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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| rtickner Diglot Groupie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3314 days ago 61 posts - 95 votes  Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French, Spanish | Message 73 of 83 11 June 2015 at 8:47am | IP Logged |
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Thank you for taking the time to write about your experiences with FSI Spanish, reading,
and your other pursuits along the way. You've almost convinced me to incorporate the course into my own Spanish study plan. Admitted it is a "grind", but it doesn't seem to have eroded your enthusiasm. Great work, looking forward to reading more of your log. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4561 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 74 of 83 14 June 2015 at 8:19am | IP Logged |
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OK, getting near done with Unit 38.
It is clear from the instructions that the originators of the course intended for students to memorize the material one Unit at a time from beginning to end. If I was spending full time studying Spanish, maybe this would be a good approach, but I think that with the time and energy I have to devote to this, that something less than total memorization is better. I do a lesson until I understand it completely, which is about 3 times. I'm not going to get through this course if I try to go through each lesson 6 times. I can always go back and review later. I ran a few more books through the readability formulas, and I found that La Ciudad y los Perros by Vargas-llosa scores as even easier than Detectives Salvajes. I gave a quick read of the first few pages, and it seems a little harder than DS, which shows the weakness of mathematical formulas for calculating readability. I'm getting a bookshelf of books ready for the end of FSI. I know that the logical things for me to read are young adult things translated from English and native language versions, but I'm really, really hungy do bite into some literature. I continue to be shocked by how well I can read, all of a sudden. Obviously things cominng in from reading and FSI are fitting together there. As I've said before, I think that FSI increases the saliency of grammatical points which can have a rapid impact on overall comprehension. I'm surprised other FSIers haven't commented on this. 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 75 of 83 14 June 2015 at 12:51pm | IP Logged |
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It took me quite a while after finishing FSI to be comfortable reading. FSI gives the structure so there will not be any verb forms, constructions or pronouns that look strange when you read. I just don't think it gives enough vocabulary. That being said, I did skip the reading sections of FSI! :)
The whole thing about reading kids books, etc before getting into literature is over blown... I think. I have not yet read any literature that was originally written in Spanish, but I can say that many adult books are easier to read than many books for teenagers. The things that seems to make the biggest differences are reading books that I have read before in English and reading on my kindle. Also, reading what you want makes it a lot easier. Most of the time I read in the morning, but occasionally I'll be reading a book that I simply cannot put down and I take it everywhere and sneak in 15 minutes here and there. That makes a HUGE difference if you can find something like that. I'm totally with you on doing each FSI lesson three times and then pressing on. That's definitely the way to go. Keep an open mind when you start in on the last ten lessons, however, as they are very different than the first 45. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4561 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 76 of 83 23 June 2015 at 6:09pm | IP Logged |
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OK, done with Unit 40; I may review it today, but I'm going to start 41. I'm getting near the "hard lessons", but I'm going to push forward. I really want to finish this. I don't think that it is important to memorize the lessons, although I'm sure that's how FSI did the original lessons. The recent units on the subjunctive were excellent. I have studied when to use the subjunctive before, and done grammar exercises where I picked which form to use, while looking at a list of rules. The FSI exercises put this "on the tip of the tongue", and this is a very different thing. I would say that I absolutely have the rules down that we have covered in FSI. Will I still make mistakes when I use them? Sure, sometimes. But they will never confuse me again when I hear or read them. There is a lot more to learn about the subjunctive, of course; I haven't even started the past subjunctive yet, and I really don't understand when to use it other than in clauses that are the past tense equivalent of present tense subjunctive uses that I already know (and that may be wrong). I also know it gets used in requests, for some reason. Dont worry; the upcoming lessons will cover this.
I've been doing an experiment recently, which seems to be working, but I know is not the cup of tea for everyone. Let me explain why. The extensive reading I've been doing shows that I know enough to follow the story, but it also shows that there are many words that I don't know and can't even really guess, even if they aren't terribly important to the story. It seems to me that it will take a very long time to learn these words, just from reading. I've learned from doing FSI that studying something can increase the saliency of a part of the language that you need to learn, so I decided to use some word lists get a little basic familiarity with some words. If I can skip something and still get the "gist", I don't learn it very well or very fast. I decided to try an "Iverson list". The best way to do this is to make lists of words you need to learn for the reading that you are doing, but I don't want to give up any of my Spanish time to make a word list. What I did was to combine three word lists, one made from opensubtitles.org Spanish subtitles, another from the Lifcach list of Chilean Spanish, and also the Routeledge (sp)frequency list. I removed extra copies of words in more than one list. The opensubtitles list includes different forms of the same word (mujer, mujeres), which is redundant, but that also means in includes all the common forms of all the common words, including irregular forms. They other two lists only contain the "dictionary forms" of words, which means they go deeper. My list contains about the first 30,000 words from each the lists (the Routeledge list only has 5000 words). I have 50000 words in the list. I folded the words, and their definitions into lists of five words at a time, and I I made anki cards out of the word lists, and the lists of their definitions. So each time I see a list, I have to run through each of the definitions, which slows down the card, but which seems to make the meaning sink deeper. I unchecked the "bury related cards" box, and I entered the card as the "basic forward and reverse" cards, which means that each day I will study the word lists in both directions. Using frequency lists containing dictionary headwords and doing my best guess, it seems that my passive vocabulary in Spanish is about 6000-8000 words; my active vocabulary is harder to test, but is much, much lower. When I do these lists, I usually know some of the words, sometimes almost all, and occasionally all of the words, in the passive direction. My cards look like this: FRONT: comestibles chicureo socialistas ciudadania panecillos BACK: 18581 groceries = c_s 18582 chicureo (place) = c_o 18582 Socialists = s_s 18583 citizenship = c_a 18583 rolls = p_s Of course, picking the correct gloss for a word is complex, but I did it mechanically out of the dictionaries I could find online. There are some really bad mistakes, but if something doesn't make sense, I fix the card. When I get a "leech", I'll change the definition to include a "keyword" or some other clue to make the word easier. The list is very imperfect, but it took about an hour to produce. I'm studying 20 new cards a day, and since I'm studying the cards in both directions, that means only 10 new cards a day, but at five words a card, I'm studying 50 "new" words a day, which adds up fast. 200 days to 10000 words. Since I already know 6000-8000 words, and I'm working through the first 20000 words first, I'm actually seeing maybe 20 new words that I'm unfamiliar with. I'll use this list for a while; I really doubt that I'll word through all 10000 cards/50000 words. But a half hour a day over coffee, or while ignoring the TV news may be able to push my vocabulary high enough that I don't have to worry about vocabulary. Anyway, my ability to read and understand is exploding, and I can talk much better than before... Perhaps this year, or early next, I can get the B1 active/C1 passive. It's funny how studyig Spanish gets easier and more effective when you know more Spanish... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4561 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 77 of 83 23 June 2015 at 6:11pm | IP Logged |
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Since it's summer vacation, I can go through two units a day. I plan to finish as fast as I can stand it, so that I can move on...
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4561 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 78 of 83 23 June 2015 at 6:37pm | IP Logged |
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I forgot to mention what I've been reading lately, _Las Hijas de Juarez_. If you want to know what level my Spanish is at, that book is a pretty good measure. I can read it with little effort, but I do see the occasional unfamiliar word.
I'm actually going to lay off reading it for the most part to spend more time on FSI.. I have a stack next to my bed of Spanish books, and I do dip into this when I go to sleep, but I've got to finish this FSI thing... Forward! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4561 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 79 of 83 24 June 2015 at 4:50am | IP Logged |
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The other thing I'm doing is watching "El gran hotel"
with subtitles. Delightful. The Castilian Spanish takes me back to Assimil, and I found myself imitating the accent while doing FSI. I do find Peninsula Spanish very appealing, probably because it sounds exotic to someone living in a sea of Mexican Spanish. Edited by sfuqua on 24 June 2015 at 3:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4561 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 80 of 83 29 June 2015 at 5:18pm | IP Logged |
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I'm doing a quick rerun through lessons 37 to 42 this week. The subjunctive made
sense the first couple of units, but I found the explanations in units 40 and 41 incomprehensible. I'd like to be a little sharper on the drills and then read the explanations again. It will take 5 days, and then I'll try to get back to my regular schedule. My weird little Iverson list experiment is actually working, sort of. I have been getting about 50 words a day from groups of 6 words. Since it is from a frequency list that I already know many of the words in a passive direction, maybe 20 or so words are unfamiliar. I've been running into some of the words while reading, which lets me read a little better without looking up words. This suggests that the process is not useless, or maybe I just like anki. I kind of like big goals I can finish, even if I've been whining about FSI lately. Some possible big goals: 10000 sentences in anki (done) finish FSI (70% done) 10000 words from Iverson lists in anki (I'm not sure if I really want to do this) 10000 pages reading (for sure, a 2 year project, just keep adding up the pages) 100-200 hours L-R (maybe, not sure if this would be useful) 100-200 hours reading aloud (this was very useful to me when learning Samoan, I'd like to try it for Spanish) Edited by sfuqua on 29 June 2015 at 5:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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