Zac29's Spanish Platiquemos FSI log

[zac299]

Updates:

I've started unit 52 of platiquemos and it's a long one again. It'll be another 2-weeker, but it's really drilling a lot of good stuff as well.

Last week was a "much" improved 2 hours 30 minutes of podcast listening.

And of course, plenty more TV watching. I'm up to Episode 11 of La Reina and episode 8 of El Puntero.

The reading of news articles is coming along and the 75 page ebook I posted previously should be done by next week, so I'm going to put together another 1 or 2. I figure I'll create 300 pages worth of ebooks and then just start again from the beginning so it acts as spaced repetition without being too recent to become boring.

In the last week I've used a lot of cool frases with my friends... Let's pick one... Mmmm... While planning my trip away next week to visit my Chilean friend, we were making some jokes and at some stage I responded with "pero demasi bromitas... Me parece un mal augurio".

My argentinian friend taught me the cutest word ever, to be a "dormilono/a" aka a sleepyhead.

Finally, I learned another fantastic argentinian frase "sobre el pucho" which is a way to say "straight away" of "immediately" and it's really a fantastic metaphor.

What pleased me most about that last one is that, while watching El Puntero, a girl said to her boyfriend "deme un pucho". I didn't know what pucho meant, so I paused to research the word. A few websites later, I came across the above metaphor. The point I'm getting at, though, is that I've realised many times now I'm starting to clearly "hear" words I don't know and I'm simply able to go away and research the exact word, without roughly guessing what it was I heard in the first place.

What else??

On Saturday night I was out with a Colombian friend whose english is about the same as my spanish. AKA we can both understand a whole lot more than we're currently able to formulate/speak. It was a fun 4 or 5 hours of seamlessly jumping back and forth between the 2 languages. Although the default throughout the night seemed to be that we'd go back to Spanish for anything more complicated to express, so this pleased me a lot internally.

I also did a number of Gramatico de Uso lessons, I'm up to 27 now.

The next update won't be next week, but the week after because by this time next week I'll be relaxing in a little beach-side town with my Chilean friend.

Hasta luego a todos!


--- Running Totals ---

Podcast Listening: 104 h 10 min (End of week 25 since I started records)

Pages Read / Books read: 819 / 8 books

Missed Days (No study at all): 5

[zac299]

Can anyone help me by explaining the grammar/construction/what the hell is going on in this message my friend sent me?



Here's the translation:



I know google is pretty poor with the subjunctive at times, so ignore the vengas part.

I understand everything that's going on in the message except for llore .

To keep in the subjunctive, shouldn't this have been 'llorara'?

Or, at least as a future "i will cry" it would be 'llorare" - Even though I don't think you'd write it that way with the rest of the subjunctive in that message.

Anyone have any insights?

[zac299]

Updates:

I hope everyone is well.

This will be a cumulative update for the past 2 weeks.

I'm still on unit 52 of platiquemos. The 2-week focus seems to be juuuust about right for these final units. There will always be room to go back to them and redrill specific parts in the future though. Even better if you can go straight into a conversation and put the concepts into direct use (More on that soon)...

The last 2 weeks have seen an accumulative 4h 15 min of podcast listening.

I'm up to Episode 15 of La Reina and Episode 13 of El Puntero.

I finished the 75 pages of my first articles ebook! I created a 2nd ebook of articles from the 3 sources Iguanamon kindly shared recently. That ebook has come out at 270ish pages if I remember correctly and I'm slowly working my way through it. I tend to have between 3 and 5 new words per page which I think is fairly good and I'm finding myself already internalising a lot of new words that appear and reappear in these articles.

I'm now up to lesson 29 of Gramatica de Uso

Finally, I thoroughly enjoyed my week away at the beach visiting my Chilean friend. We spent the days hiking and visiting near-countless waterfalls in the area.

We rented a car and set off on endless adventures, sharing mate and swimming in some of the most beautiful and pristine rivers we could find.

And best of all, 99% of the time was spent in Spanish! I had some interesting observations along the way;

Speaking seems to be the most powerful way to ingrain a word or phrase into my brain so it gets closer and closer to 'automatic' for me. There were a whole heap of concepts and phrases that I've read many times and used a few times... But using them over and over, with some word variations, has cemented them into my automatic recall very quickly.

Next, being able to ask for words from a native makes the learning process so much easier and faster. There were times when I had to manipulate my way around the phrasing and conversation to express what I wanted to express in an understandable way, compared to the exact way I wanted to express it... But then I'd immediately ask my friend for a faster and more concise way to express the exact same thing, how she'd say it... And having that automatic feedback was blissful.

I've read many times in old logs that people have the "growth problem" of major tiredness/headaches when they first start spending long hours each day in their target language...

Interesting because I barely had it at all. What I found really pleasing was that I could basically "turn on" my spanish brain immediately, on the flip of a coin. As soon as I woke up in the morning, it was spanish... As soon as my friend interrupted my daydreams while driving, it was spanish... As soon as my friend caught up to me during our hike, it was spanish...

It didn't matter if I was tired or daydreaming or concentrating on something else, my brain was straight back into it and absolutely ready and willing to understand and comprehend what was being said.

The only "problem" I remember for that whole holiday was maybe first 5 minutes of each day, my tongue took a moment to untie itself and let the spanish begin flowing again.

I think we used Google translate a whole 3 times during the entire holiday. Again, testament to being able to talk my way around what I wanted to say/express, give my friend enough understanding and then have her explain back to me a better and more concise manner to express the thought/question/whatever.

Where I'm at now: I'm much further along the path than Michel Thomas' beginner idea of "simply get the ball over the net". But I'm still far from "playing elegant beach volleyball in the Olympics".

I'm absolutely ready to make speaking my main way of progressing in spanish. That, combined with extensive reading for vocabulary acquisition, is going to boost my spanish to new levels very, very quickly.

However, I'm still going to focus on finishing FSI's final units. At the beginning of this thread I projected I'd be done a bit before Xmas and I'm absolutely on track for this. Once it's done, I'm going to actively search out a few local language exchange partners and transition into that side of things a lot more.

As I said in the beginning of this post, FSI is never "finished" and the way I see it being most helpful from here onwards is this: Going back through this last level 8, unit by unit and taking the concepts presented in each lesson and making their usage and slow perfection the main focus on the language exchanges that I'll soon start having regularly.

The multi-track approach is the way to go and I think the speaking part of it is the most powerful leg that ingrains the whole thing into your memory the fastest.

It was a great week and holiday


--- Running Totals ---

Podcast Listening: 108 h 25 min (End of week 27 since I started records)

Pages Read / Books read: 894 / 9 books

Missed Days (No study at all): 5

[Chmury]

Can anyone help me by explaining the grammar/construction/what the hell is going on in this message my friend sent me?



Here's the translation:



I know google is pretty poor with the subjunctive at times, so ignore the vengas part.

I understand everything that's going on in the message except for llore .

To keep in the subjunctive, shouldn't this have been 'llorara'?

Or, at least as a future "i will cry" it would be 'llorare" - Even though I don't think you'd write it that way with the rest of the subjunctive in that message.

Anyone have any insights?

Hey Zac, I'll give it a go y aportar mi granito de arena. In my opinion your friend is saying: "By the way, I'm really happy that you're coming and I might cry when I see you; I'm telling you so you don't get scared." The present tense, in this case the present subjunctive llore (sin tilde - must have been an autocorrection when your friend wrote it), is often used to express something which will happen in the future, just like cuando te vea: when I see you (in the future).

Also I believe the subjunctive vengas part of the translation is also correct, as the subjunctive often (¿siempre?) comes after a de que construction when the "person" changes: Yo estoy feliz de que Tú vengas.

Did all that make sense and/or help at all? Espero que sí.

[zac299]

Hey Zac, I'll give it a go y aportar mi granito de arena. In my opinion your friend is saying: "By the way, I'm really happy that you're coming and I might cry when I see you; I'm telling you so you don't get scared." The present tense, in this case the present subjunctive llore (sin tilde - must have been an autocorrection when your friend wrote it), is often used to express something which will happen in the future, just like cuando te vea: when I see you (in the future).

Also I believe the subjunctive vengas part of the translation is also correct, as the subjunctive often (¿siempre?) comes after a de que construction when the "person" changes: Yo estoy feliz de que Tú vengas.

Did all that make sense and/or help at all? Espero que sí.

Perfect mate and thanks for helping me out with it.

Shows I've got to really go back and re-drill the present subjunctive a bit more.

Cheers y espero que hayas disfrutado tu viaje a la tierra de los humanos con seis dedos

[zac299]

Updates:

I've begun unit 53 of platiquemos and it seems pretty easy. This is the lesson that introduces all the vosotros terms. I knew a few of them from exposure to Argentine spanish plus La Casa De Papel. Enough to get by in the most common forms. To be honest, I'm just skipping those particular drills because at the moment I don't care enough about this form to really bang my head against the wall using their subjunctives etc. This unit and drills will always be here if I need it in the future, but since the rest of the unit is easy I think I might actually get it down in a week.

I listened to 2 h 45 min of podcasts last week.

Reading my long ebook of articles is going well. More and more vocab is slowly sinking in, though for my records I'll say I'm still stuck at around 10 pages per hour right now. It'll be interesting to see after how many xxx or x,xxx pages worth of reading it takes for this speed to start increasing.

I'm up to episode 17 of La Reina and Ep 19 of El Puntero.

I didn't touch Gramatica de Uso last week and I doubt I'll get to do any of it this week as well.

Interestingly, I had a video call with an old friend who I met while living in Buenos Aires. She only speaks spanish but she's juuust started learning english because she now wants to do a working holiday in Australia. She says she'll be coming next year in July. Which is funny because I told her it's almost 100% certain I'll be back in South America by around March or April of next year. I haven't booked anything yet, but I'm seriously thinking about going and spending 2ish years in south america, 3 months at a time in different countries/cities.

Either way, she wants to have semi-regular calls to practice, which would be great. Our first one was pretty average because I was sitting in the middle of a mall and I think her internet was mediocre. This was a perfect mixture of madness and while she could understand when I spoke, it was very, very difficult for me to catch much of what she was saying through the 50 minutes we chatted. I told her we needed to end the call and next time I'd try it from the quiet of my house and see if that improved things.

Almost each day I try and listen to one "call" from the level 3 supplied on this site:

https://phone.dliflc.edu/default_spanish.asp

And I'm finding recently I'm probably around 85% - 95% comprehension quite consistently. One day I'm going to do a mass download all of all the level 3 phone calls, stick them together and have them as an audio to listen to, as a variation to the normal podcasts.

That's about all to report this week.


--- Running Totals ---

Podcast Listening: 111 h 10 min (End of week 28 since I started records)

Pages Read / Books read: 894 / 9 books

Missed Days (No study at all): 5

[luke]

You're doing very well Zac29.

I've found Gramatica de Uso difficult to get enthusiastic about. I know it would be good for me. Which book do you have?

I know it's not the Gramatica de Uso series. It's grammar books in general that are difficult to motivate for. That's why the Platiquemos/FSI courses have been so helpful. They're not grammar heavy, but they cover all the bases.

[zac299]

Cheers mate,

I've got the B level book and it's very useful.

I've screenshotted someone's old post about how they used to line up the corresponding grammar points of the book with the subsequent unit of FSI they were going through at that moment. They said it really helped to hammer the point home. If you're curious, I'm sure you can quickly find it in the links of screenshotted posts that I put in post 2? or 3? of this log during my introductions.

While I think it would be a good way to go through it, I'm also enjoying this "forced SRS grammar study" by doing a Gramatica de Uso lesson that covered an FSI unit months ago.

Though, the book does point out granular details that are super useful as well.

[luke]

Very well done. You've got a smart approach.

[zac299]

That's a polite way to say a lazy approach, but I'll take it