FSI Spanish Walkthrough

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kunsttyv
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FSI Spanish Walkthrough

Postby kunsttyv » Sun May 21, 2017 8:21 pm

Just to log my progress through this monolithic course, to share my experiences and most importantly, to keep myself honest. I've already done the first part, up to unit 15. I'll try to do a couple of them every week, and where necessary I'll definitely supplement it with lessons from the GdUdE workbook that has become so popular around here lately (I'm about halfway through the A book).

Bring the first one!
Last edited by kunsttyv on Sun May 21, 2017 8:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A FSI Spanish Walkthrough

Postby kunsttyv » Sun May 21, 2017 8:21 pm

Unit 16

Molina is showing the colonel and his wife around town, giving remarks such as people in Surlandia drink more coffee than in the US, and then the colonel tries to get him to drive them (him and his wife, they don’t have their own car, which is a bit hard to believe for a mid century American colonel, even though they just arrived in town) to Sunday mass. Molina is not religious though, or at least that’s what Mrs. Colonel believes. As we have gotten to know him, he would rather chase girls together with his buddy Señor White (if maybe not “la gordita con las gafas” whom he tried to sneak away from at the cocktail party a couple of episodes ago).

This unit dealt with the indirect object clitic pronoun, which is one of the things I struggle with in Spanish (lo/le). As has been the case with previous units, I don’t think it became more clear nor more automatic after this one, because what they present in the drills are the indirect object pattern itself (me, te, le, nos, les), and not contrasting it against the direct object which at least for me is more of a struggle. With some verbs I just don’t know whether to throw in there the one or the other.

One general thing: I use FSI as an audio course only, and I think it’s important that I know close to all of the vocabulary beforehand. They speak fast, the recordings are sometimes unclear, and the whole purpose is to drill grammatical structures. This is not the right place for vocab acquisition. Luckily this has not been a problem so far.

On to the next one.
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Re: FSI Spanish Walkthrough

Postby blaurebell » Sun May 21, 2017 9:24 pm

I'll be following this thread :)

As for le vs lo, this sorted itself out with lots of input for me. Stick to Latin American media though, since there is quite a bit of leísmo in Spanish series! And I bet contrasting one against the other will appear in one of the future units!
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Re: FSI Spanish Walkthrough

Postby James29 » Sun May 21, 2017 11:40 pm

blaurebell wrote:I'll be following this thread :)

As for le vs lo, this sorted itself out with lots of input for me. Stick to Latin American media though, since there is quite a bit of leísmo in Spanish series! And I bet contrasting one against the other will appear in one of the future units!


Ditto on everything. The le/lo thing was a thorn in my side for quite a while and I still have to pause a bit and think about it quite often when I am speaking. Assimil teaches the leismo and that really screwed me up at first. The good news is that I NEVER had any native speakers EVER correct me or comment on any errors with le/lo.

Good luck with FSI. I think it is the best thing someone can do for taking Spanish toward an advanced level. And, you are exactly right to get all the vocabulary ahead of time.
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Re: FSI Spanish Walkthrough

Postby blaurebell » Mon May 22, 2017 7:23 am

James29 wrote:Ditto on everything. The le/lo thing was a thorn in my side for quite a while and I still have to pause a bit and think about it quite often when I am speaking. Assimil teaches the leismo and that really screwed me up at first. The good news is that I NEVER had any native speakers EVER correct me or comment on any errors with le/lo.


Yikes, Assimil teaches leísmo? That's horrific! I've been corrected in the Basque Country for speaking correctly, instead of using leísmo :roll: But then Spanish is only taught as a second language here, so they speak a somewhat bad "street Spanish". In some regions you will seem awfully uneducated if you use leísmo, like in Argentina, but in most places it seems somewhat accepted as a weird Spanish phenomenon, so it's more accepted with a Spanish pronunciation rather than Central American or South American pronunciations. When we watch Spanish series my husband sits there correcting all the leísmo and rolling his eyes :lol: With loísmo you will seem uneducated in *most* regions though, so I guess leísmo is somewhat preferable to loísmo.
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Re: FSI Spanish Walkthrough

Postby kunsttyv » Mon May 22, 2017 10:57 pm

I encountered this little innocent sentence on clozemaster the other day, and today I asked my tutor about it: Déjalo entrar. I thought it should be le, since the guy you're letting in is the indirect object, he's being let in, but maybe I'm misunderstanding what's a direct and what's an indirect object. A search on google yields way more results for lo than le, and my tutor (she's from Madrid, but she's careful to not teach leísmo) couldn't even give me a good answer. She will come back to me when she has figured it out. A two word sentence! No wonder why a poor foreigner will get confused.

Unit 17

I'm glad I'm not actually a diplomat, because there's no way I could keep up with their partying and drinking. In this episode they are basically bragging about who went latest to bed, who had the worse hang over the day after, and whose day was most ruined because of this (yo me acosté a las cuatro y me levanté a las once, con un dolor de cabeza horrible). The women even seem to go harder at it than the men!

This time we practiced el pretérito. And it was mostly a piece of cake. Again, it's not constructing the tenses correctly on the fly that's difficult, it's how to use them in the correct circumstances. El pretérito versus el imperfecto can be tricky sometimes, and also to a lesser degree preterite versus present perfect (although here there is also a greater degree of overlap, depending on regional differences).

I think it's a good thing that the early part of the course uses relatively simple constructions and language, because it's difficult enough to keep up with the speed and form of the drills, and I think it would have been unbearable if the material itself was difficult too. Now I'm starting to get the hang of how to solve the drills, and I welcome more challenging material from here on. Again, this time I also knew all the words in advance. I think "cenicero" might be the only actual new word FSI has taught me so far.

On to the next one.
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Re: FSI Spanish Walkthrough

Postby blaurebell » Tue May 23, 2017 1:43 pm

As far as I understand it, it goes something like this:
Direct object, something that is affected directly. I hit him, I let it go, I give it away.
Indirect object, something that is indirectly affected: I give it (OD) to him (OI). I say it (OD) to her (OI).
One of the most common errors is to think that any person must be always Le, because most OI are people, very common in Spain. In this case it probably doesn't help that your tutor is Spanish, because to her both sounds right.

As for the concrete example: Déjalo entrar is the same as the "let him go" I used above, you affect that person directly, not indirectly. "Lo veo" or "Lo llamo" are other examples where people can be the OD.
Here is where things get really interesting: Déjalo entrar vs Permitirle entrar. Why is it le with permitir? Because you always allow something (OD) to someone (OI). In one case "entrar" is considered the direct object - what do you allow -, in the other the person.
Where things get tricky is when you could theoretically use both, depending on context.
No le entiendo a ella. - I can't understand what she's saying.
No la entiendo a ella. - I can't understand her and her way of thinking.
This is not at all trivial and native speakers get confused: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads ... do.210192/
Tricky stuff! I guess I have an advantage coming from German, since we have different cases for OD and OI and are used to paying attention to these kinds of things. Well, at least most of us. There are some dialects where people commonly mix up OD and OI as well.
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Re: FSI Spanish Walkthrough

Postby kunsttyv » Tue May 23, 2017 2:21 pm

Thanks blaurebell! Actually, previously I've been looking for lists of verbs with info about whether they take a indirect object or not (or if it's ambiguous, like your entender example), but I haven't found anything I'm satisfied with. I asked my tutor about it, but she didn't know about anything like it. Are you aware of any such thing? It is still not obvious to me the difference between dejar and permitir with regards to the OD/ID situation.

I have found that the best way to learn the subjunctive is to learn under which different circumstances it is used, not to think that the subjunctive has any particular intrinsic meaning (like possibility or uncertainty, although yes that's often the case). Maybe a similar approach could work for the clitics, i.e. learn which verbs take which variation.
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Re: FSI Spanish Walkthrough

Postby blaurebell » Tue May 23, 2017 2:51 pm

I don't know of such lists either. In my experience there is no need for them though and you just have to go through a lot of input to get it right. At some point you will have certain sentences from TV or books in your head that will just come out of your mouth as chunks. By then it will be pretty obvious what the difference is between "No voy a permitirlo (OD)" and "No le (OI) voy a permitir eso (OD)!" I actually made a list for Italian once when I had my A2 exam years ago and it didn't help at all, it was still where I lost most points even after trying to get it into my head by flashcard brute force. Don't worry about it too much, it will come naturally as long as you consume a lot of latin american media.
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Re: FSI Spanish Walkthrough

Postby FrannieB » Tue May 23, 2017 3:17 pm

Great conversation - my kryptonite in Spanish right now is this exact topic.
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