tx2005 Beginning Spanish Log

[tx2005]

History and Background - Why Spanish?

Spanish has always been a part of my life. One of my parents is from Spain and I lived for a few years in Madrid as a young child. During those years, Spanish was the main language I spoke (so I've been told of course). We moved back to the United States around the time I was 3 1/2, and only English was spoken at home since only one of my parents spoke Spanish. I forgot it all. Not knowing Spanish frustrated me at times as a kid, especially during the handful of times we took a trip to Spain to visit family. While many of my family members can speak English, I always wished I could speak with them in Spanish. I always assumed that since I didn't learn it as a kid, I would never learn it.

My first "formal" education with Spanish was in high school, where I took it for my mandatory two years of foreign language. I didn't take it real serious and while I still have some basic understand of conjugations and minimal vocabulary, I lost most of what I learned by the time I went to college. Throughout my 20s the Spanish learning bug always existed in the back of my mind. I even started a self learning plan several times, but I was never able to make it past the point where the initial excitement of a new hobby wears off. Part of that was due to all the self doubt adult language learners often have (you are too old, it's too hard etc..), and the other part was a lack of planning or direction on how to learn. After the third failure, around five years ago, I dropped the idea and moved on.

Since then I have changed careers into an industry where knowing Spanish is a big plus. In addition, my significant other is both a native Spanish and English speaker. She has been very encouraging regarding my desire to learn Spanish. It would allow me to get to know her family better, many of whom are Spanish speaking only, and if we are blessed with children, we want them to be bilingual. As my own life experience has shown, both parents being bilingual makes this much easier.

With so much to gain from learning Spanish, I recently decided to put all the doubts and negativity behind me and get started on this journey once and for all.

Goal

My long term goal is fluency, a C1 (not sure how realistic C2 is short of moving to a Spanish speaking country) on the CEFR scale. Of course, this is something that will likely take many years to achieve.

Shorter term, we are planning a trip to Spain in late spring 2019. By the time I leave for Spain, I would like my Spanish to be at a level where I can communite with my family and other locals in Spain without much trouble. I'm hoping a B1 or B2 on the CEFR scale would be enoguh to achieve that goal. That gives me around 26 months to reach that level.

Plan

As many of you know, the vast amount of language learning reosuerces available these days, especially for a langauge as widely spoken as Spanish, is both a blessing and a curse. While there is no shortage of learning material, it's easy to get caught up in all the different programs and resources available. I've spent a lot of time researching different methods and have come up with the following study resources.

1.) Assimil Spanish at Ease
2.) FSI Programmatic (FSI Basic seems too advanced for me right now)
3.) Anki flashcards for vocab
4.) Duolingo
5.) begin to add in regular speaking at home with my girlfriend (we both want to get the point to where can just speak Spanish at home for long periods of time)
6.) begin to add in native materials like news, tv, radio

I'm also doing a one month trial of Spanishpod101 as I have a long commute to work and podcasts would be a nice way to use that time for learning. I tried Pimsleur in the past and I like that with Spanishpod there are at least written materials and other study tools with each lesson vs just audio. Not sure if I'll keep this, but I'm see how the podcasts fit into my schedule over the next month.

For the time being my plan in the following:

1.) Assimil - at least 2 lessons a week
2.) FSI Programmatic - at least 1 unit a week
3.) Anki - review daily
4.) Duolingo - keep the daily streak going

Ideally I'll be able to do more than this most weeks, but I'm hoping a minimum of 2 Assimil and 1 FSI programmatic is manageable no matter how busy daily life gets.

Current progress

As of tonight, I'm on Lesson 4 of Assimil and Unit 4 of FSI.

[BOLIO]

Welcome. It is a great place here.

Your goals are very much in line with mine when I started learning. Your plan is very similar to the plan I used. I will share that if I could do it all over, I would listen to native material from the beginning. Understanding is not important at the beginning. Parse the sounds. Search Iversen Bloodhound listening. Also, I would have mastered the Assimil dialogue better and SHADOWED them. Assimil and FSI both became a grind to me.

Stretch yourself in completing your two courses but make sure you have fun. People like Iguanamon, James29, Stelle, Luke, Crush, Hank and many others have started from where you are and have accomplished what you are trying to do in Spanish. Also, other logs like EMK for example as well as tastyonions in their learning French were very helpful to me. HTLAL archives are worth a search when you need a boost in motivation.

All the best,
BOLIO

[Tomás]

That's an ambitious program, and it would be hard for me to stick to because of all the drudgery. I suggest adding one new Assimil lesson every day, which only takes 15-20 minutes. With any extra time, pound some Anki vocab. After the first month, start reading the news and watching tv. Play Spanish in your car.

Once you finish Assimil -- 3-4 months from now if you hit it almost every day -- you will not need any more courses. You can start learning naturally, by listening, reading, and talking.

[blaurebell]

Your story with Spanish is very similar to my story with Russian, stopped speaking it when I was 6 and forgot all of it! It's been bugging me to say "I'm half Russian, but I don't speak the language". So now I'm learning it too.

Be careful not to overload yourself with too many courses, or you might just abandon the whole lot of it. My own maximum is 2 courses at a time and I tend to start with daily Assimil and Duolingo. Once I finish Duolingo I replace it with an FSI style course if I feel like it. FSI isn't really necessary if you only want to understand, but it's really good when you want to speak correctly. For folks like us with the heritage angle I think we can't really get around something like FSI, since people will judge our language abilities differently. I often hear my mum say about the children of her Russian friends "Oh, she / he speaks such bad Russian!" whereas anyone without the heritage angle who'd speak that way would be praised for their good Russian! FSI will compensate for some of that by really drilling correct grammar. The advantage of leaving FSI for later is that you can do the FSI Basic course right away, which is the more efficient option.

As for details: I find shadowing the Assimil dialogues really helpful to get the pronunciation right. This makes the lessons longer to get through, especially once the sentences get longer and more difficult to pronounce at the speed of the recording. It's really worth it though! Also helpful for pronunciation is the Gabriel Wyner pronunciation trainer which is basically minimal pairs listening practice. As far as I know the FSI Spanish Basic has the minimal pairs listening drills too by the way. They are really good to catch pronunciation mistakes with sounds you simply can't hear properly. Also, listen from the start, even if you don't understand anything yet, it really helps and as you keep going you will understand more and more. Even if you can only stand 10 minutes a day it will help.

Personally I hate flashcards and replace them with early intensive reading with Learning with Texts. With French this was immensely successful for me - I read some 5000 pages that way, starting as soon as I could decipher texts with a dictionary. After finishing those 5000 pages I watched all of Buffy French dubs, and now I understand written and spoken french without a dictionary! Right now I'm following the same method for Russian and I'm almost halfway through my first novel. The intensive reading is also super helpful to reinforce all the grammar I see in Assimil and Duolingo with lots of real world examples. The only downside is that the first 300-500 pages are somewhat tough to get through, so if you don't like reading in general, it might not be for you. Follow whatever is fun for you. You'll learn best if you enjoy what you're doing.