Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Fri Jul 23, 2021 2:23 am

I was feeling a bit overwhelmed today. The pizza with an extra 1/2 pound (220 grams) of mozzarella cheese on it didn't help.

I got to watching a YouTube video by Helen Abadzi. She's apparently an extremely experienced and successful polyglot. She gave several useful pointers. The one that stuck out was that if you stop using some skill, like a language, for some years, and you want to reconstitute it as quickly as possible, return to your old books and tapes and recordings if possible. That is better than turning to new materials on the same subject. (she gave an example of about 16 years that she'd put a certain language aside. That's about the time I'd set Spanish aside).

There's also the aspect that one should get the skill very high before quitting, but she didn't mention that.

Anyway, in the down, overwhelmed state, with Helen Abadzi's suggestion, I started listening to an old Practice and Improve Your Spanish set of recordings that I'd listened to many years ago. It's like a radio show telling a story with some practice exercises spliced in. Professor Arguelles talks about this series in his video on Passport Books. I'd converted the tapes to mp3s and cut out the seemingly gratuitous musical interludes all those years ago. Went from 4 hours to 2 hours 40 minutes. I'm only about 40% into the story, but this listen has been better than any of the ones I remember.

Once again it got me to lamenting the KonMari induced disappearance of a few other books: my Street Spanish books 1-3, another "Street" book in a different series, the Programmatic Spanish book I'd bought at a garage sale, the hard copies I'd had of FSI Basic Spanish, etc.

But I have the recordings for all that stuff in mp3. Helen Abadzi mentioned the listening aspect as particularly important for adults and even more so for older adult language learners. "So I got that going for me". (Bill Murray in Stripes).

I do have my old Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish book. I'm curious if the Magic Key and perhaps some fast listening might help "prime the pump" when I'm getting ready to visit the restless natives.

I'm not planning to drop my current program, but I am thinking supplementing with these other materials I'd used long ago might be very useful.

That reminds me of another adjustment I've thought about to the "language island" 3 month goal. That is, rather than the specific topics I'd mentioned in an earlier post, just take the "talk to yourself" more seriously. That way, when I'm wondering what to call the circular basin one drains the kidneys into, I can feel good about looking it up, even if I'm not planning to share that word with anyone ;)

One other thing I tried today for what seems like the first time. I got it from the YouTube "booktuber" channel El librerero de Valentina:


One of the things Valentina mentioned was that she listens to audiobooks at 150-200% speed when she uses audio. This is in her native language and she often reads when she listens. (She usually just reads, btw).

I did a little experiment with a book I'm familiar with. 150-250% audio speed. It definitely made me read faster :) There's also an interesting psychological phenomenon by pushing the speed very high. I even did 350% for a tiny bit. That that was too fast for this book right now. After doing 250% for several minutes, it was rather comfortable when I went back to 200%. Earlier in the session when I went from 150% to 200%, the 200% seemed quite fast at first. It's still rather fast, but hearing Valentina say she generally does 150-200% made me think maybe it's not weird to do so.

So the pizza, which was about 10 hours ago, is starting to wear off. I'm not hungry, but at least I'm no longer comatose.
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: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sun Jul 25, 2021 12:45 am

Madrigal's Magic Key
This book reappeared on a shelf in my closet. It always gets rave reviews. Margarita Madrigal wrote it a long time ago. She wanted to help others communicate in Spanish. She's wrote a few other books, carrying her simple lessons learned to other languages. A bit like Michel Thomas in that respect.

So I was looking at Madrigal's Magic Key this morning. It's neat. Andy Warhol drawings. Simple concepts. Powerful truths.

In lesson 1, she introduces some common cognate endings. By page 4, she's already introduced 5 cognate categories. There's exact match cognates, like actor = actor and popular = popular.

I won't go through the other cognates. If you've studied Spanish a bit, you probably already know them, even if you haven't done the 1 + 1 and realized there is practically a vocabulary rule for this stuff. The thing is, she gets the student to understand if you know English, you already know a lot of Spanish.

So I'm on page 4. She has about 12 conversaciones.

Is the actor popular?
Yes, the actor is popular.

I took these as simple take-off points for a bit of extemporaneous babel...
Yes, he's popular. He's good-looking. His wife is too. I saw him in a movie. The movie was good.

My point is that I might can use this book in a way that's not boring at my current level and it might be very helpful for fluency.

Alternatively, there are 3 tests and one can see where they stand by just taking the test and skipping ahead and possibly to almost the end of the book, where the subjunctive is introduced. Not sure what I'll do, but starting at the beginning and going through it page by page is an option. Another is jump around and enjoy myself. I'm practicing, not procrastinating, right? :)

Anki Ultimate Conjugation Deck Mystery Solved
So I'd been brutally flogged by the first two verbs in the Ultimate Spanish Conjugation deck. I wondered, how do I begin to cover my bare bottom from this brutality? I have about 15 decks of various vintages in Anki. Some French, a little Esperanto, a bit of English, Spanish 9000 sentences, etc. Many of these were abandoned long ago. A few were diligently worked for months, some were abandoned at birth. All of them jeered at me as bystanders in the Conjugation Deck flogging. They always stuck out in the "to do" queue.

Rather than drop a KonMari bomb on them and get them out of the house, I experimented with a setting where you set the maximum number of cards per day. I changed all those old decks to have 0 as the maximum cards per day to "clear the deck" for the Conjugation deck.

Then Anki, the goddess of SRS took mercy on me. She designed the universe in such a way that Ultimate Spanish Conjugation deck shared a deck setting with at least one of those moribund, rescued from a KonMari slaughter decks (jeerers). She saw to it that the Conjugation deck max cards was also 0. It has been a blessing. I am safe and protected from the conjugation deck. Thanks be to Anki!
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sun Jul 25, 2021 11:58 pm

Cien años de soledad - ConKepaAmuchastegui Fully Published
I've listened to at least 2 amateur readings of Cien años de soledad and 3 professional recordings. The series on the ConKepaAmuchastegui YouTube channel is my favorite by a country mile. Kepa Amuchastegui's got the perfect voice, passion, love for the story, and he's Columbian on top of that. He uses artistic hand gestures, facial expressions and narrative voice. Magnificent.

The novel's 20 chapters are split into 4-7 episodes per chapter. Insightfully done. Each segment has a title that make good sense, based on the story. (I don't mean the titles of the videos, but rather those that are embedded in each segment). It took 7 months for him to finish and publish the whole story. Now we have a master narration for Gabriel García Márquez masterpiece.



I usually turn the CC on and set the font size to 400%.

Practice & Improve Your Spanish

Took a diversion this weekend into an old Passport Books program called Practice & Improve Your Spanish. I like this sort of course. All of the dialogs are related and tell a story. I didn't do the course, but I did listen everything.

Image

How to Improve your Foreign Language IMMEDIATELY
My old mouse was acting up in all kinds of ways and had become bothersome. To get my Amazon order up to Free Shipping ($25), I picked up this Boris Shekhtman book. Going through it very slowly so far. It's a short book, about 100 pages.

His first tip is that when talking to native speakers, say as much as you possibly can with as much fluency as you have. It's about communication and intentionally saying more, rather than less.

So, "where do you work"? Could lead into something like:
I work at XYZ company. We make widgets. I'm a widget maker. I've been there 5 years. I like the job a lot. Everyone is very nice there. Before that, I was making ball bearings in a factory in Zuglitz, Germany. What about you?

So the thing is not to stop after the first sentence. Keep saying things you know how to say that are in some way related.

It's the sort of book one doesn't have to race through. I'm glad I got it.
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon Jul 26, 2021 6:11 am

luke wrote:The novel's 20 chapters are split into 4-7 episodes per chapter. Insightfully done. Each segment has a title that make good sense, based on the story. (I don't mean the titles of the videos, but rather those that are embedded in each segment). It took 7 months for him to finish and publish the whole story. Now we have a master narration for Gabriel García Márquez masterpiece.


Gracias por la recomendación! What a resource! It must have been several years since I listened to an audiobook in Spanish.

Moreover, I don't have have to scour the internet for interesting content in Spanish. I just go to this log.
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Wed Jul 28, 2021 11:27 pm

Don Quijote llega a su fin
Image

Third trip through RTVE's Don Quijote del siglo XXI has come to its end.

I read the last chapter in English before listening to the final episode.

Extremely content right now.

This is the ultimate progress bar:

: 20 / 20 El Quijote del siglo XXI (3x)

The RTVE site: https://www.rtve.es/radio/20150424/quij ... 4721.shtml

Setting down Don Quijote for a while.

I've already planned how I might return to it down the road:

Listen to El Quijote CDs from Anaya simplified version.
Read Anaya's El Quijote again (that will be the 4th time).
RTVE El Quijote del siglo XXI
Listen/Read with recording from Cervantes Institute and parallel text using Fusion Reader that I came across long ago.

Could just jump into that last step, we'll see.

Over the last few days, have been listen/reading Cien años de soledad with ConKepaAmuchastegui. On chapter 5 now. It's too pleasurable to stop.

Life has me interacting with several Mexicans now. Thinking I could get more out of actually sort of studying the Hablemos Español | Mexican Spanish podcast. It covers a lot of the peculiarities of Mexican Spanish, so may be helpful right about now.

https://tunein.com/podcasts/Language-Le ... -p1145450/

I've been able to keep several tracks going. With Don Quijote off my plate, there could be room for that podcast, a menos que la ciénaga de Cien años de soledad me vuelva a la locura.
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: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby Christi » Thu Jul 29, 2021 11:22 am

Well done!
Did you read the original or an abridged version?.

I've never read Don Quijote so finishing either of them, in Spanish to boot, is a huge achievement to me!
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Thu Jul 29, 2021 11:34 am

Christi wrote:Well done!
Did you read the original or an abridged version?.

I've never read Don Quijote so finishing either of them, in Spanish to boot, is a huge achievement to me!

Anaya's El Quijote is an abridgement and simplification. 2000 different words, however they define that. There are 2 books and 2 CDs. The CDs only are a few chapters from each book.

https://www.languages-direct.com/dollar ... sicos.html

El Quijote del siglo XXI is a 10 hour radio-drama. It is also an abridgement. Normally Don Quijote would take a good speaker about 40 hours to read aloud. They modernized the language somewhat, but a great deal of it is word-for-word from the original.
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sun Aug 01, 2021 7:51 pm

Thoughts du jour, or, what I'm doing

FSI Basic Spanish - I continue with the drills and the manual and refer back to the manual and highlight stuff that is signicant. I think tomorrow will be my 8th day on unit 23, but I'm close to done with it. Memorizing the narratives, dialogs, conversation stimulus lately. Not so much for "I want to be able recite this next week", but rather as a signpost in mastery of that particular bit of material. It is what the manual suggests the student does.

Anki - I do Anki every day, typically in the morning. Main decks are 5000 word frequency dictionary pairs. I can typically add about 20 words per day with that but I use "time" as my limiter, rather than a "new cards" goal. Trying to move this closer to 10 minutes, rather than 15. I've been rather successful at reducing the daily time on Anki.

Also do the FSI Basic Spanish deck. Here, less time per day. Less than 10 minutes and 5 is perfectly fine. Typically add 5-10 cards per day and they're fairly easy, because the deck hasn't caught up to where I'm at in the course. The deck often includes definitions of words. I read these even though I know the words. That sort of gets me used to reading definitions and other example sentences using whatever word the deck author decided to include.

Other decks are El Quijote, Mexican Slang, the residual load of 5000 words from frequency deck with phrases, communities of Spain. These may take around 5-10 minutes in total. The only decks I'm adding words to are El Quijote and Mexican Slang, but only a word or two each day and those are currently small decks, less than 100 cards.

Miscellaneous YouTube videos and podcasts - I spend a fair bit of time on this. Not studying, but tube time and downtime is All Spanish All The Time ;) (most of the time). Started listening to Sapiens while taking a walk today. I'd listened to it about a year ago and it was pretty hard to understand at the time while on a 12+ hour road trip. Today, walking for about 30 minutes it was almost completely comprehensible, with exception of a few "genus" things and some particular cat I didn't recognize. This was nice to listen to on a walk. I just wanted to unwind and get some exercise and not be bored. Also listened to Hablemos Español podcast when Audible or my hearing aids decided to quit talking to each other. Was weird, because podcast on my phone - which is also where Audible app is - worked fine.

FSI Dialogs in Advance - This started also with the "illustrations" or "presentations of patterns", but my other FSI tracks turn this into too much FSI to progress in the full course at 1 unit per week. May start the illustrations after I finish the dialogues, but that will be some weeks down the road. I have a "listen" folder and a "repeat" folder on my thumb drive to organize this a bit. "Listen" really means understand everything that is said with ease and all the notes the manual highlights. Be comfortable repeating. Not trying to memorize on this track. Goal is just understand and repeat without looking at the manual for any assistance and have no questions about why people would say these things in this situation. You know, relationships, formality or informality, how a diplomat can be a spy in bed with a worker at the embassy, etc. Just kidding on that last point.

Listen to Cien años de soledad - Downloaded to mp3. Organizing the Con Kepa narration. Using the great titles the Kepa came up with for each episode. Listening to Kepa while reading the English translation. Audio set to 140% speed. The faster audio helps engage me in the story. If I'm not understanding what's happened, it's generally because my mind has wandered for a bit. I'm enjoying the story more and more as I listen to it.

Read another book I know well - Set audible to about 160% speed and read in Spanish. This is actually several books what were originally in English that I know pretty well. Not too much trouble to zip through a chapter which is typically around 15 pages and may take 20 minutes or so. The idea here is to get some easy reading in and push use the audio to push the pace a bit.

The natives are restless - I'm one of those socially awkward types until I get to you know you very well and feel comfortable. Then I'm perfectly fine. With the natives, there's a relatively big cultural divide. They're pretty much all immigrants. Some may or may not have papeles, which can foster a [/i]"¿Porque es ese pinche cabrón nos esta escuchando cuando habla como idiota y parece demasiado detectivo?[/i] (why the f is this guy here? i don't think he's one of us. probably a g-d-f-ing cop.)

You can see how that might create some tension, even if they were nice at first but now may thinking, "is he immigration? why would anybody learn spanish when what matters here is english? probably thinks he's better than us."

None of the thoughts I imagine them to be having are true, but considering curtailing this activity. The difficulty is, you can say, "i'm not a cop, i'm not immigration, i'm a person just like you", and they might think, "exactly what a cop would say".

But I have enjoyed it. Thinking it might be better to take this track more slowly so I have time to improve my cultural understanding, general listening and speaking skills, and particularly understanding colloquial Mexican Spanish. Also don't want to start cussing like a sailor and that's the type of language that I've found easiest to acquire and is less pleasant (for others) than a poorly digest bean burrito.

Closing with one bit I learned on the podcast today, ¿Y qué? - "i got it. all that and you've said nothing." But this is a log and I'm a lumberjack.

Lastly, one hour into "Destrezas básicas para el aprendizaje de la lectoescritura: Nuevos hallazgos de la psicología de la percepción", dictada por la Dra. Helen Abadzi:

Big fonts, minimal pairs, repetition of the basics to automaticity, reading requires words, pictures can be a distraction. Will notice how much picture-telling is going on in my Anki decks. Not that I'm a child. I just think like one.

[edit to add a few additional tips from Helen Abadzi]: Move, exercise if possible, especially when learning if it doesn't distract from the learning process. Enjoy something funny after studying. For me, that might be an Arrested Development episode in Spanish. Speed is important so we can get full thoughts, phrases, etc into our working memory. That seems a nod to speeding up the audio when it makes sense. More of it can fit in your working memory.
3 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Tue Aug 03, 2021 11:40 am

How To Spanish Podcast
This is a great one if you want to learn about Mexican culture and "buena educación (manners and good behavior). It's done by a cool couple who talk to the viewer and each other. Very balanced in delivery. Clear pronunciation, nice mics, HD video.

Although "podcast" is in the name of the channel, I haven't looked for it yet outside of youtube. It would be perfect as a podcast too, but I really like being able to see the speakers.


Tiny Tweak on the FSI track
So I've got the "advance" wave where I'm listening ahead to the dialogs and want to be able to repeat them, etc. I'd been thinking that the "illustrations" or "presentations of pattern" was just too onerous. It came on me though that the "presentations of pattern" can trail, and trail by quite a bit, the "dialog" wave.

Example: I think I'll finish unit 23 today. My "listening" folder for dialogs is on unit 31. The "speaking" dialog folder is on 30. The presentations of pattern folder is on 25.

So don't have to abandon the "illustrations" (new structures that will be focused on in the unit). And it doesn't matter how many units end up between the 4 folders.

By the way, when I'm getting to the end of a unit, such as the current 23 and there are only a couple drills (mp3s) left in the folder, I let the audio player advance into unit 24, for example. You know, I've done enough with that drill for today and the audioplayer is ready to move to the next "folder that starts with unit*".

Also, btw, my approach is that I typically set the drill (mp3) to repeat and I do it until I either feel good, have done enough, getting tired of it, or am starting to memorize the prompts too much. So, lately I haven't been revisiting a drill later in the day. It's always for tomorrow. That makes sense to me for longer term memory. I.E., a drill may be done over the course of 5 days or more if it's challenging.

These are just made up numbers for an example and the duration of the drill comes into play here. The way I have the mp3s cut up, typical drill is about a minute, but most are 40 seconds to a minute and a half. A few are longer. 5 minutes would be a very long drill in my mp3 splits.
day 1: repeat drill 2-7 times depending on difficulty and duration.
day 2: repeat drill 3-5 times.
day 3: repeat drill 2-4 times. (1 if it was very easy - easy drills are deleted from the thumbdrive)
day 4: repeat drill 2-3 times.
day 5: repeat drill 2-4 times.
day 6: keep repeating until it seems pretty much down or I feel I need to move on.

My point is just that rather than N times (or once) through a 30 minute mp3 that just flows the way it was recorded, I do it bit by bit and delete things when they're pretty easy.

There have been drills I've done probably 50 times. That's fairly rare that I repeat something so much that I'm aware I've spent a great deal of time on a particular drill, but a few are tricky.

I also try to think about what I'm saying. Even a simple drill where the goal is "just shift the phrase to the conjugation we'll be drilling". Just think, "now" if it's "shift to present tense", for example. Or, "give it to her", think of what an "it" might be and who "she" could be. A real person or maybe an imaginary person of the appropriate gender.

What I'm saying is I try to get beyond thinking in terms of grammar. So a drill is not "change the conjugation of the verb to the N tense". That might be what it is, but I try to "make sense" "make real" what I'm saying. So a little bit of mental play.

Too much time writing this this morning. Didn't sleep enough and coffee hasn't kicked in yet.

Somehow I was just going to make that tiny note on FSI tweak and it turned into too much.

And really just wanted to note the super "hey, here's how you can maybe not be perceived as such an outsider with the natives" youtube channel.
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby jeffers » Tue Aug 03, 2021 12:15 pm

I'm sure you've said before, but where and how do you do the drills? Are you sitting at a desk with a computer? Walking about? Are you looking at the manual while doing them?

I think the drills would be much more useful broken up into smaller tracks, but I don't think I want to invest the time to split them up for French FSI. I would if it was a larger part of my study programme. Or maybe it would be a larger part of my programme if I split them up? Hmmm... a vicious circle of sorts.

Even though I'm not studying Spanish, your log gives me a lot to think about!
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