Sudoko Spanish Numbers Learning Milestone

[Steve]

I often play online Sudoko for perhaps 10 to 15 minutes at a time as a quick mind-clearer when I need to shift gears or I've hit a major mental block. About a week or two ago, I mentally shifted to using Spanish numbers as I played. Yesterday I started hitting my first 1% and 2% level times thinking exclusively in Spanish. (I.e. 1% means in top 1% of recorded times.) I'm nowhere near as fast in Spanish as English, but it was a satisfying moment that my ability to use Spanish numbers has improved greatly over the past year or so.

As a recap (previously mentioned in some thread a long time ago), I started working on numbers at night when I couldn't sleep. If I woke up, or couldn't fall asleep, I'd practice counting in Spanish. I started by going from 1 to 100. When that became easy, I started a repeat pattern of 123, 234, 345, etc. which helped me internalize adjacent numbers. Then I started a by 10s approach from 10 to 1000 which then included 100s. 10,20,30 ... 300,310,320... 1000. Then by 100s, 100,200,300... 2000,2100,2200 ... 10000. Basically, each set had 100 numbers in it.

I found it helped me in two ways. One, I started internalizing the numbers. Second, it ended up being a great way to really monitor my sleep patterns. I found that very often that I was not as wide awake as I thought. In the past when I woke up feeling alert, I'd often get up and read or do something. After I started practicing counting, I found that many of those times I thought I was wide awake, I'd barely get to 10 or 20 and I'd be falling asleep. Some nights where I could have sworn I was wide awake most of the night, I had barely made it counting up to 40 or 50. I'd get past perhaps 5 to 10 numbers, fall asleep, wake up and try to remember where I was, try to start again, and fall asleep again. This actually helped me relax and my sleep has improved. Instead of being mostly aware of being awake, I'm mostly aware of falling back asleep and losing track of what number I was on. On those rare occasions that I now make it straight through counting to the end of the pattern, I actually am awake and alert.