Isn't it Romantic? SCMT learns Spanish and French

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SCMT
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Re: 40something Spanish Log

Postby SCMT » Tue Sep 07, 2021 7:10 pm

I have been trying to deal with a very difficult family situation that has prevented me from making as much progress in my comeback as I would have liked, but I have managed to do a few things with Spanish since my last update.

I have had 2 italki sessions.

I have intermittently returned to reading my newspapers.

I have watched the news a couple of times.

I have returned to Casa de los Espiritus.

I am trying to pick up some momentum and rebuild some better habits going forward.
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SCMT
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Re: 40something Spanish Log

Postby SCMT » Thu Sep 23, 2021 4:25 pm

I have been trying to make an earnest effort to return to my language learning projects, starting with a couple of italki sessions. I really do enjoy conversing in Spanish, and my tutor--the one I used to refer to as my "main"tutor--is a really good conversation partner. She is good at leading the conversation to a point that is just a little bit past comfortable, she is skilled at giving selective corrections that don't disrupt the flow of discussion, and she has a wealth of resources she has collected and can call upon if she needs them. She is just a skilled, pleasant, professional teacher that has been good for me through the beginner and now intermediate stages of learning the language.

I have been picking at Casa de los Espiritus and also reading the news in Spanish most days. I listened to the El Explicador podcast a couple of times; it is organized differently depending on where you shop for podcasts, and I found it broken into ~10 minute chunks somewhere, so I've been listening to those short segments in my car when the mood strikes me. I also resumed the Diablero TV show yesterday where I left off (s2, e6;) I had to stop it and turn the subtitles back on to catch the dialog. I will watch it again without subs, but that's probably going to have to be the pattern--one viewing with crutches, followed by one without--until I move on to something else.

So overall, I feel more connected to the language, but I still need to improve a couple of things. I need to make my italki sessions and my reading and my watching and listening a normal part of my week again. I need to do something to increase my production of the language; I toyed with the idea of joining one of the "submit your writing for correction" websites but never got around to doing it, so that's a possibility. I need to do a better job of recording, studying, internalizing, and producing the new vocabulary that i find in my input; it's easy to read a passage with new words in it, understand the gist of it, and not actually learn any of the new words, for example. I think a notepad and pencil could probably help this process. And I may need to increase the frequency of conversations in Spanish, which probably means more italki, which is going to be tricky because of scheduling issues, so I'm not going to stress over it.

As for sideline projects, I did thumb through my French vocab book, and some issues at work have led me into a totally different language direction: Python. I don't ever expect to be a professional coder, but I am trying to learn enough computer science and programming to do my job better, and right now, Python is the tool.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: 40something Spanish Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu Sep 23, 2021 4:48 pm

SCMT wrote: it's easy to read a passage with new words in it, understand the gist of it, and not actually learn any of the new words, for example. I think a notepad and pencil could probably help this process.

I am right there with you on this. This happens to me especially in Ancient Greek, and it used to happen to me in German (before I gave up German). If notepad and pencil help, let us know. Iversen's word list method may help, too.
2 x
Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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SCMT
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Re: 40something Spanish Log

Postby SCMT » Thu Nov 04, 2021 5:31 pm

So I just realized I've gone the whole month of October without updating. That's a new record since I started this log, I think, but it is really more of a reflection of the difference in study methods I undertake how than through the beginning stages. It's still too long, though.

For instance, I'm still reading the news in Spanish most days. It has become habitual, it is comfortable, and it is a welcome break from the US news that wakes me in the morning that seems solely focused on political issues from one side or the other. I haven't watched the Spanish language news much recently--my workout time has been consumed by other stuff--so that's an area where I could put a little more Spanish in my day.

I finished the Diablero series; the second season was only 6 episodes. I think they are planning a 3rd, but I don't know if I will watch it again. I found season 2 to be less engaging than the first, and it crossed the line from fun but farfetched fantasy to just stupid in a few places. I haven't found a replacement yet, but I did get about halfway through a movie called La Ley de Herodes before I forgot about it. It's the story of a hapless bumpkin who is named mayor of a town in which the last 5 mayors have been killed for doing lousy jobs. I liked it, and will resume it at next opportunity.

I'm also still reading Casa de los Espiritus. I like the book, but it is kind of slow going for me. I am trying to read it paying special attention to new vocab (see my last log entry!) but without looking up every unknown word. I'm still only somewhere around 1/4 through.

I have been having weekly sessions with my italki tutor, mainly for conversation practice. I enjoy them, and it is the only regular conversation in Spanish that I have, but it is difficult to find time to do more.

And that's it. I'll try to have more accomplishments to post before another month expires, but I'm not making any promises.
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Re: 40something Spanish Log

Postby SCMT » Thu Nov 18, 2021 4:36 pm

Well, I didn't go an entire page of the calendar without updates this time, so that's something. I do like this log as a way of tracking progress, or lack of progress, and having some interaction with what is principally an individual endeavor for me, this studying of languages. I'd like to go back through the now 16 pages and 150+ posts represented here just to reminisce, but that isn't going to happen today.

I finished La Ley de Herodes, the movie I started and then forgot. I should have continued to forget it. What was a quirky and enjoyable dark comedy for the first hour became a depressing, formulaic commentary on society whose overriding message seemed to be, "things are bad." The Mexican Spanish was good, I guess, and i was able to follow pretty well except in a few instances of rapid conversation between characters. I also watched a Columbian movie titled, Pickpockets, but I didn't have as much success with comprehension. While the news from Columbia is usually clear and relatively straightforward, I found the natural dialogue of the street kids in the film difficult enough that I had to turn on subtitles. The movie was moderately enjoyable, but as a language learning exercise, I probably got more reading than listening practice.

I am stilll reading the news in Spanish most days, and I am still working my way through Casa de los Espiritus. I am enjoying the book-- I understand why it is the seminal work of one of Latin America's legendary authors--but fiction is still proving difficult for me. I seem to have two speeds when reading novels: either fast, where I don't retain the words that are flowing through my head; or slow enough to parse every word while not making much progress in the 30 minutes or so per session I can find. This really isn't a problem with my news articles, but there is a distinct the two.

I have had a sessiion or two with my tutor. I really like her, but I am starting to wonder if I shouldn't move on. She is very good at structured lessons and conversations around them, but really, I am at the point where what I really need is flowing natural conversation practice with corrections and not a planned lesson. Of course, it helps if there is a topic that the conversation can be based around (like the Casa de las Flores episodes i watched wtih my conversation tutor before,) but I may have outgrown the structure of her preferred lesson type. We shall see.

After a false start or two with difference exercises, I started French in Action this week, completing episodes 1-3. I have all of the materials, but so far I have just watched the videos. I found them straightforward and easy to understand. As the program progresses, I intend to use the workbook material as well. It's enjoyable to listen to French, and although I know that I'm comparing different levels, and that conventional wisdom would convey the opposite, I think I am going to find listening comprehension less of a challenge than I do in Spanish (maybe because French was the first foreign language I studied in school, although never reaching a conversant level, or maybe because I have spent so much effort listening to Spanish, I don't know.) Anyway, the foray into wanderlust continues.
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Re: 40something Spanish Log

Postby SCMT » Fri Dec 03, 2021 2:51 pm

It's time for an update on my modest language learning activities over the past couple of weeks. A busy work and family schedule has made finding time for study difficult, but I have managed to read the news in Spanish more days than I haven't, and I have watched Noticias Telemundo once or twice. I had a lesson with my italki tutor where we did a lot of practice with direct and indirect object pronouns, which is something I find difficult to produce in conversation; I usually just take the much longer shortcut and substitute the actual object for the pronoun and locate it where it would be in English, which is after the verb. This whole business of placing object pronouns before the verb, especially when there are two of them, seems wrong; how am I supposed to know the thing I am acting upon until I have acted upon it? And then on top of that, the direct and indirect pronouns are sometimes the same and sometimes almost the same and often the same unless they are together in which case they are different. It's one of those skills that every 4 year old in the Spanish speaking world does naturally but will always present some difficulty for me, I think.

I started watching the Netflix show Cocaine, a docuseries that, at least in the beginning, is about coca farmers in South America. It is an interesting topic, but I abandoned the show fairly quickly. There are many interviews with local farmers and villagers where the sound quality is not good, and between that and unfamiliar accents, it was just too difficult to follow. On top of that, randomly the narration goes from Spanish to English with Spanish subtitles, which just confused by brain. So I switched to a documentary series called, "Magical Andes," which I am enjoying much more. I have watched the first three 30 minute episodes, and I had planned on watching #3 again but seem to have fallen asleep sometime in the first 5 minutes. There are 10 episodes total.

I have not returned to Casa de los Espiritus, although I intend to do so. Reading fiction is just hard, and I haven't found the combination of available time and brain power to tackle it recently.

I have continued what feels like progress in French in Action. I have watched through episode 8, and while I considered viewing 6 & 8 again, I think I will work through the written materials on those chapters when I have the chance instead. The written materials, being 35 years old, designed for a university class, and available piecemeal on the internet, are a little hard to sort through--there are text books and work books and study guides and dialogues and who knows what else--but I'm sure i can get something out of them. My comprehension of the videos is pretty good, I think. The topics are still pretty basic, and I did have quite a bit of French in school. The videos seem to be doing a good job of refreshing that. I have no delusion that i would be able to produce as much as I understand at this point (or at any point, really,) but I am enjoying the show, and I am certain I am getting better at understanding the language. I will add in other resources as opportunity arises, but for the moment, I'm happy following Mirella through her lovely little French life.
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Re: 40something Spanish Log

Postby SCMT » Tue Dec 28, 2021 3:27 pm

December hasn't been my most active month of language study and practice, but I did have a few adventures.

My Magical Andes show didn't really pan out like I wanted. It turns out that 4 of the 10 episodes are available in Spanish and the other 6 are English only, and it also turns out that I'm not that interested in the Andes when people are talking about them in English, so I gave up the show after one additional episode. So I turned to limited series Frontera Verde, a really engaging murder mystery in the Columbian Amazon that, like Pickpockets, gave me a lot of trouble with the accent. Yeah, I know that Columbian Spanish is supposed to be neutral and clear, but it's fast and it's different and I couldn't follow, so after turning subtitles on and off for 3 episodes I quit watching. I hope the detective finds all of the answers she is seeking, but she is probably going to have to do it without me. I watched Noticias Telemundo a couple of times and even pulled up a couple of those BBC mundo videos that are so good, but it's clear that listening comprehension is still my weakest skill and not practicing is not causing any improvement whatever.

I have been reading regularly, mainly my newspapers ElPais and BBCmundo. After putting it down for some time, I have restarted my Isabel Allende book, but I'm finding that somewhere between 5-10 pages is about all I want to read at a time, so it's slow going. I keep thinking that reading decent fiction is going to get easier, but it's still tough going, even though I enjoy the book. Much of it is told in the imperfect, so maybe that is imprinting somewhere on the dark recesses of my brain.

I've done a little more work with French in Action; specifically, I have watched through episode 9 and I have reviewed the written materials I have for the more difficult chapters I have already covered (6 & 8.) The materials really are good, and I should not shortcut them in the future, even for stuff I think I know. I should probably look at the videos as a complementary resource to the materials instead of the other way around, but we will see how that works out in the future. I do enjoy refreshing my French, and I do enjoy FIA, so I probably need to start thinking about a more settled program of study and maybe a name change to the log. I'm not going to be 40something forever, anyway.
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Re: Isn't it Romantic? SCMT learns Spanish and French

Postby SCMT » Mon Jan 03, 2022 8:26 pm

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

– Maya Angelou


SCMT wrote:For 2021, I am going to improve my listening comprehension to the point where listening to Spanish tv and movies is easy. I am also going to improve my fluidity in conversation, especially in past tenses and the subjunctive.

Oh, yeah...and I'm starting French


So much for that whole “tv and movies is easy,” business! The only part of that resolution, made with the bestest of intentions a year ago, that was fulfilled was the “starting French”part, and only because “starting” isn’t really defined. After a roaring start with my own personal “listen an hour each day” in January, my practice became sporadic. In going back through all of my activities last year, my language study was much less dense, and predictably, my progress has been less consistent and…well…less. That’s probably to be expected—I’ve left the beginner stages well behind and am less energized to face the slow slog that seems to come with the B levels. In fairness, I am more comfortable in conversation and probably a good deal more fluid, but I'm not where I would like to be.

This past year, I’ve watched the final season of Casa de las Flores, two seasons of Diablero, and several Spanish language documentaries, sometimes watching the same show more than once. I watched a 6 hour mini-series, two movies, a handful of youtube videos and several BBC mundo clips, and I watched the news in Spanish and listened to my pop science podcast on an inconsistent basis. I have read only two Spanish novels :( and am half-way through a 3rd. My best practice has been reading newspapers, and guess what? I’ve gotten really good at reading Spanish language newspapers. I have now had 95 hours of tutoring on italki, or just 7 more than I had at this time last year :cry: , and I spent two weeks in Mexico trying to pretend that my Spanish was better than it actually is.

So this year I’d like to do more. I’d like to read more and listen more and watch more and converse more. I'm going to set a goal óf 10 hours per month of movies and tv in Spanish, plus the same amount in either youtube videos or podcasts. Written down, that doesn't sound like an overly ambitious goal, but I think practically, that may be all i can muster. I also will find a conversation partner again for at least a once a week discussion. I will continue my mostly daily reading of newspapers, but I also would like to finish at least 5 novels, including the one I'm dallying with now. I'll try to post my progress against these measures monthly in this log for public shame or glory.

I’d like to jump further into my French diversion, even though I know that it reduces the time spent on Spanish. I want to finish French in Action and work my way through one of my Assimil courses following the formula I used for Spanish. At some point I’d like to find an online tutor to help me cut a path to conversation there, too.

And finally, since I’m going to be posting about more than one romance language I’ll be learning, I’m going to wave my magic wand over the thread title and…
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SCMT
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Re: Isn't it Romantic? SCMT learns Spanish and French

Postby SCMT » Fri Jan 14, 2022 8:56 pm

Ok, it's the first post under the new thread title. I once heard that people and companies change names for two reasons--either because they get married or because they are hiding from something. What does that say about my log?

Spanish: The first thing I am going to have to do is clarify, or more accurately revise, my 2022 goals for Spanish. I wrote:

I'm going to set a goal óf 10 hours per month of movies and tv in Spanish, plus the same amount in either youtube videos or podcasts.

After a week or reflection, that's just not going to be possible. I think a more reasonable goal would be 15 hours of combined, focused listening of movies and tv and youtube and podcast combined. That's 30 minutes per day, every day of the month, and with reading and French and whatever else, that's a full plate for me. As a matter of fact, I'm going to set 10 hrs as a minimum hurdle and 15 as the target and see how that goes.

I did start by watching a Mexican movie, Dime cuando tu. It was a llight romantic comedy with lots of fast dialogue, so much that I had to turn on the subtitles to keep up :( I actually wound up watching the thing twice through in chunks of about 20 minutes, first with subs on, then with subs off. It was disappointing to have to rely on that crutch, but I ccan tell I'm out of practice, and it wasn't going to do any good to stare blankly at the screen without understanding. I also listened to an hour of the El Explicador podcast, which went much better. My understanding of someone talking to me in a clear voice is remarkably better than trying to listen to a conversation between two other people on screen conversing in some sort of witty banter.

I am slowly progressing through Casa de los Espiritus.

I am reading the news in Spanish most days.

French: I am on chapter 13 of FIA, which I have watched once. I need to go through the reading materials and watch at least the vignette portion of the video again.
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SCMT
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Re: Isn't it Romantic? SCMT learns Spanish and French

Postby SCMT » Wed Feb 02, 2022 2:38 pm

Well, I had to add a day to January, but I did make my 10 hour listening goal in Spanish by staging an overtime rally yesterday. For the month +1, I watched the movie Dime Cuando Tu twice (3 hours total,) listened to 2 hours of el explicador, spent a little over an hour with bbc videos, consumed an hour of Noticias Telemundo, watched the two hour movie Como Caido del Cielo, and started the six episode mini-series Somos. It was the bare minimum to meet my target, which I have already revised downward, and it came in chunks rather than regular daily practice, something I will try to improve going forward. On the bright side, I like the Somos show, a Narco story based on real events; it’s interesting, and I can understand the dialogue with some issues catching up with the speed. It seems much closer to the level I need than the movies, which are more difficult for me to make out for reasons I can’t fully explain because I don’t fully understand and don't like very much at all.

I read very little of my Isabel Allende book, but I did read my newspapers pretty regularly. I still find it peculiar that the frequency of unknown words is so much greater in literature than in the news. I'm also somewhat frustrated that I know so many of the words spoken in movies but am unable to make them out without subtitles and process them rapidly enough to keep pace. This tells me where I need to focus my efforts, though.

In French, I have completed Episode 16 in FIA. It seems to be a good pattern to watch the episode, return a day or so later and read through the transcript and written material using a dictionary as needed, then watch at least the vignette, and sometimes the whole thing, again. For now, that’s the course I am planning to follow.
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