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ymapazagain Senior Member Australia myspace.com/amywiles Joined 6962 days ago 504 posts - 538 votes Speaks: English* Studies: SpanishB2
| Message 81 of 88 19 July 2011 at 2:09pm | IP Logged |
supertom wrote:
Everyone that has no previous knowledge of Spanish should start out with the foundation course.
Everyone that has previous knowledge of Spanish, should skip the foundation course and jump straight into the Advanced course. The advanced course is helpful for everyone, except the very advanced. For all those who still have some problems conjugating verbs will get benefit out of the course. |
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I completely agree. Having attempted to use the Foundation course as revision (and bailing half way through due to finding the pace far too painful) I think it would have been a much more sensible move at my level to start out with the advanced course.
Congratulations for finishing Michel Thomas! I agree that it is likely to be very beneficial to review a few weeks down the track once your all round understanding of Spanish has improved. It will be a great way to solidify the grammar and make it much more automatic.
So what is your plan of attack now? Are you going to continue with Assimil and L-R, or are you thinking of adding another program/book/system to your studies as well?
:o)
Edited by ymapazagain on 19 July 2011 at 2:11pm
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| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4997 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish
| Message 82 of 88 19 July 2011 at 6:48pm | IP Logged |
At the moment, I will just stick to Assimil+LR. I notice that the lessons of Assimil are becoming more and more long and that I need more time to really complete them. So for now, I will just stick to this!
Día 36/60
1 hora Assimil lección 29
0.25 horas Michel Thomas Advanced CD4 tracks 14-18
4.25 horas LR L2-L1 Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkeban capítulos 14-20
Total 1: 67.50 horas
Total 2: 117.5 horas
Assimil lessons are becoming longer, as I already noted. Even though this lesson had very little grammar, only a little about paraguas y parasols, the sentences were long and took me a long time to memorize ymapazagain style. Had lots of nice vocab though. Things like bones, rain, soaked, warm. I always wanted to learn them as I encounter them very often in HP, but couldn't yet figure them out myself.
Finished Michel Thomas Advanced, only had 15 minutes left. Nothing special, wrote everything in my short review about it.
Reading was weird. The last few days, I had the idea that I could understand almost everything that was said, as long as I knew what was coming. Today, I felt like I could understand much less than everything. Perhaps I had an offday, perhaps the chapters were just more difficult (something that I do think is true. The first half of every HP book is almost the same, vocab wise, but the end of the book comes with a new adventure that one hasn't encountered yet), or maybe I just wasn't able to concentrate well enough since I really enjoyed the story
I did, however, manage to put in some great hours and noticed some new vocab on the way that I learned passively I believe. So all in all, it was a good LR session, 4.25 hours isn't nothing.
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| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4997 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish
| Message 83 of 88 20 July 2011 at 6:09pm | IP Logged |
Día 37/60
1 hora Assimil lección 30 + review 29
1 hora LR L2-L1 Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban Capítulos 21,22
2 horas LR L2-L1 Harry Potter y el Cáliz de Fuego Capítulos 1-5
Total 1: 71,50 horas
Total 2: 121,5 horas
Assimil covered mostly familiar stuff. Days of the week, some vocab one uses in a house (fireplace, stairs, etc), but I knew most of these already. Still, the sentences were pretty long, so it took me 45 minutes to complete the lesson ypamazagain style and to do a review of the previous lesson.
I finished the third book! Only had an hour left to read, so that didn't take too long. After that, I started the fourth book. The narrator is very good, but the quality of the recording is pretty bad. It is like listening to an old recording on tape or something. So much distortion etc. This makes it more difficult to comprehend, but I think this may just be a good thing. In real life, you also dont have perfect sound.
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| Just a Dreamer Groupie Egypt Joined 5014 days ago 59 posts - 62 votes Studies: English, French
| Message 84 of 88 21 July 2011 at 2:22pm | IP Logged |
Hi Tom,
I want to express my admiration one more time! and I have a question about L-R method, 'coz of your log and Teango's log too, I want to study with this method, so what are the steps for it?
What I'm doing:
1) read L1 text
2) read L1 text while listening to the audio
3) read L2 text while listening to the audio
Is this right?
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| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4997 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish
| Message 85 of 88 21 July 2011 at 5:48pm | IP Logged |
Hi Dreamer, nice to see you here again! Teango's log was my reason for LR too :)
LR is a method that uses 'understandable input' to get you results. This means, that you should know what you are about to hear in order to make sense of the input (Spanish audio in my case). The better you know what you are going to hear, the more your brain can make sense of the Spanish audio.
What you say is pretty correct. The first step is simply to get a first understanding of the text you are about to hear in Spanish. The second step is to give you the option to read a little ahead in English and then to try to link this to what you hear.
Once you know the text really well, you can try to LR with using the Spanish text along side the Spanish audio (your step 3). As you may notice, this reduces the amount of 'understandable input', as you only have the target language to guide you. So your third step doesn't really help you comprehend the text better. It does, however, let you link everything you have learned from the audio to the written text. Also, it helps you to really distinguish words.
What I did when I first started was the following.
I did your step 2 with the first Harry Potter book and repeated this three times. Hence, I was really exposed to the vocab in the first book and knew the text really well so I was able to focus really on the audio and only needed to glance at the English text to make sure I knew what I was about to hear.
After that, I did the same thing with the second book. Three times I completed your second step.
It was only after that, that I did your step 3 with both books.
Now, after having done a lot of hours of LR already, I completely skip step 1, do one run through step 2 and then move on to the next book. But this is more difficult, as you really need to juggle between your reading and your listening.
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| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4997 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish
| Message 86 of 88 21 July 2011 at 7:21pm | IP Logged |
Día 38/60
1 hora Assimil lección 31 + review lección 30
3 horas LR L2-L1 Harry Potter y el Cáliz de Fuego Capítulos 6-10
Total 1: 75,50 horas
Total 2: 125,5 horas
Assimil covered the days of the week and stuff like that. Some nice idioms and vocab in there. It seems that in the first 28 lessons, Assimil tried to give you most of the grammar, so it can use all of the tenses in the next 81 lessons. Now that those tenses are covered and we just need to get handy with them, you start to learn all the things you need to learn when you want to get to A2 level. Things like days of the week, months, seasons, counting, telling the way. It is a good thing to do this I think.
Reading was nice. The shit just hit the fan in chapters 9 and 10, in 11 they finally go to Hogwarts. The audio is still very strange. Sometimes, you can hear very clearly what is said. Other times, it is very vague because of some sort of distortion. Sometimes they just suddenly switch narrator or something like that. It keeps you on your toes and really makes you listen.
As I said earlier, the first three HP books started in almost the same way. First, he is with his family. Then he goes to his friends in order to go to Hogwarts. While there, he starts to take classes. This uses up about 10 chapters in each of these books. Because of this, the vocab used in these chapters is very similar in each of the books and thus makes it much easier to comprehend.
Once the great adventure of the book starts to unravel, the book gets more complicated to follow as the vocab used changes.
This book however had a different set up. Hence, the vocab used was already different in the first chapter. This made it more difficult to follow in the beginning.
Now, I am starting to get more familiar with it, so things are improving again:)
The upcoming days I might not be able to do much, Spanish wise. I will be at a friends house partying for a few days. So I will have to make up for those lost days sometime..
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| supertom Diglot Groupie Joined 4997 days ago 87 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish
| Message 87 of 88 13 February 2012 at 1:28pm | IP Logged |
Long time no see!
After a break of about six months I am starting again with my Spanish studies. This time a little less intensive, as I noticed it took a lot out of me.
At this point in time, I don't have the time to do three hours each day of intensive study. So I will start slow and just try to pick things up again. Keep the ball rolling so to speak.
To get back into things, I am reviewing all the lessons I have done from Assimil. Today, I did lesson 1-3. This was ofcourse very easy for, but I don't mind. I just dont want to rush it.
Yesterday I read a little (half an hour or something) Spanish.
I will try to do some lessons of Assimil and some reading/listening each day.
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| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French
| Message 88 of 88 14 February 2012 at 1:49am | IP Logged |
Welcome back. I have found your thoughts on LR useful. It is nice to see you are going to get back to studying Spanish.
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