What next? (learning Spanish, maintaining German, random dabbling...)

[gsbod]

Back to Thursday updates!

I watched two episodes of Destinos this week, to catch up with the episode I missed last week. We're now in Argentina, and I have to say that the Argentinian pronunciation is going to take a little getting used to. On the other hand, Castillian Spanish is what I have the most need for in daily life, so I'm not too concerned. I do find accents and dialects fun though.

Also, I am finding Destinos a little repetitive and boring...but I think it's still too soon to jump in and try to follow a telenovela on Netflix (although no guarantees that won't be boring either I'm not much of a TV person really...). So this can be my motivation to study more.

I've started working through my A1 Lernkrimi now. It's just one short story (but comes with audio). I mentioned a few weeks ago that I listened to the audio. This time, I'm reading through it intensively, noting new and interesting vocabulary, and doing the exercises. I think it's useful.

I need to get moving more on grammar though. Something to look forward to this weekend, maybe?

[stell]

I watched every single episode of Destinos (well, except for the review episodes towards the end). It helped my listening ability enormously, but I don’t think I would have made it to the end at a rate of 1 episode per week! Towards the end, I was watching an episode every single day, just to finish up and be DONE. Haha!

[gsbod]

I watched every single episode of Destinos (well, except for the review episodes towards the end). It helped my listening ability enormously, but I don’t think I would have made it to the end at a rate of 1 episode per week! Towards the end, I was watching an episode every single day, just to finish up and be DONE. Haha!

The thing is, if I tried to speed up my watching of Destinos, it would soon overshoot my actual current ability in Spanish, and become much less useful as an activity! I need to make sure that my study of grammar keeps up with the Destinos curriculum (which is usefully provided here under the "Instructional Design" tab).

So maybe the motivation to get through Destinos can also help motivate me to complete studying all the necessary grammar points that go with it. The quicker I cover them, the quicker I can finish the series!

[gsbod]

I have another migraine so today is a write off as far as studying is concerned. I wish I could just have a few weeks without being ill, or having migraines, or not being able to sleep... Never mind. It's just one day, the rest of the week has been pretty good really. I'm slowly getting to grips with the preterito indefinido. It's just going to need a lot of practice.

I'm struggling a bit with the fact that having spent a lot of time on the present tense already, I came to associate an -o ending very strongly with the first person. And now the preterito indefinido has come along to shake that up completely. It's also blown my mind a bit that position of stress can be a part of verb conjugation in Spanish - for example the difference between "Hablo español" ("I speak Spanish") and "Habló español" ("He/she spoke Spanish"). I know in English we have a few words where stress changes meaning - for example the difference between the noun "a project" and the verb "to project", but word position and context are also going to be a factor here to help avoid confusion (although if you say it with the stress in the wrong place, it does sound weird).

I'm also starting to wonder why Spanish has developed a reputation as being somehow an easier language? I guess if you transfer to beginners Spanish from beginners French then, at the start, it may look easier, but it's still got plenty of things to chew over, not least the verb system. I doubt it's any easier than any other Romance language, to be honest, and in some respects it's looking to actually be trickier than French. In any case, next time I want to pick a new language, I'm going to go for something with fewer different verb conjugations!

[tastyonions]

I'm finding Greek also does the thing with simple stress changing the meaning completely.

κάνεις ('ka.nis): you do / make
κανείς (ka.'nis): nobody

περνώ (per.'no): I pass / go past
παίρνω ('per.no): I take

Spanish conjugations are definitely trickier than French, imo.

[gsbod]

Spanish conjugations are definitely trickier than French, imo.

But how are Greek conjugations?

[tastyonions]

After four weeks of learning Greek (so take it with a grain of salt), I'd say they're a little harder than Spanish or Portuguese.

Each verb has "continuous" and "perfective" aspects in present and past tenses, and passive and active voices. Aspects and voices are all differentiated morphologically rather than by using auxiliary verbs like in Germanic or Romance languages, e.g. whereas in English you would say "it was taken," in Greek you would just say "πάρθηκε." So if you're worried about big verb tables, Greek might not be to your taste! Look at the table for παίρνω to get an idea:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%C ... E%BD%CF%89

But one discount compared to Romance languages is that the future and subjunctive *do* "reuse" verb forms + particle (similar to English "will do / make / say / etc.").

[gsbod]

I'm running a bit short on motivation for Spanish at the moment. It's in these scenarios where being signed up to a class is actually quite helpful. The course progresses, whether you are motivated or not. In any case, preterito indefinido is starting to sink in, ever so slowly. I haven't watched any Destinos for a couple of weeks, so put the next episode on this evening and gave up after the first 5 minutes or so. I'm really not invested in whether they find Angel. Also I seem to find Argentinian accents particularly difficult... So then I started looking through Netflix to see if there were any Spanish language TV shows that were appealing, but no, I couldn't find anything.

I ended up sticking on an episode of Tatort instead (which I also haven't watched for some time) and enjoyed that a lot more. I really miss having the opportunity to speak German irl (I know where to find online opportunities, I just would prefer not to right now).

I think at the moment, I need to prioritise more social activities anyway. I've found a couple of local groups linked to other hobbies I have, which I am trying out, which is taking precedence over the grammar books (probably quite rightly too). There is a local Spanish conversation group, apparently, but I've got a lot more work to do before I can show my face there...

[gsbod]

After last week's poor showing, I watched two episodes of Destinos this week, and was rewarded for my efforts with the first episode in the series which is entirely in Spanish (episode 14, if you must know). They seem to be using a lot more of the preterito indefinido now, so it's a nice synergy with my main grammar focus at the moment.

Nothing much of interest to report this week. I've been playing a lot of board games...

[gsbod]

I finally got to meet up with some German speaking friends and actually speak some German. Face to face, no computers. It was amazing I had an easier time remembering vocabulary than I expected, but I made some really stupid verb conjugation errors. Maybe I was just overexcited!

My motivation for Spanish has completely vanished, however. Not as a result of the German speaking, it happened before I even knew I'd have a German speaking opportunity. We've got a short break from class over Easter anyway, so I'm using this as an excuse to take a complete break for a couple of weeks, and see how I feel afterwards. Still, it would have been easier with the class if I could have maintained motivation for another couple of months.

One thing I'm not doing is treating my lack of motivation as a problem to be solved. If it comes back great, but if not, maybe I just don't want to do any studying at the moment, and that's ok too. Work is going to be getting busier again after an unusually quiet period, and, as I've mentioned before, I want to spend more of my free time doing things that get me out of the house and socialising with others. OK, a class will do this, but not the homework bit between classes!