- Anki: Daily, 6528 mature + 1822 young = 8350
- Verb conjugator: Daily
- El Gambito de dama: 320 pages, finished
- Other reading: A few news articles
- FSI Basic Spanish: None
- Youtube: 30 minutes
- Los Diarios de vampiros: 1.17-1.18 (2 episodes)
- Carbono alterado: 2.1-2.8 (8 episodes)
- Sense8: 1.1-1.3 (3 episodes)
- Online tutoring: 7 hours
This week has been good for numbers. I’ve realized that I’m slow with numbers, so I started counting all my pushups for the Polyglot Fitness Challenge in Spanish. This is slowly making numbers a little bit more automatic for me. I also read El Gambito de dama which has lots of ordinals numbers to describe chess moves. Plus, I’m forcing myself to subvocalize every number I come across. 1900 and 2000 are fairly well ingrained now, but there’s still lots of room for improvement for 11-99.
Polyglot Fitness Challenge
I kept up pretty steady progress with reading, watching series and pushups, and should easily hit my targets by the end of the month. I was surprised to have watched so many minutes, but after doing the calculations, my numbers are more in line with the ratio of minutes to pages suggested by the Super Challenge, so that makes sense.
: 911/1000 Pages Read
: 2026/1000 Minutes Watched
: 905/1000 Pushups
Anki / FSI / Grammar
I kept up with daily Anki despite really wanting to take a break on Thursday when I was just feeling terrible. I’m so close to my goal, just 6 more weeks!
I’m still on break from FSI. I haven’t mentioned grammar much, but I’m getting some grammar study in, even if it’s not systematic or particularly well ordered. I mark every sentence I come across with unfamiliar grammar. I also pick topics that I struggle with and highlight all of those instances with a particular color in the Kindle app. For example, I realized a lot of words I didn’t recognize were actually diminutives of words I do know, so I started highlighting all diminutives. This has really helped me improve diminutive recognition, which I reinforced by reading a grammar source about diminutive formation. I’m enjoying focusing on one grammar topic at a time where I have exposure to a bunch of “real world examples” instead of just reading the theory or doing a few exercises. I’ve even used some diminutives in conversations recently!
Reading
As much as I love the style and writing in La Sombra del viento, I didn’t want to commit to a book with so much unknown vocabulary. I got to a paragraph that described a fountain pen in detail and was flummoxed by the number of unknown words in that paragraph alone!
Instead, I started and finished El Gambito de dama. I watched the series in English, and I’m surprised how much the series followed the book. I was hoping to get a little more background on the main character’s feelings and relationships at the orphanage, but there wasn’t much that wasn’t covered by the series. She’s just that obsessed with chess! I learned some chess and smoking terminology, but best of all, I got to see lots of examples of ordinal numbers in the teens. One deviation between the book and the series is that she spends some time learning gym movements in the book, and I enjoyed those descriptions. Despite talking about the gym and working out with several online tutors, I still don’t have a good sense of how to describe body positioning and movements. I’ve added this to my list of things to work on.
Audio / Visual input
I finished Carbono alterado, watched a few more episodes of Los Diarios de vampiros and started Sense8. I was surprised that the first episode back watching Los Diarios de vampiros was harder to understand, but I got back into it by the next episode. I’d like to get to a point where I can switch between series and retain my ability to understand.
Online Lessons
I feel like I am slacking on lessons by only taking 7 hours this week, but then I realize that is a fair amount of time! The sheer amount of reading and series watching is definitely helping, and I find myself spontaneously using phrases from books and shows in conversation. Unfortunately I didn’t think to cancel my BL membership until after the billing cycle started, so I still have a few weeks left. I plan to switch to iTalki in February, or maybe I will take a couple weeks off and start iTalki in March.