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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4561 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 25 of 83 26 October 2014 at 4:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Unit 13 started out amazingly easy. The very first time through, I had only one drill
where I regularly could not keep up the pace. I made a few random errors, but for the most part it was OK. It is tempting to only do it a couple of times and move ahead, but I don't trust myself to avoid second guessing my decision later on. I'm going to just keep at the same one unit a week pace. There is nothing wrong with an easy week of FSI. I definitely am starting to have positive effects on my spoken Spanish. I still fumble, but its a lot more accurate fumbling than it was. I had fun talking to a couple of young ladies in the class I teach (11 yeqr olds). One of them could not read Spanish at all; she is a fluent native speaker of the language who does not know where the words begin and end. She reads English well. The other girl reads books for adults in Spanish. I'm thinking of loaning Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosfal to the girl who can't read. We had fun the last couple of minutes before the last bell on Friday translating the stuff on the blackboard to Spanish. Lang-8 shows that I still fall into way too many traps with irregular features of the language. I'm going to try put up 5 little posts a week there in hopes that I can eventually get to the point where I can write without messing something up every other sentence. I switched back to Garcia-Marquez sentences in anki. The newspaper sentences were too easy. After about 6500 cards in anki, I think I may be reaching the point where I'm not getting as much out of it. I hoped to reach the point where I can read straightforward, thriller type books in Spanish and I'm about there. An anki deck is pretty easy to keep up, however, if you reduce the number of new cards, and let the reviews spiral down. I think I'm really going to be ready for some L-R and extensive reading when I'm done with FSI. About 10 and a half months to the FSI finish line... 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 26 of 83 03 November 2014 at 4:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Unit 13 was easy, and I was pretty good with it the first time through. I never really got much better. I think it bored me enough that I had a tendency to zone out while doing it, so I didn't improve that much.
I've moved on to Unit 14, which seems marginally harder than 13. My main problem here is speed. I know the answer, but before I can spit it out, the answer is ringing in my ears. After two times through, I still am too slow to get a lot of it. I have five more trips through before I move on, and I usually am pretty accurate the last couple of times through. We'll see. There was a new voice in the lesson, and the conversation seemed slower than before. I liked the old way better. The drills are plenty fast for me, though... I am continuing to have explosive growth in my reading ability. It may have something to do with FSI, but I bet it has more to do with my 10000 sentences deck. I think I've hit the level where I could productively do the super challenge, at last. I've done 77509 anki reps during 274 hours of study with anki over the past year, so I guess it's not surprising that it has had some impact on my reading. I've made and deleted a lot of cards over that past year; I find it better to create a bunch of cards, knowing that I'm going to delete many, rather than trying to cull them before they get into the deck. I just made a bunch of cloze (kind of MCD) cards today; I'll try them tomorrow, and I may delete the whole lot. Since I've been using sentences from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I've cut down my number of new cards way below what it was most of the past year. If I'm dealing with long sentences that have multiple unfamiliar words, it takes longer to do each rep. The sentences from gabo seem very worthwhile, however, so I think it's better to keep grinding at them. Edited to fix my usual typos that make me wonder if I am a native speaker of English... Edited by sfuqua on 03 November 2014 at 4:47am 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 27 of 83 06 November 2014 at 1:31am | IP Logged | ||
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This is more of a note to myself for later.
The first three times through I didn't really do very well with unit 14. I started to wonder if this is where I would hit the wall. Am I incapable of doing this? The fourth time through most of the problems went away. I still can't keep up the pace for one of the drills, and the response drills are still weird, but it's almost there. I have to remind myself that I am making progress, even when I'm not quite succeeding. I'm pretty sure I could perfect the drills faster if I would just work on one drill at a time until I get it, but I'm going to keep up my simplistic "once through a unit a day for a week" approach for now... Edited by sfuqua on 06 November 2014 at 1:32am 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 28 of 83 11 November 2014 at 5:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm glad I wrote that note a few days ago. I'm sort of discouraged right now. The first three times through unit 14, I stunk it up. The fourth time, I had a few problems, but it was much better. It took me all the way to the seventh trip through before I hit it right.
Unit 15 has started out worse. I hate it that they don't include the whole conversation without pauses at the beginning. The sound quality on this lesson is a little below what it was in some of the previous lessons, and I had trouble figuring out what was going on, which made it hard to repeat lessons. I finally got out the printed lesson and did the lesson with the printed lesson, which makes it much clearer what was going on. I wasn't sure I was learning much reading along with the lesson. There really isn't anything in the lesson that is unfamiliar, it is just challenging to hear the prompt, understand it and build an answer during the pause. I happened to look at the instructions to the DLI Headstart lessons, and I saw their suggestion that if the lesson was too hard, do it with the printed lesson until you understand it, if it is too fast use the pause switch, but don't think you're finished until you can do it at full speed without the book. It sounds like a good approach, but I wonder if I can get it done in a week. I know I said that I would just keep moving ahead whether I have mastered anything or not. I hate the idea of rushing through the course getting slower and less successful as I go along. Knowing my personality, I'm probably more likely try for too much perfection. Anyway, I started this post discouraged, and then I saw my note from a few days ago. I'll keep plugging away. Wow, there is a long way to go, and there is no way to get away from doing the work in FSI. Edited by sfuqua on 11 November 2014 at 5:19am 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 29 of 83 11 November 2014 at 5:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I was just thinking about goals. I will finish FSI. It seems to work wonders for other people; I hope it will for me.
I would be real happy if I could get into the B1/B2 range. For someone who doesn't live in an immersion environment, it may be really hard to get beyond that. I see no limits to my reading, as long as the eyes and brain work. Even if I stay an A2 speaking, it'll be another data point. People can say, "FSI worked for everybody except that 61 year old guy." I'm not planning on that, I'm going to fight FSI to the end, and I'm planning on a big boost to my speaking. My reading is going through the roof these days, so something is going right in the old brain. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7001 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 30 of 83 11 November 2014 at 9:54am | IP Logged | ||
I know you can do it. I'm glad you're keeping a log. It's really helpful to look back and see where you've been and where you're going. The neat thing is, if you keep plugging away, a few weeks from now you'll think the lessons that you're doing now are pretty easy. It's current lesson unit that's hard. :) I went through the same thing with FSI Spanish and I still get it with FSI French. I tended to back up and do more reviews with FSI Spanish. It's good to keep a balance. Thanks for publishing your notes on the DLI instructions. Those seem helpful regardless of the language. Another thing I've found with FSI, especially since I usually do it away from the book is that reading the grammar points and sometimes the lessons themselves was very helpful. That's especially true when something isn't clear. With you're reading powers and experience with the audio, reading quickly through a section will be a breeze. 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 31 of 83 11 November 2014 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, going through FSI with a plan to review the lessons somehow is important. I did the entire course and then after some time off I went back and went through the entire course again. I have resisted desires to do it a third time. I found going through it two full times was a great way to do it. I think I did each lesson three times the first run through (and moved on no matter what) and then twice for each lesson the second time. Constant progress will get you through. I felt the lessons really did not get "harder" until the fourth section so moving on after a set amount of days on each lesson should not be a problem... especially if you plan to do a full review.
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| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4561 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 32 of 83 16 November 2014 at 5:26am | IP Logged | ||
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I've thought a lot about learning, FSI, and me over the past few days. On the fifth time through unit 15 I got most of it up to speed. The sixth time through, I looked carefully at where I was still having difficulty. My difficulty with this lesson seems to be centered on one 4 minute translation section. Usually these drills do clear variations on the same theme. This one combined changing tense, aspect, number, dropping or keeping pronoun, and inverting word order for questions. I hammered it for an hour, and started doing it right.
The FSI tapes were originally designed to be a supplement to classroom learning. As such they focus on practice rather than teaching. When I first started this FSI project, I read the lesson earlier in the day. I didn't find this very useful, since I was already familiar with the structures involved. I've cut down on reading, only doing it the first two times through the unit. I just realized that there are many other things I could do with the printed lessons. Last night, I worked through unit 15 using the printed material. For each conversation or drill, I first worked through each "answer" repeating the sentence aloud without looking at the page. In fact I repeated each sentence aloud three times in a row, to be sure I had it down. Then I went through each conversation or drill looking at the English translation, or the prompts for the drill. When I got to the point where I could produce the correct responses all the way through three times in a row without a mistake, I would move on to the next drill. This mastering the drills from the printed page with no time pressure made doing the drill at full speed much easier. I think I'm going to try something like this with Unit 16, which I start tomorrow. I notice there is a reading section to Unit 16; I'll have to figure out what I'm going to do with it when I get to it... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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