5 Week UpdateI'm surprised both by how far I've come and by how far I have to go! My comprehension has come a long way, but output is still pretty rocky. At this point I have:
- 933 vocab words in Anki, each a picture/L2 pair with a sound byte (2,546 actual cards)
- 350 grammar cards of various types (conjugation, cloze deletion etc)
- finished reading/listening to Harry Potter 1
- read/listened to the first half of El león, la bruja, y el ropero
- finished 27 units of Pimsleur
- and 6 of FSI
- watched the first two season of Érase una vez, without subtitles but making use of transcripts when necessary
- casually read through ~2/3 of my grammar book
I've also gone to a few tutoring sessions and done some writing on Lang-8, but probably not enough of either to count for much. The past two weeks have been hectic so I've mostly settled for input, trying to read/listen/watch for at least a couple of hours a day even when I don't have the energy to produce much. I've been waiting for my Ultimate Spanish audio to get into the library... it was supposed to be 3 days. Two weeks later, I'm still waiting. In the interim I started FSI and I
love it, so I'll probably continue with that regardless. I think that if I'd started it earlier, it probably would have been a little much, but right now it's great for automating some of the grammar that I've been reading about.
In spite of spending a ton of time on Spanish over the past 5 weeks, I probably could have made more progress had I wanted to be more disciplined about my approach. I haven't drilled through my grammar book, I've mostly just read it like I would any other book. I've been good about Pimsleur, and religious about Anki, but other than that, I've more or less let myself do whatever I feel like, so long as it's in Spanish. It's made the learning process enjoyable, & I haven't felt any burnout even though I've devoted a huge amount of time to studying.
I do think that the Anki dedication has paid off as far as comprehension goes. Making the cards is time consuming - I download an audio clip for each (either from Forvo or Spanishdict), find a picture or two on Spanish google images, and find a sentence using the word, either from a book I'm reading or using the sentence maker on 123teachme.com. But after that, the words are pretty well engrained in my memory -- I get them right at first view ~90% of the time, and after first view ~98% of the time. I do about 200 reviews a day along with 60 new cards (if I've made that many!), and it typically takes <30 minutes. So the card production bit is arduous, but after that it seems to be pretty smooth sailing. Grammar cards are easier to make, but slower and more difficult to study. I'm curious as to what the difference would be if I simply used L1/L2 translation cards, which would certainly have allowed me to learn more words faster, but given that this seems to be working, I'm sticking with it.
Thanks to my increased vocabulary and the many, many hours of listening (>37 hrs, thank you Once Upon a Time & audiolibros), I'm able to understand a lot more of what I hear. I feel like the language has slowed down for me -- at first it all sounded like an incomprehensible mishmash, but now I'm better able to hear the individual words. But my lackadaisical approach to grammar has definitely left me speaking like a caveman -- although I have spent a lot of time on pronunciation, so at least a caveman with good pronunciation!
Overall, it's been a fun & productive 5 weeks, and I'm willing to sacrifice some progress for the sake of making it an enjoyable experience.
In other exciting news, I bought my ticket to Peru, and I head out in just over a month! Talk about great motivation
They were just being nice I'm sure, but it was a great confidence boost. I was also happy that I could understand all of their replies.