote that much time every night... or even one night a week. Destinos was great for evenings because each episode was only 26 minutes. I wish there was something else like Destinos for a more intermediate learner. All things considered, this was a pretty good week. Edit: It just occurred to me that Assimil With Ease has 109 lessons and if I only do one lesson per day it is going to take me close to another three months to finish it. I don't want to spend that much time on it. Maybe I will try to do two at a time for a while and see how I like that. We will see. Edited by James29 on 14 March 2011 at 1:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5171 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 15 of 668 20 March 2011 at 2:35am | IP Logged |
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Well, it was a pretty good week. I did one Assimil lesson each day. I spent a ton of time doing the review lesson (lesson 28) and thoroughly reviewed the previous six lessons. I am going to stick with one per day for now. I will do two if I feel like it, but forcing myself to do two would be too much. Plus, I like having a little extra time in the morning to spend some time with some native materials. I am doing the Assimil lessons a little different now. I go straight to the English and translate it into Spanish. This way I know if I really know the stuff instead of just remembering it from reading through the Spanish first. I am quite pleased that I really do know almost all of it. I am also quite pleased that I am able to tell when to use the subjunctive in most situations. After I do the translation I read through the Spanish and read the notes. I then do the exercises. Then I shadow a few times with the book and a few times without it. Doing the lessons this way is actually faster which is good because the lessons are getting longer.
Assimil Spanish with Ease is definitely a good course. It is more challenging on this third wave than I thought it would be. I am glad I took some time off from it, however, because now it really feels like a different course and I am getting a lot out of it. In fact, I think I am getting more out of this third wave than I did from either of the first two waves. I am realizing that the book is put together in a much more organized and logical manner than I previously thought. Even though this is a "beginner" course I think I will keep it around for a long time and probably do a fourth wave sometime in the distant future. I keep listening to Assimil dialogues on the way to work in the morning. Some days I don't feel like it and that is fine. When I have listened to dialogues on the way to work in the past I would just listen to the dialogues and I did not care if my mind wandered. Now, I am doing the lessons I have already covered in this third wave and I am shadowing the lessons. I know the lessons so well it is "easy" and it is really reinforcing this third wave of Assimil. In terms of secondary methods it was a pretty good week also. I watched an hour of the economics course. I need the transcripts in order to have this be useful. I won't do the classes without transcripts for a long time. I am happy to be doing this course because I definitely need listening comprehension practice. I can sit and watch this for an hour and I really enjoy it (provided I have put the transcript through Google translate and read it). It is not like "work" or "studying" at all. Plus, it is in So American accent which I really need to hear more often. I did a few skype sessions also. I feel like a broken record with skype. It takes a lot of time and I feel like I am not really learning too much. However, this week I realized that it is giving me skills that I simply cannot get through self study. I am learning how to struggle with the language and what I want to say. It gives me confidence simply "spitting it out" and not worrying if I sound like an idiot. I often think of Michel Thomas and tell myself "ok James, get it over the net and they will understand." I unfortunately find that on many subjects I simply have no vocabulary and I either have to switch to English or give up and not even try. The last thing with regards to skype is that it is simply very cool to talk to and get to know people from different parts of the world. I did my night class. It was fine. I got to do a decent amount of conversation which was helpful. Conversation is important for me. Both skype and class are decent for conversation skills. I actually learned a lot in class this week about preterite and imperfect. It was helpful. I downloaded Pablo Neruda's 20 Poems and a Song of Despair from albalearning.com. I also clipped them so the audio is just the reading of the poems. She reads the poems slowly and the recording is high quality. I reviewed the text of the poems again and they are a good length and have quite a bit of new vocabulary. The CD I created is about 41 minutes so, on average, each poem is about 2 minutes. I downloaded them because I have the bilingual text in a book (by the way, the bilingual text is at albalearning.com also) and they are the perfect length to go through them like 20 additional Assimil lessons. Something about the fact that these poems are well known native material makes it satisfying to add them to my secondary learning materials. I am not in any rush, however, to get to them. I stopped in a bookstore and reviewed some books on Madrid in the travel section. I am just starting to think about taking a trip. I probably will not go for about a year, but I would like to start thinking about it. Madrid looks like it would be a good option. I have also done a little bit of looking for a TV show. I don't get any Spanish language channels on TV so I need to find something online. Someone in a different post graciously posted some links to some Argentine TV channels that have all their shows online. I watched a few minutes from a bunch of shows and was quite pleased that I could understand them fairly well. Something about the Argentine accent makes it easy for me to understand. Hopefully I will find a good show to watch. Unfortunately, right now I don't have too much time in the evenings so I think that will have to wait for a while. In a little over a week we will be taking a family vacation. This is going to be a very special time for us so I am not going to plan on doing any Spanish. I will have the Assimil dialogues on my phone so I will be able to listen to them if there is down time, but I am not going to mind if I don't do any Spanish on vacation. This got me thinking earlier this week that I have never missed two days in a row of Spanish study. It has been close to a year and a half now and I have never missed two days in a row. In total, I bet I have missed less than 10 days. I think doing a little bit every day is very important to progress. This was a good week. I am also looking forward to next week. I am going to a business lunch with a native speaker and I am also going to a meetup. Edited by James29 on 20 March 2011 at 2:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Li Fei Pro Member United States Joined 4919 days ago 147 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 668 20 March 2011 at 3:03am | IP Logged |
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I just read your whole log and I'm impressed with your steady work. You don't seem to notice it yourself, but I
think you are making really rapid progress. Look at all the courses you have worked through in, what, 1.5 years? That's amazing to me. Madrid is a beautiful city and would be a great place to travel, by the way . . . Good luck with your studies! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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