Cenwalh's Spanish Conquista

[Cenwalh]

Some advice that a friend gave me regarding which books to read in a foreign language: go for books written in first person. This really made getting into reading easier for me. Books written in third person tend to have a lot of descriptive writing (building worlds, meticulously describing characters and scenes) and while this is not a bad thing, they often use weird verbs, adjectives and adverbs - words you'll seldom use. Books written in 1st person contain more everyday vocab and more dialogues.

So maybe try something like that after Algo tan sencillo como tuitear te quiero. If you need some recommendations, go for El juego de Caín by César Mallorquí, Mentira by Care Santos or anything written by Rick Riordan

Thanks, these look like great suggestions! I just went to preview Mentira on Amazon and accidentally previewed the Galician version by mistake which led to some confusion until I realised it wasn't Spanish.

[iguanamon]

...Some advice that a friend gave me regarding which books to read in a foreign language: go for books written in first person. This really made getting into reading easier for me. Books written in third person tend to have a lot of descriptive writing (building worlds, meticulously describing characters and scenes) and while this is not a bad thing, they often use weird verbs, adjectives and adverbs - words you'll seldom use. Books written in 1st person contain more everyday vocab and more dialogues. ...

I totally agree. Robinson Crusoe is a good first person book to read in a TL translation. I've read it in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino and Haitian Creole. There is a fair bit of nautical vocabulary in the first 60 or so pages to get through. It also has the advantage of having the English version in the public domain. You may even be familiar with the story. Really, any autobiography, translated or original will be good to read when learning a language. ¡Suerte!

[Cenwalh]

...Some advice that a friend gave me regarding which books to read in a foreign language: go for books written in first person. This really made getting into reading easier for me. Books written in third person tend to have a lot of descriptive writing (building worlds, meticulously describing characters and scenes) and while this is not a bad thing, they often use weird verbs, adjectives and adverbs - words you'll seldom use. Books written in 1st person contain more everyday vocab and more dialogues. ...

I totally agree. Robinson Crusoe is a good first person book to read in a TL translation. I've read it in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino and Haitian Creole. There is a fair bit of nautical vocabulary in the first 60 or so pages to get through. It also has the advantage of having the English version in the public domain. You may even be familiar with the story. Really, any autobiography, translated or original will be good to read when learning a language. ¡Suerte!

Gosh you really love that book! I am indeed familiar with the story and will add it to the list. Autobiographies are probably a really good suggestion and one I haven't thought of. I should probably balance fiction and non-fiction and autobiographies would be one good method. Thanks for dropping by!

[Cenwalh]

I'm starting an exercise in passive listening. I'm not sure I believe in the benefits of fully passive listening, but I do believe if it's actually 5-10% active then it's sure to help. To this end I'm going to listen to Spain's RNE radio station at work. Say I get 4.5 hours of listening per day and 7.5% is active, then that's an extra 20 minutes active listening per day. We'll see.

[Cenwalh]

I'm scrapping flashcards and going all input. I'm going to do an end of life update on the 9,000 sentences from Tatoeba so that others might benefit from it, but I don't enjoy doing it and I'd much rather just learn from listening/watching/reading.

I read an article yesterday by Dr. J. Marvin Brown which proposes a formula for fluency of languages with an input based approach (specifically listening, but I like reading too). The formula proposed was:
y = C * (1 - e^(-kx/L)
Where y is how "fluent" you are with 1 being a native speaker and 0 being knowing nothing, C I didn't really understand what it's supposed to be but is apparently how well a learner goes about doing it, e is the natural number, k is the "acquisition constant" which apparently is 0.0018, x is the hours of input understood, and L is the ease of a language (as in closeness to a known language considering cognates/culture). We could break x down into hours of input consumed (h) and percentage understood (u), so x=hu.

If we assume, as the author of the article did, that sentences should come naturally at y=0.83, C=0.95, k=0.0018, amount of content understood should be 80%, and the L for English-Spanish is 0.4 (this hasn't been studied with English-Spanish so it's dubious), then the curve looks like this:

Hours-fluency for Spanish.PNG

With the number of hours at 0.83 "fluency" being 574, or 720 to 0.88 fluency which seemed to be significant in the mind of the author as being the level at which one can have an easy (as in you don't have to try), uninterrupted conversation about any everyday matter. This is interesting because I'd never seen an equation given to this input method before, just people throwing numbers out there.

What does this mean for me? Well I probably have 100 - 200 hours of Spanish input so I'm nowhere near... Although I don't know to what extent all other learning (eg 200 hours of Anki) counts, I guess the author would argue that it doesn't. Anyway, no matter what this says about being able to talk, it does mean that I know I have somewhere to aim in terms of understanding which is really what my goal is. Also, I'm going to Spain in a year and at 2 hours a day I should be "fluent" by that time. We'll see! No doubt I'd need to train my mouth muscles at some point.

Here's the article (direct MS Word download).

[Cenwalh]

My last post has me thinking. What should one's "comprehension" be? If it's 100% one'd never learn, if it was 50%, one would never understand. Also, is there even a good definition for it? I see people (including researchers) throwing the term around all the time, but I've never seen a good definition.

Anyway, good day for me. 3 hours listening (podcasts whilst doing garden work), and I read a chapter of my book. I'm going to have to make changes to get 2 hours of content consumption in per day. It's harder to do than Anki reviews which can be done whilst spending time with the other half, watching TV etc.

[Cenwalh]

It's been a while since my last update - primarily because I've been on holiday. I found it quite hard to fit time in for Spanish, but including flights I probably managed an hour per day on average. Coming back to a more intensive programme afterwards was a little bit of a surprise as my comprehension seemed to have decreased slightly, but I think it's come back now. At the moment I'm primarily watching made-for-natives Youtube videos, but still listening to made-for-learners podcasts which is possibly because videos give you that extra bit of context to make them comprehensible.

As for reading... Little progress.

[Cenwalh]

When learning with input only, it can be difficult to know when you've learnt something or are making progress as there are no definite things that you're learning one at a time. No rules, no vocab, nothing. This would probably be demotivating, but it definitely has led to progress. A while ago, when I first started watching made-for-natives Youtube videos, I watched a few channels that I could understand the main themes, and subscribed to a few more that looked interesting, but that I couldn't understand enough to be able to watch and be entertained. I can now watch these channels without a problem and have replaced most of my subscriptions on Youtube with Spanish content rather than English content.

I also wish I'd had the hindsight I have now of finding comprehensible content, so for those who want to find easily digestible content I have a few suggestions for content (mainly because the presenter is describing what is shown on the screen):

• Cooking/baking shows/videos: the presenter usually just describes what they're doing and offers commentary on it. They might say "I take my two courgettes and dice them" and shows on the screen two courgettes being diced. This is an example where an intermediate language learner would be able to parse "I take my two xxxxx and xxxxx them" so it might not make sense if they were to hear it on a podcast, but when they can see it it's comprehensible.
• Animation style videos: usually what a presenter says is shown on the screen in pictures when possible. I'm not talking about children's animation here either, I'm talking about discussion of topics of interest that are presented with animation. Maths, science, music, history, geography, economics and politics all made very comprehensible with animation on Youtube.
• Listed videos: you know the sort "Top 5 biggest pizzas in the world", "The 6 strangest boat crashes that led to world wars" whatever it is, they're presented with pictures on the screen that relate to the content and if you get stuck on number 3 then it doesn't matter because you won't need it for number 2. These videos concentrate on one topic and repeat the vocab throughout so if you didn't know the word for that topic at the start of the video, by hearing it said 50 times and seeing a different picture of it each time it's said, you'll surely figure out what it means.
• TV with audio description: my rationale for this is that it describes what is happening on the screen right now (which makes it so much more comprehensible), and it adds so much more language to a TV show/film that's otherwise light on dialogue. Just look at how much language it adds to The Lion King! Trouble is it can be hard to find. The American Council of the Blind maintains a list of Netflix titles audio described in languages other than English, but otherwise it's a real challenge.

After finding some comprehensible content, you need to put the hours in!

[Cenwalh]

I've been managing to maintain around 2 hours per day of input (active) I think which is a reasonable amount. It's so much in fact that I could almost do the double super challenge for films starting now and finish by the end of 2019 (although I'd not even nearly make reading department!).

Tracking has been hard, but it's something I want to be able to do. I set up an IFTTT rule that adds a row to a spreadsheet every time I like a YouTube video saying the length of the video and the time/date I liked it. It works OK to track dates, but it misses about half the videos I watch which means I have to copy the list of liked videos on YouTube and match the two up which is a bit of a faff.

I've also started expanding the things I watch on RTVE and don't have a way to track that yet apart from manually logging which I'm too lazy for, although this is more realistic than Youtube given videos are 30 mins - 1 hour rather than 5 mins on Youtube.

[Cenwalh]

I've finally finished Algo tan sencillo como tuitear te quiero. I listened to the audiobook for most of it rather than reading, and boy did it really get going! I enjoyed it so much that I've got the second and third parts of the series on Audible already lined up.

I've also been chugging away through podcasts and videos. I finally finished binging through Hoy hablamos which means I've listened to every episode they've made excepting ones talking about grammar/expressions and some of the older news episodes - that's about 5 days of audio. I'm not going to "graduate" from it yet as they talk about varied topics that are good to keep fresh for 10 mins/day, but content geared towards learners is now taking very much a backseat in the conquista. I have a new favourite podcast called Entiende Tu Mente which as the name suggests is about psychology, and I've been slowly getting through that recently.

I managed a whopping 5.5 hours of Spanish listening on Sunday as I was travelling, but otherwise have been maintaining around 2 hours per day (perhaps a bit less). I've not really watched much TV or that much Youtube so it's been an audio only journey for the most part, but nevertheless I think I've improved a great deal.