german2k01 wrote:Thanks for your detailed analysis. Really enjoyed reading it.
Is it possible for you to dig up stats for pure reading you had done in Spanish? Same for doing L2->L2 LR books in Spanish. How many books? In simple words, what groundwork should one do in terms of pure reading and doing L2->L2 LR books before they are ready to do an unassisted listening to a completely new audiobook? I would love to know about your transition in relation to this, especially in Spanish.
Sure. Here equal measures of data and memory are needed and summarizing the Spanish journey may be a bit lengthy. Initially, I read roughly 9-10k pages in Spanish, mostly in 2017, before transitioning to a combination of audiobooks and much harder reading selections. I mention the preliminary listening I did in 2017 to make it clear how much of each input activity occurred simultaneously prior to laying ears on an audiobook. I also spoke from the beginning and started writing fairly early on, so there was an immersion impact to consider.
Part 1 of 2: First 10k pages Spanish reading and first 500+ hours general listeningFor an initial 10k pages of pure reading in 2017, I picked challenging texts that were a mix of translated and native works. Examples include
Blood Meridian by McCarthy,
The Name of the Rose by Eco, and
Love in the Time of Cholera by Márquez. For my entire Spanish learning journey, I recorded about 14,500 pages of pure reading spanning 2017 and 2018. In 2017, I had put in quite a bit of beginner-level listening including an initial foray into intermediate Spanish podcasts, perhaps about 400-500 hours total listening in 2017. After this, my listening level was reasonably poor but slowly improving. My reading level was good but untested.
Edit: Now that I think on it, I read and listened to articles from the now-defunct Veintemundos magazine in 2017. Technically, I consider it my first LR experience, at least in spirit. Though applied to magazine articles and encompassing very few hours, the concept had experientially wedged itself in my brain and the professional voice from Veintemundos was at least as good as a professional audiobook narrator.
Part 2 of 2 - around 5k pages reading + audiobooksReadingIn 2018, I intentionally devoted most of my time to listening and had to slow the pure reading experience somewhat to accommodate for that listening effort. In early 2018, I spent over a month reading
Don Quijote de la Mancha and progressed from there with monolingual reading. I took advantage of reading native works across several centuries and moved away from using translations. In total, I stopped tracking pure reading after that period since I could read almost anything I attempted.
Listening - first LR textListening was the most difficult hurdle in Spanish and it is where I spent most of my time in 2018. I used L2->L2 LR very differently studying Spanish. The first book that I remember using it with is
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and it was my transition novel to go between reading and audiobooks. Toward the end of the book, I noticed that I was close to being able to listen to it without technically requiring the text, but I intuitively sensed a drop in comprehension when I tried to do so and therefore stayed the course with both text and audio. My understanding of the work wasn't quite as good as it would have been via a slow and careful reading, but the nature of the work and Patrick's engaging writing style made ultra-high levels of understanding less necessary.
First unassisted audiobookNext, I jumped right in the deep end and went for a native audiobook of the same ilk. I switched genres from fantasy to historical fiction and chose
La catedral del mar by Falcones. I remember this as a very hard but rewarding and enjoyable first audiobook. It took me a month to get through that one audiobook unassisted and I remember needing to use full concentration and listen with eyes closed to be able to follow the story. Encouraged by that initial success and attracted to the same genre, I then read
Pillars of the Earth. I recall that translated work being much easier to understand and after completing it, I pretty much knew that my path to mass audiobook listening was wide open.
Additional use of LR in SpanishI used L2->L2 LR later on as well. At more advanced stages (perhaps between my second and third year of study), I read well in Spanish but subvocalized slower than an audiobook narrator. For a change of pace and perhaps sometimes out of impatience, I turned to LR for some of the readings where I also had corresponding audio available from Librivox. I did this with portions of The Iliad and Odyssey and with other texts as well. While I don't think that greatly influenced my Spanish progress at that later stage, it is likely where I developed a better understanding of how I like to use LR, which ended up paying big dividends now as I tackle German.
Challenge between Spanish and GermanTo put the above in context, I should briefly compare tracks in German and Spanish. German reading is much harder than Spanish reading based on personal experience and the many log reports I have read. You can see the increased level of challenge in nearly every German metric that I provide. The result is a more balanced analytical distribution of study hours for German and much higher total hours forecasted. Study weights are much more evenly distributed between vocabulary, grammar acquisition, reading and listening in German than they were in Spanish for me. I literally can't speak for speaking, not yet anyhow. That more equal weighting, bringing challenges in every area, gives me more time with each language component as well as more reasons to track progress.