Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

[luke]

I find Vecinos from Mexico funnier, more interesting, and even, for me, easier to understand. Few if any, however, will find it intellectually stimulating.

Thank you! Situation comedies are more my style as well. Found a youtube channel called Venicos Completo that appears to have more episodes. And at least the last season is in 720P. (The first season first episode is 360P).

Your jousting with the various versions and presentations of Don Quijote is interesting. I found Cien Años de Soledad equally profound and moreover more interesting. I have read and listened to Cien años at least a couple of times, but read only once Don Quijote, and only Part 1.

Thankfully, the more time I spend with Don Quijote, the more I appreciated it.

Oh BTW, I'm planning a road trip and have downloaded Vivir para contarla, Gabriel García Márquez' autobiography. Based on the audible sample, it seems easier than Cien Años de Soledad. Should be good idiolect and insight background for my next run at 100 Years.

Just glanced at the chapterage. 21 hour book with 8 chapters. I guess that means it's perfect for a roadtrip.

[luke]

A Wall of Anki
Came back Friday night from about 2 weeks away from my Anki deck. Had been doing about 25-30 minutes per day before the trip. Also studied 2 days ahead before I went.

There were about 1000 cards to be reviewed in Essential Spanish Vocabulary Top 5000. Holy smokes!

I got through that between Friday night and Sunday afternoon with a few sessions by bumping the daily limit up to 400 or 500.

It's nice to have that beast tamed.

I have another Frequency Dictionary of Spanish deck which had a few hundred in the review queue. Interestingly, I was only doing about 4-5 minutes a day on that one before I took 2 weeks off. Also worked 2 days ahead on that one.

The FSI Spanish Anki deck didn't seem like a big chore. I was doing a fair bit of FSI during those 2 weeks.

I caught up my miscellaneous decks too.

All the decks in italics above are from AnkiWeb, by the way.

It was about 90 minutes today and probably similar yesterday, plus a bit Friday night.

I've decided to put Frequency Dictionary of Spanish on life support. Have a few reasons. More than enough Anki, a bit of research that suggested word pairs were better for pure vocabulary acquisition, more work work in the near future, and the Ultimate Spanish Conjugation deck. More on him next.

The Ultimate Spanish Conjugation deck. I read the manual twice. Did the 7 card intro. Then, ser, 58 cards. Vosotros, Vos, Future Subjunctive, everything else. Some word prompts introducing the subjuntive I'm not familar with. About 50 minutes for the first verb on the first day. Holy Mother of God. Ouch!

I thought the deck would be pretty easy and felt happy when I learned one thing, siendo as the gerund of ser. I'd seen siendo before, but hadn't done 2+2 on it yet. That was about 30 seconds into the deck. Everything was bright and gay.

Then the lights went out (figuratively).

Holy cow! Seeing now that Saturday is a better day to add a new verb in that deck, because you get another day to start cleaning up the carnage before the work week commences.

The deck-author does suggest one verb per week for the first 4-6 weeks. If day 1 is any kind of an omen, he's giving good advice.

Sorry if this all sounds sissy. I've never used Anki for such a grueling chore. It's always been nice and easy before.

I was waiting for that 58th card to expire its "10 minute good" timer so I could finally put a nail in the deck for today.

I hope and suspect that as time rolls on, I'll become a fan of this deck, but that may take a while. Interestingly, ser is only the 10th most irregular verb in Spanish, by the deck-author's count.

The deck-author started with ser (to be), which is the most frequent verb in Spanish. They say, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but after the trauma of ser, wondering if he could have started with the regular verbs first 8)

I just want to lay back and eat pizza now.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Impressive work!
Please tell me a bit more about using word pairs for vocabulary acquisition. I am pulling my hair out with Ancient Greek vocabulary and could use a better flashlight.

[luke]

Impressive work!
Please tell me a bit more about using word pairs for vocabulary acquisition. I am pulling my hair out with Ancient Greek vocabulary and could use a better flashlight.

I'll have to look at your log more closely so I can see how you're approaching Ancient Greek vocabulary.

Word pairs are the simplest cards:

Code: Select all

house / casa
cow / vaca
water / agua


You might have the gender in there if Ancient Greek has them.

Another possibility for vocabulary flash cards are word + sentence / translations.

Code: Select all

[i]casa - la casa verde es bonita[/i] / house - the green house is pretty


So that Frequency Dictionary of Spanish is words and phrases. That's the deck I'm going to let slide for now. Not because it isn't good, but rather because I can fly through the word pair deck. (They used the same source for the 5000 words. One deck-author decided to include the phrase too).

The word pair deck goes both directions. The word phrase deck only goes English / Spanish. (would be easy to change that if it were desireable, but I agree with the deck author's defaults).

By the way, another reason for me putting the word phrase deck on life support is because I think the Paul Nation notion of 4 balanced strands is a helpful approach to designing a language learning program. Those strands are:

Meaning focused input (listening and reading)
Meaning focused output (speaking and writing)
Learning (Anki, FSI, grammar, etc).
Fluency (stuff you find easy and you just work on getting faster at doing it)

[MorkTheFiddle]

In a way, in a very confused way, I'm approaching vocabulary as Nation suggests.
Now that I know what word-pair means, I see I have used the method already.
The trickiest part for Ancient Greek is so many words have many meanings, and often either the meanings have only a tenuous connecton to one another or else no connection at all. This is compounded by the fact that there is just not that much to read in Ancient Greek, so learning by extensive reading is not possible.
It would seem, from what I have read, that vocabulary retention is hard for many folks learning Ancient Greek, even those with long experience. This is conforting, but unacceptable.
My log will show that I have spent the past few weeks wrestling with this problem. Right now my solution is to read and reread passages I have already read and found interesting. Now the goal will not be to just "get through them" or understand them, but rather to concentrate on words unknown, especially, at first until I am sure of all of them, the words that appear most frequently.
We'll see how that goes.

[luke]

Took the vocabulary test at https://itt-leipzig.de/?lang=en.

My overall score for receptive vocab on the 5000 most frequent words was 80%.

The test goes for 30 minutes max. I used 29:44.

The post I was working on disappeared when I tested the URL link in my preview, so I'll try to piece the results together from memory.

1000: 30 of 30 = 100%
2000: 12 of 30
3000: 29 of 30
4000: 27 of 30
5000: 22 of 30

The site said 24 of 30 correct (80%) means you've passed that level, but still have some words to learn.

Oh, and on, Vivir para contarla, the autobiography of Gabriel García Márquez, I only listened to the first couple hours. Didn't even finish the first chapter in my road trip. I did use the car ride productively though. Some FSI drills, some other audiobooks, some shadowing, a random Spanish speaking radio station now and then, etc.

[luke]

The trickiest part for Ancient Greek is so many words have many meanings, and often either the meanings have only a tenuous connection to one another or else no connection at all.

My log will show that I have spent the past few weeks wrestling with this problem. Right now my solution is to read and reread passages I have already read and found interesting. Now the goal will not be to just "get through them" or understand them, but rather to concentrate on words unknown, especially, at first until I am sure of all of them, the words that appear most frequently.
We'll see how that goes.

That sounds like a sensible approach. From reading your log, it sounds like you're hitting some real classics in Ancient Greek.

[DBAG2]

Hi Luke, was it you who used to post in the old forum years ago about using FSI and Assimil?

If so you where one of my early influences! Great to see you back at it!

[luke]

Hi Luke, was it you who used to post in the old forum years ago about using FSI and Assimil?

If so you where one of my early influences! Great to see you back at it!

And good to see you back here too. Hope you enjoyed your night now. Looking forward to your future posts.

[luke]

Took the vocabulary test at https://itt-leipzig.de/?lang=en.

My overall score for receptive vocab on the 5000 most frequent words was 80%.

The test goes for 30 minutes max. I used 29:44.

There's a Spanish vocabulary test at https://www.arealme.com/spanish-vocabul ... e-test/en/ that I found in philomath's log. It seems less rigorous than the previous test. Only took about 5 minutes. It says:

Your Spanish Vocabulary Size is: 13582
★★ Top 23.41%
Your vocabulary size is like that of a 18-year-old teenager in Spain!