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 » Sat Aug 28, 2021 11:08 pm

Mientras estoy aquí, pensando en ello, diré:

Audiolibros AMA - Clásicos de la literatura universal, leídos con tranquila voz humana.

Puedes escucharlos en el fondo. No necesariamente estudiándolos, sino escuchándolos, con calma, sin luchar.

El narrador habla con sencillez, sabiduria, con comprensión. La producción es buena. Los temas profundos.

Empecé a escuchar a Sun Tzu; un libro breve. Viejo. Tópico. La música mejora la producción y no es una distracción.

Hay muchos otros. No evita el gran océano de libros antiguos que han superado el tiempo, los años, los cambios.

Thoughts in English:
While I'm thinking about, making a note that AMA Audiolibros has a lot of good old classics recorded. The narrator, who speaks slowly, may be perfect when multitasking, listening while working, etc.

Don't limit yourself to those few books you've been diving into. In the background, youtube audiobooks and captures of "en vivo" (live) events can be nice, almost subconscious, listening without effort. They're spontaneous. The creators are joined by the listeners and supporters and fans of the channel who are so engaged they participated in a live chat.
8 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 » Mon Aug 30, 2021 6:35 pm

A couple notes on the first leg of my journey...

The replacement drill stick was probably what I enjoyed most. Not sure how many hours it was in total, but a few, sprinkled through various other things. The most pleasant surprise was that drills in the forties - the last part of the course - were not particularly hard. Same with the thirties. i did put the player on repeat for most of those drills, but after a few times through they were pretty good.

The drills in that I've already studied were easier of course, particularly the very early ones. Deleted a few of those, but want this to get to effortless and having easy ones for comparison and change of pace is helpful.

A couple drills repeated, which is expected for random. i'm guessing i did about 3 hours or so. They did get easier as the trip went on. Randomness was good because themes get mixed up.

Also was surprised at times when things were easy and I glanced at the unit and it was in the high 30s or 40s. The replacement drills start with a sentence from the dialogue, so the initial sentence was familiar. I knew the situation and it wasn't just a random sentence.

Got through Anaya's El Quijote on CD too. That was harder with the dynamics of the voices not always even and a lot of road noise.

But now I'm settling into El Quijote the book and highlighting a few words for Anki when I get back.

Had an easy book on Stoicism para principantes. It's more fun doing an easy book on a long drive than something new and challenging.

I didn't hit the sequential track as hard this time since I was doing a lot of replacements, but made some progress. On the way back I may do more.
5 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 » Sat Sep 04, 2021 9:57 pm

Diversion into FSI Programmatic Spanish
I haven't started this diversion yet, but was looking at the manuals a bit. The 50 unit Programmatic Spanish course is meant to be an introduction to the major structures of Spanish and is designed for the student to be pretty autonomous in their learning.

The intro says to take a look at the Applications sections, and if you can do those pretty well, you can pretty much skip the unit. That's the approach I'm planning to use. The applications start around unit 6. Back at home, I have some of the mp3s edited down, which should make this all more pleasant.

My hope here is that some book learning will compliment the drill focused Basic course. Programmatic does a fair bit of subjunctive, etc and introduces some phrases that the course designers thought were important at the time.

I'm thinking this won't take a lot of time, but will be good at filling in some cracks and creating a mental framework around some of the grammar. (with no background, FSI Programmatic Spanish would be about 150-250 hours of study).

Other diversions
Will delve back into Cien años de soledad and Don Quijote. I've been listening to some of the Don Quijote curso videos I mentioned a while back. They parallel the chapters of the book pretty well. Those will be good to listen to perhaps before L-Ring the chapters. They bring out certain historical features that would probably go under the radar. This like "what kind of knight was Amadis de Gaul, etc. The course brings in a lot of things that were contemporaneous with the time that Don Quijote was written, the defeat of the Invincible Spanish Armada during Cervantes life, debasing of the currency, etc, so timeless stuff.

What I've been up to
I finished unit 26 and am making progress in units 27-30. More so in 27 than 30, but treating them a little less sequential, so I end up spending more days in total on the unit, but chip away at the upcoming mp3s. I'd turned certain recordings into 4 mp3s, such as the dialogues. 2 from the original FSI, and 2 from Platiquemos. Same with the illustrations of pattern. Platiquemos included English translations for these, so I use them a bit like translation exercises. It also makes it so I can work on the dialogue over the course of a week or so and gradually put certain pieces behind me.

About 1/2 through the second book of Anaya's El Quijote. Thinking if I do another road trip and family visit around Thanksgiving (end of November), I might use RTVE Don Quijote del siglo XXI as the "audiobook" for the trip.

This all implies I'd like to finish the Fusion Reader + Quijote curso during the 10 weeks or so between now and then, Programmatic Spanish, another trip through la Ciénaga, and still make some progress in FSI Basic.

Have picked out the FSI Basic Spanish variation drills as the "random" drills for that trip later this year.

Starting to conceptualize Quijote y la Ciénaga sort of like a musician might approach an instrumental part to a song that made them want to play the instrument in the first place. They end up playing the piece many times and the goal is to be able to play the part well with little effort.
Last edited by luke on Mon Sep 06, 2021 7:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
5 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 » Sun Sep 05, 2021 3:09 pm

Came across this channel that looks like it has some really interesting content:



So that one is nice for historical context of Don Quijote, but the author has a wide variety of topics and I want to be able to find him again.
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Thu Sep 09, 2021 12:58 am

Lately
I finished FSI Basic Spanish unit 27 this morning. Got into unit 28 during the drive to visit Mom and back.

Finished Anaya's 2nd book El Quijote. Well, almost finished. Through the story. Still going to read through the exercises.

Watched some old faves on youtube. The Jesus G. Maestro first video on Cien años de soledad sort of in the background while working. Same with a bunch of videos from the Don Quijote MOOC from a university in Guatamala. This one too. Very soothing voice and I like how he thinks about language:


It's coming to me now
I had highlighted the parts of Cien años de soledad that Jesus G. Maestro reads in his 20+ hour analysis of Gabo's masterpiece. Reminding myself that those small bits are a nice "read this" perhaps before the video or they can be a "just read this" for a quick dip in the book.

So I was driving to visit my Mom and an FSI idea coalesced and I pulled over and made some notes, as I didn't want it to be forgotten like a good dream you didn't write down.

BTW, had a good dream last night. Was under a table at this banquet and there were a lot of people at big round tables being loud and laughy and eating. Someone else under the table I couldn't see made some sort of confession. Someone at the table heard the confession and twisted it into something bad and gossipy and the others at the table all enjoyed the "we're better" that people find so comfortable in that sort of situation. The great part of the dream was that I also heard the first hand account from even closer and understood how the person at the table skewed the confession for the effect they wanted, rather than to transmit it faithfully (if they were going to say anything about it in the first place).

So, somehow that was comforting this morning.

But back to the FSI Realization that happened upon me on the road to visit my mother....

FSI Basic Spanish has several types of drills. Putting them below in an order that makes sense to me right now as a possible random review format to go along with a sequential sail through the course.

1) Original dialogues (not Platiquemos - with space to repeat after each sentence/speaker).
2) Platiquemos Illustrations of Pattern - these have English translations before the pattern and can function as great translation drills on a particular grammar/linguistic point.
3) Replacement drills - noticed these are in the order they came up in the dialogue.
4) Variation drills - The initial sentence here also comes from the dialogue and the variations are delivered in the order they came up in the dialogue. These are translation drills on a particular sentence pattern.
5) Response drills - Question / Answer
6) Translation drills - these and the response drills focus on whatever linguistic pattern they are teaching.
7) Narrative / Dialogues - are mostly from Platiquemos. Many of them apparently weren't recorded in the original FSI. (the text is there and is meant to be used in class, but they didn't keep recording them as the course went on).

I've been coming up with this for a while. My signature has the tracking of dialogues and Presentation of Pattern. I started the random replacement drills with the current road trip.

This extension of using it in the end for most of the drills (along with sequential progress) can front-run (be ahead of) the sequence or be a review. Reviews are helpful for many reasons, but especially that the patterns stay fresh and practiced and maybe mastered as the course goes on, rather than perhaps only getting the normal review of a progressive course + normal input which generally is no-holds-barred when it comes to grammatical constructions.

The other part I like with this idea is that most of them can be randomized. By grouping drills together, like "response" or "translation" or "replacement" or "variation" or "dialogue" or "presentation of pattern" is that there is very little "what do I do with this one?" For randomized drills, that can be especially important, as most drills you also have to learn what sort of response is expected. (e.g., translate this, answer that, substitute the word).

The part that isn't in my 1-7 list is the more "construction" style drills. These are sometimes "person number" or "person" or "tense of verb" or "construction" meaning "shift to the construction we're learning now". "Construction we're learning now" and some of the others vary a bit from time to time). Thinking these only need additional drilling outside of sequential if a particular grammar/linguistic point is especially difficult.

So, minimize executive think time.

A few observations, expectations:

1) Dialogues - most dialogues are about a minute or two. Some of the later dialogues are 3 or 4 minutes. Story, vocabulary, patterns - about 2 - 3 hours total.

2) Presentation of Patterns - keep "recycling grammar" - which is one of the points from the series of youtube videos screencapped above.

3) Replacement drills - help with automating everything that switches and shifts when a word changes. There is implicit learning of verbs, prepositions, adjectives, nouns, etc. (4+ hours)

4) Variation drills - these help with a pattern FSI is teaching. It deepens the understanding of the dialogue, since they start as dialogue sentences. (same as replacement drills). 4+ hours

5) Response drills - at some points I'd thought these were the hardest drills. By grouping them though one gets into "interrogated" mode. There are a few variations, where there's a prompt to switch the answer, but the big mental shift is "you are being asked a question". About 2 hours.

6) Translation drills - everyone understands this. They bring in vocabulary and grammar points. About 2 hours.

7) Narrations/Dialogues - I'll think about this one more. One thing is these are realistic situations with normal dialogues, so I find them good and helpful for that in and of itself. I've turned these into about 18-20 mp3s per unit, so not at all sure how I'll do these down the road. They are the final frontier, so don't need to know yet.

As far as total hours of drills, this will be approximately 1/2 of the original. Read recently that the course had 54 hours of audio or so. That varies a bit depending on whether you're using FSI original or Platiquemos or a combination. Me, I've been doing both or whichever I thought was better.

I'm sure all readers understand this, but say this is 22 hours of drills. It could become 200+ hours over time even after the course is sequentially completed. Spaced repetition, etc. Keeping that core vocabulary and all the major grammar practiced until automatic and mastered.

Difficult drills can always be put on "repeat" even when doing a "random" set of drills. Later visits to "difficult" drills should become easier over time

This morning it dawns on me that doing these strands sequentially and individually might be a better use of my time review-wise than a big FSI Programmatic project. That would bring in some actual review and spaced repetition rather than "a different angle" and also opens up progress bars in the signature, which I find motivating.
7 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 FeoGringo » Fri Sep 10, 2021 11:51 pm

I'm loving everything about your analysis and breakdown of FSI Basic Spanish. Did you edit the raw audio yourself and separate into individual drills?
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sat Sep 11, 2021 1:56 am

FeoGringo wrote:Did you edit the raw audio yourself and separate into individual drills?

Yes. I used the free software Audacity to do it. It's very good.
1 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 » Sun Sep 12, 2021 2:52 am

and back again
The drive home was about 14 hours. Main activities during the drive were:
* Sequential FSI - Did whatever mp3s I have in the folder for unit 28 and got about 1/2 way through unit 29.
* Los Miserables - Found a Librivox app and that made it pretty easy to listen to 9 chapters.
* Replacement drills - randomized. Scribbled a few notes about easy drills for deletion.
* Hablemos Español | Mexican spanish podcast - Listened to a bunch of these - probably 6 or 7 - they vary in length.
* Found a few local radio stations in Spanish. These tend to show up around larger cities.

Anki Review
The catch-up was about 3 hours. Did over an hour last night and an hour and 45 today. Anki is once again tamed.

Quick calculation. The time it took to catch up / The numbers of days skipped = 16-17 minutes per day skipped. That's somewhat less than the time I was spending on all the decks per day, which was about 20-25 minutes before the trip. Easing up on new cards for a week or so before the trip was a good idea.

Today
Besides catching up Anki, I did a small bit of FSI sequential. Tomorrow I may have more energy for it.

Set the FSI replacement drill stick to sequential and did/deleted 12 drills during errands. Added that to my signature progress bars.

Took a long siesta, which was nice.

Organized my Platiquemos Illustration of Pattern filenames. Some didn't mention platiquemos, but other tags in the files made this easy. That will help with the 'type of drill' as a learning thread that I intend use for a while.

I did read the yellow highlighting Jesus G. Maestro's citation quotes in his Cien años de soledad review. Glanced at a few translation notes I'd made in the book as sort of a pre-read.

Listen-read chapter 1 of Cien años de soledad. Used the parallel text again. Like it. Rearranged a phrase here and there so the translation is structured more like the original. Added an adjective or two that seemed to have been left out. Had the Con Kepa audio set to 100% speed, so very comfortable pace. Paused it a few times to edit the text or reread a bit or look up something in the RAE edition glossary. Much slower than my normal "git 'er done" pace. Maybe an hour and a half for the 52 minutes of audio. Noticed one short missing sentence:

Lo dejó terminar. She let him finish.

This approach was very pleasant, very engaging. Was on the Spanish most of the time. When some desconocidas popped up I generally paused the recording and used a different font color on the word or phrase, when the whole phrase seemed like an easier way to think of the bit.

This sentence popped out extra interesting:

José Arcadio, su hermano mayor, había de transmitir aquella imagen maravillosa, como un recuerdo hereditario, a toda su descendencia.
José Arcadio, his older brother, would pass on that wonderful image as a hereditary memory to all of his descendants.

So I used my highlighter on the family tree just to confirm that, well I won't say, but, yes, it's as you may have suspected.

A few other things also stood out. One of the great things about García Márquez' style in this book is that so many things circle around and dive in and out and crisscross over and over it's just delightful weaving it all together.
10 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 Sep 14, 2021 8:08 pm

Organizing the FSI
Continuing with the idea of sequential runs at various types of drills...

Today I organized the dialogue "fluency" drills and the Platiquemos "illustrations of pattern".

Dialogue fluency drills are those that have time to repeat after each sentence. That requires a bit more short term memory than shadowing or echoing, which I think will be good for this next run.

BTW, the progress bars I'm probably going to modify today look like this at the moment:
: 55 / 55 FSI Dialogs
: 40 / 55 FSI PoP

I'm almost through with unit 28 on my sequential track: : 27 / 55 FSI Basic

Unit 30 (of 55) is a review unit. One drill asks a lot of questions about the dialogues. For that reason and others, I'm putting Fluency Dialogues back on deck. They form the basis of the unit and are meant to be memorized anyways. For this run, I'm just looking for listen and repeat with fluency.

I have been memorizing the dialogues on my sequential track. (at least memorized for short term, not trying to have long term memorization of the dialogues at this point.

The fsi_listening_dialogues are 1 hour 50 minutes.

The FSI Illustrations - Presentation of Pattern drills are going back in from the beginning too (I think). That means I may be aborting the current PoP run with unit 40. The Platiquemos drills have an English translation in the recording. That way I'll be very sure of what I'm saying. Also requires the translation.

The fsi_illustrations_platiquemos are 2 and 1/2 hours.

My fsi_replacements folder has 2 hours 52 minutes left. Was 4 hours 13 minutes before I started removing the ones that seem easy enough right now.

BTW, the How To Spanish podcast was my listening during this FSI file/folder organization:
5 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 » Wed Sep 15, 2021 3:54 am

luke wrote:Yesterday, re-found Los Secretos de Cien Años de Soledad: Una Aproximación Estilométrica para la Investigación en Psicolingüística by Jorge Iván Vélez. When I looked at the paper many months ago, there was some comfort in the graphs that show the chapters of the novel range from difícil to muy difícil and that most of most difficult chapters come at the end. So, from a psychological perspective, it was helpful.

Looked back at a chart in that paper on chapter difficulty:

Hard: 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Medium difficult: 1, 3, 10, 18
Difficult / Very difficult: 11, 12, 20
Very difficult: 16, 17, 19

I just finished chapter 9. So, "hard", but the last of the easy chapters. :)

I approached chapter 9 differently. There are 6 mp3s. About 55 minutes total.

My general process was:
1) Start listening to mp3 and editing the parallel text. Mostly breaking multi-sentences into single sentence segments. Reading some while listening and editing. (alt-a-i-b (insert below), highlight, ctrl-x, ctrl-v (copy/paste)).
2) Listen to mp3 again. Change the font color on words or phrases that aren't apparent from listening. So more listen-reading, but distraction figuring out words. (colors make a glance at the translation easy to spot).
3) If I wasn't satisfied, listened again. A few more edits. This was helpful.

Then I'd move on to the next mp3.

There is a satisfaction I get from really understanding the story. The edits can be engaging too.

I confess I edited the translation a bit more in few parts I thought were especially difficult. Apparently the translator - who was hand-picked by the author, who said the English translation is even better than the Spanish, but probably said that to improve sales - had some difficulty with the translation as well. :)

Google's getting pretty good these days. One example:
M: Los mismos que inventaron la patraña de que había vendido la guerra por un aposento cuyas paredes estaban construidas con ladrillos de oro, definieron la tentativa de suicidio como un acto de honor, y lo proclamaron mártir.
T: The same people who invented the story that he had sold the war for a room with walls made of gold bricks, defined the attempt at suicide as an act of honor and proclaimed him a martyr.
G: The same people who invented the tale that he had sold the war for a room whose walls were built with gold bricks, defined the attempt at suicide as an act of honor and proclaimed him a martyr.

Google used "hoax" for patraña. I looked up "hoax" and "story" at thesaurus.com and chose "tale". Nothing's quite as good as la patraña spoken by Kepa Amuchastegui.

That was about 2 1/2 hours for one chapter. A lot different than setting the audio to 140% and L-Ring a chapter in 40 minutes. Oh, I did use 140% sometimes on that 2nd or 3rd listen.

The L-R author did say the parallel text/learning materials are important. I can see how one can put in a lot of time making the supporting text better. Was going to put in a picture a cieba tree:
Image

Uf-da. That's a beauty.

You might can shrink pictures with width and height tags, but for that ceiba tree, full size is right size.

2.5 hours seems like a lot compared to 40 minutes. I could do about 4 chapters in that time at 140% audio speed.

So I did 140% one time through with chapter 10. It was pleasant.

I said I'd try multiple methods in a single L-R. It works.
7 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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