Hank's Adventure in Spanish (Now with 100% more Welsh!)

[Hank]

Estoy escuhando a música banda y norteño mientras escribo. No entiendo todas las palabras, pero la música me cae bien. No puedo concentrar bien cuando veo una programa de televisión mientras trato de escribir. Escuchaba al música no me molesta cuando escribo.

¿Esto es un uso correcto de la frase <me cae bien>?

Reading- This first half of Apocalipsis Z: Los días oscuros was a little slow. I guess it just took the author some time to set up the new scene. The second half has picked up nicely. Manel Loureiro is really good at writing cliffhangers at the end of chapters, and since the chapters are alternating between two characters now it's really hard to put the book down. I'll probably finish it this week. My main complaint is from a language learning standpoint. I think he uses every synonym for scared in the book: frightened, afraid, shocked, terrified, etc. It's terribly difficult to keep them all straight!

I think I noticed a bump in my reading comprehension this week.

Listening- I finished episode 41 of La reina del sur last night. I can follow along rarely, and usually I still have to check the dialogue against the subtitles. Kind of annoying, but it seems to be working overall. I decided that it might be a good idea to get some more comprehensible input, so I started listening to Veinte Mundos podcasts. Listening and reading back and forth until I mostly fully understand what's being said. I listen first before I read the transcript and so far I have been following along very well on the first listen. I find the stories on Radio Ambulante interesting, but I just can't hear them well enough in my Jeep. I watched some Despierta América and some episodes of Vecinos and La familia P. Luche.

We were at the local Subway restaurant this week, and there was a family there where apparently only the dad spoke English. He was speaking to his family in Spanish and speaking to the employee in English. I understood them very well, which was cool. There was some confusion when the mom said she wanted "queso blanco". Eventually she decided that she wanted "queso americano", but the husband asked for provolone for her sandwich. I'm not sure what that was all about, but if it was a joke on his part I thought it was pretty funny.

Output- I'm still writing and inner dialogue-ing regularly. It's getting easier to write, express myself, and express myself quickly, but I still haven't had any conversations for a while. I really need to get off my lazy duff and find some partners. I know I say that a lot, but some day I'm actually going to do it!

Deutsch- All I did with German this week was research courses. Assimil sounds pretty good, and I may give that a shot if/when I ever start German. Pimsleur also sounds good, but not for the price. The language learning process is fun, but I'm not where I want to be with Spanish yet.

[Allison]

Estoy escuhando a música banda y norteño mientras escribo. No entiendo todas las palabras, pero la música me cae bien. No puedo concentrar bien cuando veo una programa de televisión mientras trato de escribir. Escuchaba al música no me molesta cuando escribo.

¿Esto es un uso correcto de la frase <me cae bien>?

My impression, and this WordReference thread backs me up, was that "me cae bien" and other conjugations of the phrase are only used with people, though the WordReference thread has exceptions for animals and food. (With the obligatory disclaimer that I'm just a learner like you, of course. Also, you can respond in Spanish if you want—I just don't feel like writing in Spanish right now.)

I finished episode 41 of La reina del sur last night.

Ah, you've overtaken me in La reina del sur episodes. I figured this would happen at our respective paces.

I can follow along rarely, and usually I still have to check the dialogue against the subtitles. Kind of annoying, but it seems to be working overall. I decided that it might be a good idea to get some more comprehensible input, so I started listening to Veinte Mundos podcasts. Listening and reading back and forth until I mostly fully understand what's being said. I listen first before I read the transcript and so far I have been following along very well on the first listen. I find the stories on Radio Ambulante interesting, but I just can't hear them well enough in my Jeep. I watched some Despierta América and some episodes of Vecinos and La familia P. Luche.

Related to this paragraph, I'm going to repost and respond to your post from last week about listening comprehension, despite not having more language learning experience than you, in the hopes that someone who does will respond—I'm curious about what people will say!

I could use some advice from folks that have more language learning experience than what I have. Specifically in regard to listening comprehension.

Intensively watching La reina del sur has given a big boost to my listening comprehension, but all the rewinding and concentration is starting to become a drag. I know...my laziness is showing. I watched an episode last night without subtitles and for the most part didn't get terribly lost. I occasionally watch TV shows without subtitles (Vecinos is awesome!) and can usually at least follow along without getting terribly lost. So if I'm watching a show without subtitles, and I'm at least getting the gist of the dialogue, is this helping my comprehension? This is the same dilemma I have with intensive vs. extensive reading. Extensive reading, for learning purposes, makes no sense to me even though it appears to be the most preferred method from forum members. I'm not disputing it, I just can't wrap my head around how extensive reading is helpful. At this point I can read extensively for the most part and do just fine. Including most of the details, but occasionally looking up words of phrases when I realize that I'm missing something important. But didn't I get to this point because of all the intensive reading that I do? I'm not saying that I'm going to, or want to, totally stop intensively watching Spanish language programs. It's definitely fun to be able to watch a show and follow along, even if it's not perfect, but I want to be able to understand it perfectly at some point.

My experience was that I was waffling on whether or not to watch without subtitles and I was worried about not understanding everything, but that when I ripped off the band-aid and watched without subtitles, it led me to several jumps in comprehension. My confidence in ripping that band-aid off was that people who have learned languages to a high level say it worked for them. For example, in this post, Cavesa encourages people to leave their comfort zone and, in particular, to leave subtitles behind despite worrying about not understanding.

Two posts above that, emk lays out his Cheating & Consolidating graphic and theory. My recent reading experience has been a great example of this theory: my early intensive reading got me a lot of vocabulary and understanding of structure and then when I read a book without looking anything up, I was learning some vocabulary through context and repetition, sure, but it was more about understanding things on a forest-level rather than tree-level and improving my speed (which I see as an approximation of automatization and helps in increasing the amount of input you can devour). From what you say, you may be at a point where you understand enough that watching without subtitles is a worthwhile "consolidating" activity for listening comprehension, while still "cheating" through other methods because of context, visual clues, and the fact that you've watched 41 episodes already.

All that said, like you, I think intensive watching/reading has its place. After watching a lot of episodes without subtitles, when I watched an episode with subtitles, I could feel that it was a powerful way to dig in and more narrowly focus on hearing every word of the dialogue . I've never really done the kind of intensive rewinding stuff you're talking about, but I imagine it's a similar feeling. However, since you're naturally feeling less comfortable with no subtitles, I'll still make a push for leaving subtitles behind and sticking with it, particularly if you plan on doing intensive work with other material like the veintemundos articles.

This is totally unrelated to the previous question. The episode of La reina del sur I watched last night had some characters speaking Italian. I had the Netflix subtitles turned off, but the show itself had Spanish subtitles for the Italian dialogue. I was amazed at the similarities between the two languages. I could almost follow the Italian dialogue. Pretty cool.

I was struck by the similarities too when I watched that episode. And probably around the same time, I was able to read some Italian with basic understanding just from Spanish knowledge, which was pretty cool yet weird. It made me suddenly understand in a visceral way all the talk of related language discounts and being able to use native materials sooner.

[Hank]

Thanks, Allison.

I suspect you're right about leaving my comfort zone with subtitles, but it's called a comfort zone for a reason. It's comfortable, and comfortable is nice. As far as catching up to you in episodes, one of the abilities I really want to have is to be able to watch TV so I have been studying listening quite a bit. Before I even started studying Spanish I would occasionally turn to one of the Spanish language channels and think how cool it would be to be able to understand what was being said. The weird thing about this is that I watch very little non-sports TV and no serials at all in English.

In the past I have read the posts that you referenced and I vaguely remember what they said, but I'll read through them again. I know I get into my head at times in regard to language learning. I definitely see improvement in my listening comprehension. In fact, I watched a few minutes of Un camino hacia el destino last night and it was almost an "I forgot it was Spanish" moment. I actually do quite a bit of extensive TV watching but I'm just not sure how helpful it is in the overall picture. Or more likely, I can't wrap my head around how extensive reading/listening works like I mentioned. I didn't really see any big jumps in comprehension until I started intensively watching La reina del sur.

It's also possible that I'm just being an impatient perfectionist.

[Allison]

I suspect you're right about leaving my comfort zone with subtitles, but it's called a comfort zone for a reason.

True, true. I've been watching the last few episodes with subtitles because I've been so tired, so I'm with you there—probably a lot of my encouragement to watch without subtitles was also directed at myself.

In fact, I watched a few minutes of Un camino hacia el destino last night and it was almost an "I forgot it was Spanish" moment.

That's awesome!

[iguanamon]

My desire when training listening is to move away from TL subtitles. Accurate TL subtitles can be a tremendous boost when training listening but when they become relied upon too much, then listening doesn't really get trained because the learner has become accustomed to having them and may not realize that they are doing more reading than actual listening. Obviously, to each their own, but speaking for myself, it is nice to be able to listen without them. It does have its downside though, now I have to listen to annoying airline/airport announcements in both Spanish and English because I can't just ignore them- twice the pain. There's a price to pay for being multilingual,

A good way to use subtitles in the training of listening is to use them as an answer key- a check against comprehension. When I was training listening to Portuguese with a novela (with no subtitles available) I took copious notes in shorthand sometimes transcribing whole dialogs, which I would go over with my tutor. It was mind-melting at first but I got to the point after fifty or so episodes to where I was reviewing three to four episodes a week instead of just one. For Spanish, all the scripted shows for Telemundo have Spanish subs available, over broadcast and the website. In this way subtitles, or a subtitle file/parallel text, can serve as a free substitute for a native-speaker tutor. There are no downloadable files available that I know of as of yet for the Telemundo telenovelas on their dvd's often don't have them at all.

A good way to train listening is listening to some kind of daily audio, be it a news type/magazine program like RFI Español or Buenos Días América, or a podcast about any interest. The daily contact with the language becomes a habit that you won't want to break and the audio nature of it means, no subtitles are available.

Training listening and stepping outside the comfort zone is like I once heard about countries making peace- "you don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies". Well. in listening, you wouldn't need to train it if you could already do it well. Being able to listen without subtitles means understanding the spoken world around you with ease, and that's well worth all the toil and trouble involved to get there. Yes, there's some discomfort involved until you get better, there's no way around that.

[Hank]

If nothing unforeseen happens I'll be retiring in a little more than seven years at the age of 54. My wife has informed me that I can't stop working until she retires so I'll have an opportunity for another career. I have been thinking about it for a while. If I could come up with something good I'll have time to prepare: schooling, work experience, etc. After reading the recent thread about career opportunities for multi-linguals I got to thinking about that. Maybe I could do something with Spanish. I'm not really sure what that could be. I have looked through online job listings in my area, and right now there doesn't seem to be a big demand for English/Spanish speakers. The population of Spanish speakers does appear to be growing in my area, but of course maybe it just seems that way because I'm now interested in the language and always looking for opportunities to hear conversations on the sly. Maybe I could be a tutor or teach ESL classes. It's just something for me to think about. It's kind of motivating. If I want to do this I have seven years to get to a high level.

I'm trying a different approach to training listening with La reina del sur. I'm going to turn off the subtitles until I feel like I missed something important, then I'll rewind and read the subtitles. I think this is sort of along the lines of what iguanamon suggested. I have only done this with one episode this week, but something interesting happened. There were a couple of spots where I felt like I was getting the gist but missing something important, but when I read the subtitles that wasn't the case. I did understand what was being said. I didn't catch every single word, but my comprehension was spot on. I was shocked. It was kind of a struggle because I'm so used to the subtitles, but apparently I comprehend better than I think I do. Once again, I need to trust myself more. Thanks for the suggestions!

[mitcht]

To add my 2 cents I think it depends on your level. At some point you need to rip off the band aid but if you do it too early then I think it's inefficient and you'd learn more out of being able to hear the individual words, learn vocabulary, grammar, etc. It somewhat depends on what you want to get out of it.

[Hank]

My language learning journey started one year ago this month. It has been a fun and interesting ride. When I started I really didn't have any idea what I was doing or how to do it. The only thing I knew was that Duolingo had a Spanish course and that it was free. Finding this forum has helped a ton. I'm not sure what I would have done without you folks. I also didn't have a good grasp of how long it would take, but that's ok. I feel really good about my progress after only one year, and I'm looking forward to many more years of Spanish.

Reading- I finished the second book of the Apocalipsis Z series and started on Apocalipsis Z: La ira de los justos. I'm about a quarter of the way through and there are already a bunch of twists and turns. Lots of exciting stuff happening in zombie infested Europe!

Listening- I only watched a couple of episodes of La reina del sur. It's still uncomfortable watching without subtitles, but I have been following along well. So far every time that I have felt like I missed something and rewinded and read the subtitles it hasn't been the case. I'm still not catching every word, which kind of bugs me, but I suppose I'll get there. I think not catching every word is what leads me to think that I'm missing important points. I did my usual amount of watching Mexican TV in the evenings to check my comprehension. Not bad. Unfortunately I'm not terribly interested in the current crop of telenovelas. I'm looking forward to watching Pasión y poder and El hotel de los secretos when I'm finished with La reina del sur. I'm not sure which one I want to watch first.

Output- I chatted with a guy from Mexico on HelloTalk. We talked about work and travel. It was nice because he corrected my mistakes. Thankfully there were very few. We appear to be about the same level in our L2s, and I'm sure it was like two cavemen speaking. "Me go on trip." "Me too go on trip. Where you go?" I'm not real good at chit-chat, and trying to chat in Spanish doesn't help. I have to think of what I want to say in English and then try to translate. Thankfully he led the conversation and all I had to do was respond and ask questions. I realize how far I have to go before I can communicate more effectively. Writing on the forum and inner dialogues are far different activities than an actual conversation. I also need to trust myself more. Practice, practice, practice. Hopefully I can stay motivated and I can continue chatting with this guy. It was fun.

I'm kicking around the idea of getting a tutor on italki to help with my output. I wonder if I don't need to practice more before it would be helpful, though. I think it would be helpful because I wouldn't feel as funny about asking language related questions. "What's the best way to say...in Spanish?" "Why is that ser instead of estar?" Stuff like that.

[mitcht]

Definitely recommend getting a tutor of some description whether on italki, in person or another website. I like italki and have used it a bit in the past but I do find it can be hard to find teachers willing to prepare for the student - i feel they tend to work under the assumption that this is a one time class and they generally don't have an immediate lesson plan let alone anything longer term. You sort of end up getting what you pay for. That said, if you just want some practice and someone to ask questions then it'll probably fit that purpose.

[M23]

I'm kicking around the idea of getting a tutor on italki to help with my output. I wonder if I don't need to practice more before it would be helpful, though. I think it would be helpful because I wouldn't feel as funny about asking language related questions. "What's the best way to say...in Spanish?" "Why is that ser instead of estar?" Stuff like that.

Not a bad idea, but even if you take a pass on it having questions like "how would you say it" or "what sounds more common/normal to you" are good questions to have on hand when you are chatting with a native speaker that is using a form of Spanish that you want to learn. It has been my experience that most people have no problem telling you how they would say something.