- Anki: Daily, 5875 mature + 1916 young = 7791 total
- Verb conjugator: Daily
- Perdida: 63 pages, 11%
- Zona Peligrosa: 359 pages, 68%
- Other reading: 2 news articles
- FSI Basic Spanish: None
- Podcasts: None
- Youtube: None
- Diarios de Vampiros: 1.6-11 (6 episodes)
- How to Get Away with Murder: 1.8-11 (4 episodes)
- Online tutoring: 10 hours
Yet another challengeI signed up for the Polyglot Fitness Challenge even though I currently have no aspirations for being a polyglot. I plan to give myself a different challenge every month, so I can adjust my goals as needed instead of planning the year in advance. For January, I will read 1000 pages of Spanish, watch 1000 minutes of Spanish, and do 1000 pushups. I’m on track to make it.
AnkiI spent a few hours yesterday adding more words to Anki and have enough to last another 2 weeks. I downloaded the unwieldy RAE frequency list which is sorted by part of speech. My current method is to add words I encounter in reading, though this is very time consuming so I only add perhaps 50 of these words per week. For more words, I add some hundreds of words from the RAE list to a Google spreadsheet with a column translating it to English, then another column translating the English back to Spanish (S2). I filter out all words where S2 is the same as the original Spanish word and then review these to make sure they "make sense" or don't conflict with other cards I already have (such as confusing near-synonyms). I then add those words to Anki.
ReadingI started reading Perdida (Gone Girl), and it felt surprisingly slow even though I have the advantage of having read it in English. I’m not exactly sure what the problem was, if the grammar was difficult, if there were too many unknown words, if I was annoyed with the characters, or what. Something about the writing felt like overly-hipster English translated into stilted Spanish (not that I would recognize stilted Spanish), and I just couldn’t focus.
Instead, I started Zona Peligrosa, the first Jack Reacher novel, because it’s part of a series with over 20 novels, and I’d love to have a series to fall back on when I don’t know what to read next. It’s surprisingly easy in comparison to Perdida, El Club de la Lucha and La Reina del Sur. The sentences are short and simple, there’s much less unknown vocabulary, and a lot of vocabulary is repeated several times. I wonder if the original English is this repetitive.
Audio / Visual inputI'm focusing on series instead of podcasts and YT for now. I’m not sure I’ve noticed significant improvements in listening comprehension, but I’m keeping the faith that watching lots of Netflix will eventually get me there. I’m now more familiar with common imperatives, so that’s something.
Online LessonsI tried new tutors to add variety, but that was … not so successful. I booked three new tutors and thought it would be a good test to go over a few grammar questions and then practice conversation for the remainder. I had three grammar questions I knew the answers to, and I wanted to see how they would explain them to me. Well, we never got to the conversation part because the tutors all flailed trying to answer the grammar questions. :/
FSI / GrammarI’m still on break from FSI, possibly through March as I focus more on input. I downloaded some Spanish apps in the hopes of practicing some grammar. Ideally, I’d love an app that drills Spanish grammar concepts that aren’t verb conjugations. If anybody has suggestions, I'm all ears!