Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby BOLIO » Wed Sep 15, 2021 2:39 pm

I am enjoying your log. I have been away from the site for quite some time, one question, are you the same Luke from the other board from years gone by?
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Wed Sep 15, 2021 11:09 pm

BOLIO wrote:I am enjoying your log. I have been away from the site for quite some time, one question, are you the same Luke from the other board from years gone by?

Nice to see you here Mr. BOLIO. I took a quick trip to HTLAL to get reacquainted with BOLIO.

I seem to have a lot in common with that luke, if I remember him right. We live in the same house. I'm older than that guy.

I take it you are in similar circumstances? The clock and calendar have been turning?

Today, three chapters L-R in Cien años de soledad. Chapter 11 was this morning before work. Had just enough time to set the audio at 140% speed and do proper L-R with the con Kepa Amuchastegui audio and parallel text.

Chapter 12 was around lunch time. Audio at 100%. Did a fair bit of simultaneous parallel text editing.

Chapter 13 was in the early evening. Audio at 100%. Simultaneously read the text out loud for most of it. Toward the end, I went into "act it out" mode. You know, being dramatic, like the narrator. That seems helpful. It has me reading just ahead so I can talk at the same time as Kepa and say things the way I expect him to say them. (simultaneously).

Chapter 13 has 7 segments. By 6 and 7, my voice was getting tired, so went into listen-read-edit mode for the last part.

Did a bit more with the translation at certain points. Used DeepL.com, google translate, some SpanishDict. Translations are personal. We use language like we use it, and word meaning varies a bit from individual to individual. There's also the "what does this mean to me?", and "how could this be better expressed?". Sometimes that's stylistic. A bit of word selection. Sometimes shuffling word order so it's closer to the original, when the syntax doesn't strike me as too unusual.

So yes, using multiple techniques in a single L-R is helpful in my experience. The goal is to stay engaged.

Did my FSI. Five folders for that. I won't go into the details, but at least a little progress on each front. Did a bit of exercise, weights over the head, kettlebell swings with a light dumbell, just pacing with dumbells at my side. Not particularly strenuous, other the kettlebell swings. 1 minute or so of those gets my breathing going and I have to insert FSI responses while I'm swinging.

Light exercise is a tiny measure of "got it down-ed-ness". If a drill requires too much thinking, then exercise is a distraction. I like when I can do light exercises and the drills are all or almost all correct and didn't have to think hard or sacrifice exercise form.

I'm not doing heavy weights, but kettlebell swings do use the back, so always smart to be safe.

Anki is first thing in the morning with coffee. I get up early and have neighbors, so generally don't make noise unnecessarily. Try to speak the answers out loud though. I'm right by the computer, so it's easy to control the volume. 25 minutes.

Already planning another road-trip to visit another part of the family in a couple weeks, so will taper Anki before that.

Also thinking I can finish this L-R with Cien años de soledad and L-R RTVE Don Quijote del siglo XXI before that trip. It would be cool if I read my Cien años de soledad book during my visit, but the parallel text with translation at hand may be even better. A chance to compare grammar, structure, etc.

Spanish learners know that "el, la, los, las" gets used for "his, her, my" body parts. Gabo does that a good bit with things that aren't body parts. Also, some words change plurality. I was aware of mueble, muebles (furniture), but Gabo uses plenty of words that change pluralization between Spanish and English.

Example:
Tardó algún tiempo en darse cuenta de que también aquella era una forma de la ternura, y fue entonces cuando perdió el sosiego, y no vivía sino para él, trastornada por la ansiedad de hundirse en su entorpecedor aliento de aceite refregado con lejía.
It took her time to realize that it was also a form of tenderness and it was then that she lost her calm and lived only for him, upset by the desire to sink into his stupefying odor of grease washed off by lye.

Have also noticed he adjectivizes a lot of verbs and he knows a lot of ways to refine details with them. I'm thinking most of the nouns and adjectives he uses are not in the "top 5000" frequency wise. Verbs and prepositions don't seem quite as unusual. He likes his long sentences and I like the way he writes them.

An example of the verb getting adjectivized :
Se entregó a Mauricio Babilonia sin resistencia, sin pudor, sin formalismos, y con una vocación tan fluida y una intuición tan sabia, que un hombre más suspicaz que el suyo hubiera podido confundirlas con una acendrada experiencia.
She surrendered to Mauricio Babilonia, without resistance, without shyness, without formalities, and with a vocation that was so fluid and an intuition that was so wise that a more suspicious man than hers would have confused them with obvious experience.

Or maybe it's a translator thing. Someone else might have chosen "a refined".
Last edited by luke on Thu Sep 16, 2021 1:48 am, edited 6 times in total.
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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 Le Baron » Wed Sep 15, 2021 11:43 pm

Luke wrote:I seem to have a lot in common with that luke, if I remember him right. We live in the same house. I'm older than that guy.

I take it you are in similar circumstances? The clock and calendar have been turning?

:lol:
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby BOLIO » Thu Sep 16, 2021 12:58 am

Yes our situations are similar. I sometimes wonder who that older man is who is looking back at me from the mirror.

You are better man than me. The idea of going back and doing FSI again makes me shutter. I would benefit even though I use Spanish everyday in my life now, I still make mistakes especially with direct and indirect pronouns in the same sentence. Normally I will restructure the sentence to avoid it. I assume I sound a bit long winded but oh well.

Spanish study is just using the language. Having a built in speaking partner in my wife is now awesome. Back on the other board it was frustrating because my wife could not tell me WHY we say something a certain way and that KILED me. It frustrated her to no end. Now we just talk. It’s nice.

I did recently purchase the C1 / C2 Gramática de USO del Español last week and want to work through it just to see what I can improve.


I flirted with Russian but never give her what she deserved because I felt I was depriving Spanish.

I liked the idea of Russian but the investment would be massive. I came to the conclusion that if that type of investment is made, I would rather pursue Mandarin. I am in the VERY early stages but I can set aside 1 hour a day for study.

I am doing it differently than Spanish. First, I am in no hurry. Second, I have no doubt I can do it. Third, I am listening a lot before I do anything else. I am putting in 100 hours of listening to native audio before I attempt any course work. Listen and mimic and I don’t care about any comprehension…at all. Iverson’s bloodhound listening with a bit of chorusing to myself.

Anyway, it was so nice to see you here and active. Work has gotten to the point where it will allow me to be around more now especially since I have committed to Mandarin.

Nos vemos.
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Thu Sep 16, 2021 1:29 am

BOLIO wrote:The idea of going back and doing FSI again makes me shutter. I would benefit even though I use Spanish everyday in my life now, I still make mistakes especially with direct and indirect pronouns in the same sentence.

I liked the idea of Russian but the investment would be massive. I came to the conclusion that if that type of investment is made, I would rather pursue Mandarin.

Third, I am listening a lot before I do anything else. I am putting in 100 hours of listening to native audio before I attempt any course work. Listen and mimic and I don’t care about any comprehension…at all. Iverson’s bloodhound listening.

Work has gotten to the point where it will allow me to be around more now especially since I have committed to Mandarin.

The first 1/2 of FSI Basic Spanish gets deep into clitics. Haven't looked it up in the table of contents, but the first 1/2 of the course introduces them over and over and with double clitics, etc. A gander at the table of contents might narrow down target surface a lot since you already have a great background.

But you're already where you want to be, so ignore that last comment.

One day I'll study the grammar too.

Russian would be fun for the literature, but agree that's massive time investment. Maybe in a decade I'll be in a spot for that.

Mandarin? That takes real cojones! Entonces, al contrario, you are a better man than me!

Que te vaya bien, amigo.
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sat Sep 18, 2021 7:34 pm

Happy to post a progress bar movement:

: 28 / 55 FSI Basic
: 9 / 55 FSI Dialogs (2x)
: 6 / 55 FSI PoP
: 18 / 49 FSI Replacements
: 3079 / 10002 Anki Top 5000
: 16 / 20 Cien años de soledad (4x)
: 2215 / 2500 2500 pages - 6/14/21

I just finished the written exercises in FSI Basic Spanish chapter 28. Yeah! :)

Also got to put a little progress in most of the others.

Thought it would be a good idea to capture the current state of progress bar affairs, since when we look later, progress should be different and may have different markers and progress. So, for posterity :)

Also wanted to remind myself that one of ideas behind the dialogs/illustrations/replacements/variations/translations/response drills, as a separate track/folder was to be sort of sequential about them. Remember? Do the dialogues first. They're the review for unit 30. Then illustrations will pick up some grammar/linguistic review of the units. Replacements do everything. But that sequentialness introduces a bit of spaced repetition in the various reviews that isn't as much a part if the "reviews" stay in lock step with each other. Maybe I should take "replacements" off the progress bar just so they're less tempting. Would also provide increase the temptation time slice for those other tracks.

What else?

Was shopping at Goodwill today, which is sort of a second hand store that's meant to help people donate stuff and help people work and help people buy used stuff at a reasonable price. Each week, 1/4 of the inventory is 50% off. That's where I look for books that I may or may not ever read, but seem "worth it", considering the small investment.

Today I got:
Image
Looks like a second semester college textbook for Spanish from 2014. The book shows some online stuff, videos, audio, perhaps flashcards, etc. Meaning they are used the internet to deliver some audiovisuals. Since it's a textbook, may have already been superceded by a later edition and the publisher may have unpublished the audiovisuals for this edition, but thought, what the heck? The student didn't finish inking in the first page before they quit doing that, so not much writing. Noticed that page included ser, estar, and the differences between those two "to be" verbs.

Vocabulary wise, did a rough calculation on the glossary and looked like about 3000 words. I know most of them, but if I were to use the textbook and do the exercises, that would not be a bad review and I'd definitely learn some useful things here and there.

But I'm not committing to using the book. Probably will look this afternoon to see if the A/V support is still on the internet.

Will note this may be a helpful video:


Que te vaya bien!
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 luke » Mon Sep 20, 2021 4:23 pm

gathering some thoughts
This guy did a really great multipart resumen (summary) of Cien años de soledad:



He tells the story as it was told, which is nice. Lots of resumens give the reader/youtuber's interpretation of the book. That's fine, but I like the way this guy did it.

He uses a lot of visual aids, family trees with important notes like, "this person is dead at this point". That's helpful because lots of characters come back in memories and other places the author (Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez) mentions more details a about something that happened. It's also helpful for "yeah, how did that third generation Aureliano (a small character who had no descendents) die again"? Seems it was violent and may have involved gunfire, but not the firing squad. :lol:

The video series is about 140 minutes for the 7 videos. I'm not always good at paying attention, but this is perfect background youtube while I'm working on other things.

So, a very factual summary with tons of relevant cartoon illustrations that are pleasant to watch.

In my Listen-Reading Cien años de soledad parallel text, I've given some more time to hyper-literal translations with the help of google and good judgement :)

Redoing a good bit of the translation would be an enormous project the way I'm approaching it, but where I've done it, it really makes me think about "best words" for getting a point or character's experience across. (at least as I see it). This is fun, really deepens the story, and fits in with my "many methods for a single L-R" trip through the book.

By the way, here's the progress bar. The 4x count is how many times I've heard the Con Kepa Amuchastegui audio, starting with their initial rollout on youtube.

: 18 / 20 Cien años de soledad (4x)

audiolingüismo
The Replacements came off my signature. They're still on the stick. Think "no progress bar" is helpful for focusing on other FSI folders.

Watched a couple short videos on audiolingualismo. These were mostly done by students in what looks like a school project. These, plus watching a video or two by that Frenchman that @Kraut has been providing links for in some threads got me thinking.

Anyway, that researcher goes into a good bit of brain science and talks about how brain scans show various changes with respect to language, language learning, when the language was learned, alphabetization (literacy), etc.

Bringing these two strands of thought together made me think with FSI, which is pretty steeped in audiolingualism, is related to behavior and habits and these things change, particularly when the brain has automated a particular task.

That got me thinking the better FSI drills are learnt, the better the brain change, the "less steps to do something" (brain wise).

That's encouraging me to take it easy with removing mp3s from my FSI "sticks" or "folders". Probably obvious, but "knowing a rule" and "automating that rule" are quite a distance apart. It's helpful to get to the point that rule isn't even a thought. Just "this is the normal way to say that".

That's also got me feeling better about "limited interaction" with native speakers. Other threads here, particular some where @cavesa wrote a lot about series, movies, reading, etc, as super helpful in her experience for almost removing the need for "interaction" and continuing to a high level in the language. I'm not her, so lacking her talents, but it does make me more comfortable with getting FSI pretty well down before ramping up interaction again.

Interaction wasn't super high on my goal list, but I'm also aware of a theory, perhaps from the psycholinguistic's videos I like, that says something like: Rather than thinking "reading", "writing", "speaking", "listening", split "skills" up into four different things. One of them is "negotiating meaning". (actually, this is sounding like a Paul Nation theory). Nonetheless, the theory made sense to me. So in that theory, interaction does come into play, since "negotiation of meaning" is what two or more people do to understand one another.
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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 greatSchism » Tue Sep 21, 2021 11:32 am

luke wrote:
: 18 / 20 Cien años de soledad (4x)

audiolingüismo

Bringing these two strands of thought together made me think with FSI, which is pretty steeped in audiolingualism, is related to behavior and habits and these things change, particularly when the brain has automated a particular task.

That got me thinking the better FSI drills are learnt, the better the brain change, the "less steps to do something" (brain wise).

That's encouraging me to take it easy with removing mp3s from my FSI "sticks" or "folders." Probably obvious, but "knowing a rule" and "automating that rule" are quite a distance apart. It's helpful to get to the point that rule isn't even a thought. Just "this is the normal way to say that".


My goal for using FSI at this point is to move from "knowing a rule" and "automating that rule". I need "time on task", seeing something a few times usually will allow me to recognize it, but not always recall it. Everybody's learning style is different but, repeating useful vocabulary, sentence structures and patterns in everyday dialogue is helpful for recall. I think that it's easy to fall into bad habits or fallback patterns that may not be correct or sound natural to a native speaker. So, I am on unit 19 and will find out if it is worth it in a few months. Not sure how I would measure it because I have been using other learning materials simultaneously.


That's also got me feeling better about "limited interaction" with native speakers. Other threads here, particular some where @cavesa wrote a lot about series, movies, reading, etc, as super helpful in her experience for almost removing the need for "interaction" and continuing to a high level in the language.


As far as "limited interaction" with native speakers, practicing dialogue sentences can be very helpful when you do not have the opportunity, means, motivation, or time to interact with native speakers. Interacting with people for me is motivating and keeps me chipping away at learning Spanish. I'm sure that there's a valid argument that can be made regarding the usefulness of conversation practice when you do not have the ability to speak well. For a period of time, my only Spanish practice was a weekly chat on iTalki. If I did not enjoy chatting with this person, I probably would have quit studying Spanish altogether because I was swamped with work and losing motivation.
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Tue Sep 21, 2021 5:49 pm

greatSchism wrote:
luke wrote:
audiolingüismo

Bringing these two strands of thought together made me think with FSI, which is pretty steeped in audiolingualism, is related to behavior and habits and these things change, particularly when the brain has automated a particular task.

Everybody's learning style is different but, repeating useful vocabulary, sentence structures and patterns in everyday dialogue is helpful for recall. So, I am on unit 19 and will find out if it is worth it in a few months. Not sure how I would measure it because I have been using other learning materials simultaneously.

Yeah, and we don't have to get theoretical. Most "measure the dickens out of crap" people are full of the expletive which I have refrained from using.

But it is fun to measure stuff.

Hoping your forays into FSI are helping. I'm impressed with your diligence.
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 » Wed Sep 22, 2021 2:51 am

Cien años de soledad

Want to capture the progress bar, in case I decide to remove it from my signature tomorrow:
: 20 / 20 Cien años de soledad (4x)

This is the opening soundtrack and closing video that I've been enjoying:


That hyper-literal google + good taste editing of the parallel text is very engaging. I did it on maybe 1/3 of chapter 20 today. Actually did the first part of chapter 20 last night, but this editing stuff adds a lot of time to finishing a chapter. There is a satisfaction though as each sentence becomes clearer and clearer.

Tonight I also popped the mp3 into Audacity, which has this handy "highlight a segment and press <shift play>" to loop the highlighted audio. That was nice. The sentence repeating over and over while reading the original, the popular translation, the google translation, looking up a few words in spanishdict.com and/or dictionary.com. I learned a few words, including in English.

"calcining" was a word I ended up with for calcinante. Alchemist workshop, rarer and more alchemical than "scorched" or "burning"; changed, turned to dust, never will be what it was, beautiful.

The biggest upside of these interspersed hyper-literal forays during the L-R is they just jack up the beauty of book. Incredible.

Wanted to say a little about FSI today too. Yesterday I had spent a few listens each to dialogues 15-20, highlighting in the pdf certain points for emphasis. Today, I did mostly listen and repeat for those dialogues, but also looked at the fine manual. Where are the characters? White's apartment. Carmen, Jose's girlfriend, works for Aerolinia Nacional. Some small Latin American countries - like Surlándia - had a close tie between the airline and their Air Force. Golf. Nice pretext to talk about business. White invited Carmen and Jose to a party. Jose and Juan tag-team to get information. They're all getting along nicely. Subtle things like "don't get too liquored up if you have to work tomorrow". You'll probably want to get an apartment. A local from work might can help you out with that. You might find a neighbor to do a language exchange. Literature is introduced in unit 53. All relevant for the aspiring junior embassy worker. Shopping. Haggling.

The Illustrations got a bit of time today. Helpful to look at and re-read the manual. Starting to understand what a "direct object pronoun" is. I knew direct object, but not we're taking that even further.

The fine manual says the student should learn the difference between direct, indirect and reflexive clitics. There must be a reason.

Although the manuals are about 2000 pages, the linguistic commentary does not demand a lot of reading. By that I mean they are concise. Probably less than 200 pages of linguist discussion for the whole course. Maybe 150. Not important the exact numbers. Just noting that the manual, the reviews, the story, the variations all help.

Even found a bug in the fine manual today. A Jose lo ayudamos todos. (We all help Jose). It's presented without a translation, as if it was presented earlier in a dialog, but it wasn't!
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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