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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5622 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 41 of 46 02 January 2014 at 6:09pm | IP Logged |
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It's really important to review what you've covered when learning a foreign language, as it may take many times of exposure before you can comfortably reproduce vocabulary or a language pattern fairly accurately. If that review is already built into the Destinos course, then that's a huge bonus.
Mucha suerte con tus estudios. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4811 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 42 of 46 08 January 2014 at 7:32am | IP Logged |
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Platiquemos 14
Assimil 81 Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal 2 chapters Destinos 52 Notes in Spanish 19 Scrubs 32 Anki I had a good and highly productive first week of the new year. I hope I continue this pattern! I'm finished with Destinos! Yay! I do think it was very helpful, but it definitely was pretty annoying. I know that review is good, but I just feel like it was mostly done poorly. At the end of the series there were several episodes back-to-back reviewing the whole series, and at the beginning of each episode they showed parts of what you were going to see in that episode. But they were flashback episodes! They were previewing the reviews! Sheesh. I think I just wanted it the story to move faster, or at least for there to be more story in general. 52 episodes and, honestly, not much happened. I could sum up the series pretty well in a few sentences. Oh well--enough complaining! I'm glad I watched it all. I'm chugging right along with the other programs. I'll be done with Assimil soon. I'm hoping to finish the Notes in Spanish beginner podcasts soonish so I can move on to the intermediate series. Reading Harry Potter is already coming along well. Surprisingly well actually. I'm two chapters in and I'm already seeing huge improvements in how easy paragraphs are to read. I'm adding all unknown words and phrases to anki. I know this whole process is extremely helpful so I definitely want to spend a significant amount of time on this portion of my studies. This will probably be my last update before I go to Cabo. I leave a week from tomorrow. I'm going with my company and we're staying on a resort. I'm not sure if we'll be able to leave the resort. So I doubt I'll be able to speak with many natives in Spanish. Hopefully I get a little bit of practice though! Wish me luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4997 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 43 of 46 08 January 2014 at 11:04am | IP Logged |
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Interesting to see your thoughts on Destinos. I've watched about ten episodes so far, and I mostly like it but the repetition and the explanations at the start about the conversational Spanish etc. are getting a bit too much and I keep hoping they tone them down a bit. I'm getting a bit sick of hearing the story of the lost dog over and over again! That said though, a lot of the repetition is quite useful and I'm picking up some useful stuff from it; it's a good complement to other courses as I get to see things I've been learning from Assimil etc. in context. I've been watching an episode most days.
I've done 14 lessons of Assimil and I like it, I'd say it's been my favourite Assimil I've done so far in terms of humour, so it's a shame to hear that it gets depressing and weird as it goes on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4811 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 44 of 46 09 December 2014 at 5:27am | IP Logged |
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Well well well, it´s been a hot minute, hasn't it? After I went to Cabo last year I pretty much
gave up my studies. I had a good trip and got to speak Spanish to some natives, but the realization that my actual trip was more than a year away left me without a lot of motivation upon my return. I still plan to embark on a trip to Central and South America this March / April. Now that it's 4~ months away I've started my Spanish studies again, and I'm having a blast! Unbelievably, it seems like the 10 month break didn't hurt me as badly as I thought it would. I picked up right about where I left off without even accumulating too much rust. Who'da thunk it? I've also given up on Platiquemos, at least for now. I've been studying again for about three weeks now and I'm looking forward to it every day. Last year at this time I was dreading every Platiquemos lesson. I know it's really thorough, but I just hated doing it, and when I did do the lessons I half-***ed them (can we curse here? ha). I started using Duolingo. It was pretty easy overall and I finished the entire Spanish tree relatively quickly. I've started doing the reverse tree (English tree for people who speak Spanish) which is interesting. I haven't decided yet whether I'll put in the time to finish it. I recommend Duolingo though--it's not super thorough but it became addicting. I know it helped me and it was fun. I can't ask for anything more than that. I'm actually not extremely sure what my studies will entail in the future. I'm almost done with Assimil. I finished Duolingo (although I still might do the reverse tree). I don't really want to continue with Platiquemos. I'm guessing it will be heavy on Harry Potter, which is A-Okay with me! I'm already reading at a decent speed. If I weren't looking up every unknown word and putting them in Anki I could probably crank through it pretty quickly. I finished with Notes in Spanish Beginner and moved onto the Intermediate podcasts. I enjoy the intermediate ones so much more since they don't have English in them. I find them easy to understand and rarely miss a word. I should plow through those pretty quickly and move onto the Advanced podcasts soon. I'm going to Mexico in less than two months with my company again. I'm sure I'll be on the resort the whole time again with limited chances to speak with natives. Still, it'll be fun. Then a couple months later I'll be quitting and heading south for real. I plan to take a bus to Monterrey in northern Mexico and keep heading south south south. I plan to be down there at least a year if things go according to plan. And I don't have any intentions of returning to the US afterwards. I. Can't. Wait...! Anywho, here are where I am with each of my thingymajigs: Assimil 96 Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal 6 chapters Anki 30 words a day Notes in Spanish Beginner (finished!) Notes in Spanish Intermediate 8 Duolingo level 12 (finished the tree) Scrubs 56 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4811 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 45 of 46 20 December 2014 at 1:18am | IP Logged |
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Today marks one month since I started studying Spanish again this year. Things are going
really well. As a reminder, you can look at a really easy to digest overview of what I do everyday here. Green means I completed my goals for the day. Yellow is I completed some of them but not all. Red is I did nothing. I had three red days in a row when I went to San Francisco over Thanksgiving. But I was really busy seeing friends and family and it was my first time in the city so I was going all over. December is shaping up to be my best study month to date. If anyone is considering making a spreadsheet like the above one to track your daily progress, I highly recommend it! It's extremely motivating. I do whatever it takes to avoid putting a red blotch on my pretty little spreadsheet! :) I'm almost finished with Assimil. It always feels good to finish something! Cruising through the Notes in Spanish intermediates and looking forward to the advanced ones. Not sure what I want to do with Duolingo. For now I'm basically just keeping my skill tree golden. It's providing me a useful review that I enjoy doing so I'll do that for the foreseeable future. In addition to Scrubs, I started watching Avatar in Spanish. I started the series in French and just never finished it for some reason. So I'm excited to see where it ends up--what I watched of it was really good. The dialogue is much easier for me to follow than Scrubs as well, so it's good that I can mix the native resources I use between children and adult targeted. Reading Harry Potter is going surprisingly well at this point. When my French got to this point I had already been living in Belgium for a handful of months. I'm alternating between reading, listening to the audio book, and listening to the audio book while I read along. Assimil 106 Harry Potter y La Piedra Filosofal 15 chapters Anki 30 words a day Notes in Spanish Intermediate 37 Duolingo 50xp /day Scrubs finished season 3 El Avatar 5 That's about it. I'm sure my studies will dip down as I travel back home for Christmas. I'll try my hardest not to have any red days though. My psyche is high! Let's learn some languages guys! Edited by LeadZeppelin on 20 December 2014 at 1:20am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| LeadZeppelin Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4811 days ago 59 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 46 of 46 30 December 2014 at 8:25pm | IP Logged |
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I had a good Christmas break and didn't miss any days! If I make sure to study tomorrow
that will make the entire month of December that I studied Spanish every day. I've made a whole lot of progress too, so it's exciting to see that with practice comes results. I finished three resources since my last post: Assimil, the first Harry Potter book, and Notes in Spanish Intermediate. I've since started the second Harry Potter book and Notes in Spanish Advanced. I like the speed of the advanced podcasts, but since they were recorded before the others that I've already listened to, Ben's Spanish is noticeably worse. I wish he would let Marina speak more. Some episodes he says "Bueno, pues nada" every couple minutes, which I guess is better than saying "ummm," but does get a little annoying. I should stop complaining about free resources though.. During the holiday break, I started playing an old video game with one of my friends back home. I played this game as a kid and it was pretty nostalgic. When I came back to Colorado I looked if there was a Spanish translation for it, and there was! I got it up and running in a jiffy. I've been playing this some since I've been back. 
Who said learning languages had to be boring study? :) This particular game is called Tales of Destiny. I also found a translation for Breath of Fire III, so who knows, I might play through that again too. I've done this in the past with French translations of Chrono Trigger and Xenogears. I think, in general, playing video games is a waste of my time, so I don't do it. But if there's a lot of dialogue in my target language, I think it's all right. The only other thing worth noting is that I started the Schaum's Spanish Grammar book. I used the French version of the same book a few years ago and it helped me tremendously. I'm excited to go through it. I finished the first chapter last night. I highly highly recommend this book. It really helps drill a lot of the intricacies of the language's grammar. I write out all the exercises on paper, which forces me to think about it more and hopefully helps with retention. Assimil 109 ( finished! ) Harry Potter 1 | 17 chapters ( finished! ) Notes in Spanish Intermediate 46 ( finished! ) Anki 30 words a day Duolingo 50+ xp /day Harry Potter 2 | 3 chapters Schaum's Grammar - 1.41 Scrubs 4.9 El Avatar 22 Notes in Spanish Advanced 5 ¡Feliz año nuevo a todos! Edited by LeadZeppelin on 30 December 2014 at 8:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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