Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

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greatSchism
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby greatSchism » Wed Sep 22, 2021 4:55 pm

luke wrote:Hoping your forays into FSI are helping. I'm impressed with your diligence.


Likewise! The hard part is going to be staying the course. I am planing on doing 2 units a week. The audio recordings are not the best, but they have a warm quality and do not sound terrible with noise-canceling AirPods.
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Thu Sep 23, 2021 2:53 am

Don Quijote del siglo XXI
I started another run with Don Quijote del siglo XXI. I had to double check my log. I just started it this morning. Seems like longer. I'm through chapter 20, which is 3 hours into the 10 hour RTVE audio drama.

This time I'm using the Fusion Reader parallel text with the audio. Those yellow highlights I did in a couple previous runs with the RTVE audio have come in handy. I can look at the book I highlighted and get a map for where each chapter/mp3 picks up, how much it will skip, how much will be continuous, etc.

The story pieces are coming together more. Every story has little threads and it's nice to have that, "oh, this is related to that" feeling.

I had another interesting feeling a few times tonight, which was, "I'm looking forward to reading the Anaya's El Quijote on my next trip to visit my brother". I've read it during my last two visits and it fits in with the different routine of a family visit.

The other day, probably Sunday, I made Anki cards for the rest of the Anaya El Quijote vocab. I'd been using a highlighter and pens to make notes about words that were questionable. That became 308 new cards. They're double sided, meaning I added 154 words or phrases. The full deck is 417. About 292 are still "new", meaning I haven't seen them yet.

One goal is to see most of those before that trip, but eyeballing the calendar, think seeing all the cards by the Winter holiday trip is ambitious enough with a couple weeks away from Anki when I visit my sister in a couple weeks.

So, the not planning too far ahead, again, which sounds strange, since I've just typed some plans, was good. By that I mean, last night before I restarted DQ del siglo XXI, I didn't know it would be on my list, let alone that I'd go through 1/3 of it today.

I was kind with the <erase> on my FSI sticks today. Several I might have removed with the, "I've got this down pretty well, it's not going to be perfect" mindset, remain for another day. Hoping I sleep well. That makes a difference. With good sleep and feeling into it, those that I would have removed today can come off tomorrow. It seems small, but I'm thinking that last bit is where a lot of the good comes. The drill moving from "pretty good" to "good" or sometimes, "quite good" is what I'm talking about. Have to balance "enjoy the journey" with "move forward".
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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 » Fri Sep 24, 2021 1:02 am

greatSchism wrote:
luke wrote:Hoping your forays into FSI are helping. I'm impressed with your diligence.

Likewise! The hard part is going to be staying the course. I am planing on doing 2 units a week. The audio recordings are not the best, but they have a warm quality and do not sound terrible with noise-canceling AirPods.

Yeah, I found the manual to be helpful at times when the audio's not clear.

It's useful for other stuff too, but when just listening isn't turning the light on fast enough, I let my eyes help.

Thinking a bit about Listen-Reading Don Quijote del siglo XXI... So far, it's been mostly what I mentioned yesterday. Fusion parallel text and the RTVE audio. I'm almost 1/2 way through the audio, but that is only about 1/4 of the way through the original book. What that means is that after the first 1/3, RTVE gets a lot sparser in what they act out. Seems like they could have done 20 hours, but they did 10.

So thinking I have to use some alternate L-R strategies, as is my wont and which I've found helpful with Cien años de soledad. Thinking I need more of the non-parallel text, as it's easier to find what they're acting out in my highlighted book. I guess there too, I can alternate. If there's a lot of continuous "lift from the original", the parallel text is awesome. When it's sparser, I can follow my highlights and discover more bits that are in the audio that I haven't identified with the marker yet.

Also have the Edith Grossman translation in paperback and that has some highlights too. If the going gets rough, the tough get going. The translation is an elation situation.

Have you ever seen the movie Memento? I saw it when it came out on video 20 years ago. It's given me an idea. Cien años de soledad al a Memento. Con Kepa narration is 124 segments. Randomized.

Did not remove as many mp3s from the FSI sticks today as I would have expected, given how well it was going yesterday. Did lay some groundwork though.

On the manual. Had a tiny little car ride, probably less than 5 minutes on each side. Had to carry a crockpot full of soup, in case anyone's just thinking "lazy". I drive that trip most of the time anyways, but on the way home, doing FSI drills from unit 29, at night, thought I should look at the fine manual tomorrow and not just for "linguistic explanations", but to follow some of the exercises, which I've been sort of avoiding because they haven't been clicking like the easier stuff like "dialogues you already know" or "illustrations you pretty much know".

Anyway. More than one way to skin a cat. Cada maestrillo tiene su librillo.

Stuck in a 15 minute radio program that has a transcript. The news isn't too surprising, but having the audio, transcript, and spanishdict.com in 3 different windows was a good way to notice a dozen or so new or questionable words. Thinking this is a nice complement to the literary tracks. (thinking Brain Book - comics, documentaries, literature). (even if "documentary" is a stretch for the news).

Also spent a few minutes L2/L2 reading some books I've read before with the audio at 200%. It's fast. That's probably a good exercise for 10 minutes or so each day. 22 hour book becomes 11. 6 hour treatise becomes 3. These are non-fiction - so easier than literature - and I have tons of choices.

Just had this idea for when I visit my sister. Many years ago I bought a Spanish romance novel at WalMart. They're cheap and they publish a ton of them. The language is relatively easy and the books are not too long. Just looked to see if it's on my shelf. It wasn't - thanks KonMari - but I found the Oxford Spanish Cartoon Book Vocabulary Builder!
Thanks KonMari!
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 » Sun Sep 26, 2021 3:21 am

Thoughts or reminders from Stanislas Dehaene
From the Retrieval, interleaving and other learning strategies thread, wanted to make a few notes, ideas, or reminders.

* Writing a few sentences after reading a chapter in a novel is helpful. Different modality. Forces some retrieval.

* On interleaving - I've been doing this for some time with FSI drills. That is, rather than do everything in order, which they call "blocking" in the literature, (one grammar point at a time), break things up over days. Day one, illustrations, day 2, construction drills, day 3 response drills, day 4 translations. It's generally more than 4 days per grammar point, as I give myself a day of "you did that pretty well the first time" before I give it the "learned so delete from memory stick". Most units have 2 or more of these teaching points. Doing the "new structure" in parallel, rather than in a blocked sequence gets more interleaving going on.

* Random is good, even if the types of drills that are randomized are the same. It introduces interleaving as well as retrieval and spaced repetition.

Mr. DQ del siglo XXI
I did start writing out a summary sentence or several after reading some stuff from that link above. Seems helpful.

The Fusion Reader parallel text doesn't include Book 2 of Don Quijote. That's forced me back to the paper books. Did a lot more pre-reading and highlighting of the Grossman Quixote (translation). General approach was:
a) Read and highlight Grossman Quixote based on what I'd highlighted earlier in RAE Quijote.
b) Listen to RTVE audio and follow along with RAE Quijote text.
c) Write a sentence or more about the chapter in Spanish.

I'm travelling in about a week. Want to finish RTVE Quijote before that. I'm about 2/3 of the way through right now.

Burritos locos
There's a taqueria where a lot of latinos go para el supermercado y la comida. There's usually a free local latino newspaper available at the door. Grabbed that and ordered burritos locos esta tarde. Good articles because they're local. Like, 40 year old woman gets thrown in jail for talking on the telephone while driving because she forgot to pay one of these "computer camera saw you run a red light" fines. Even went into how the woman was nice and the cop wasn't just being a jerk. One of the things I liked about that article was the even handedness of it. Not outrage that a lady got thrown in jail for a small offense, but just the message that cops throw people, even moms, in jail for non-criminal activity. So, the writer letting the reader pick their reaction, rather than the writer telling the reader what the the appropriate reaction is. (seems unusual for news these days).

There was another article or two I read while enjoying lunch, but since I didn't write a summary right away, they're not popping in my head.
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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 » Wed Sep 29, 2021 2:09 am

muchos pensamientos
No sé si son locos o ingenios. Acabo capítulo 9 de los 10 en El Quijote del siglo XXI. Estoy escuchando el décimo.

This is a pretty cool board here. Recently discovered the hidden keyboards. That saves copy/paste, which is my usual método para escribir en español.

But it will be much faster and easier to recount in English, porque ese es la fuente de mis locuras.

Watched some Lýdia Machová poligot talks.

I had been on the fence, planning my trip to visit my sister and what I might do in our off time when we're not hanging out or working on a home project, when we're just introverts in the same house. Don't know that my following thoughts will change the trip activities much.

I did want to finish RTVE Quijote again before I go. That seems quite doable. BTW, in book 2, I've been leaning more heavily on the Grossman translation, highlighting, listening.

Before the Lýdia videos was thinking, focus on taking out the Anki 5000 deck. Tame the beast. See all the cards. Supplement that with internet reading, wikipedia, maybe an hour of news per week. Internet surfing makes it hard to count pages, so was thinking 50 hours of internet reading, see all the Anki deck, so it goes into that nice mode that a finished deck gets to. Cards slowly decrease over time. Keep some FSI going too, but I'll be through unit 30 by the end of my trip. That's the official 1/2 way point. (55 units total, but only 25 in the second 1/2).

Had also been thinking on return, maybe add a third major book, like Borges Ficciones. I listen-read one story last night. It wasn't a happy story, but it was well told.

But seeing and listening to Lýdia and the notion of "find what you want to do and do that", has me second guessing and a bit inspired. That had me thinking spending more time on Cien años de soledad would not be a bad thing to do. It keeps drawing me back.

One avenue of that inspiration tonight was to save the e-text as txt and do some frequency parsing on it. Very crude, wasn't looking at turning conjugated verbs into a single unit or anything like that. I just wanted to glance at the text from a frequency angle. The rough takeaways were:

* 15K distinct "words"
* 50% are hapax legomenon (7,500 distinct words only used once in the text).
* As I was scanning the list, it was in the "used 6 times" or less that unknown words began showing up. Not saying I didn't know any of them or that I know every word used 7 times or I don't know any of words used only once, but the more frequent words felt like "got a handle on that". Makes perfect sense.

Lýdia talked about having 1 to 3 things to focus on for 6 weeks to 3 months, so you can feel real progress in whatever your focus is.

3 possibilities of 3 possibilities:
1. Vocab, literature and FSI.
2. Vocab, Internet reading and some FSI.
3. Cien años de soledad, vocab and a bit of FSI.

They're in order as they came to mind. The first one in each list is meant to be the top priority and the others, lower priorities.

#2 might be the most helpful. It's the biggest shift from what I've been doing. Thinking the reading plus an hour of "news" per week would make a lot of the Anki 5000 words show up on the regular, which helps them come alive.

But #3 is exciting.
9 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 AllSubNoDub » Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:42 pm

luke wrote:#2 might be the most helpful. It's the biggest shift from what I've been doing. Thinking the reading plus an hour of "news" per week would make a lot of the Anki 5000 words show up on the regular, which helps them come alive.

Which deck is this? Do you know if it's based on the Mark Davies list? If so, I would assume you would breeze right through it.

Yes, there have been some surprises in the Davies top 5000 for me for sure, but I've found a lot of the stuff outside the top 5k to be a goldmine. Specifically referring to the thematic lists. For example, stuff like "bisabuela", "suegra", "camioneta", "helicóptero", "zanahoria", "jamón", "pavo", "nuca", "pulgar", "rana", just to name a few outside of the top 5k which, 1. really surprised me that they weren't higher frequency (obviously, I already knew a lot of these) , 2. I couldn't imagine not knowing.

I'm not saying Anki'ing your way through it would be a waste of time, but you probably could save quite a bit of time reading through the list first then cherrypicking (unsuspend or add (if outside the top 5k) one-by-one). Depending on the example sentences though, it still may be worth it. A lot of Davies example "sentences" (mostly sentence fragments, not whole thoughts) include words outside of the top 5k. I've noticed I end up absorbing this vocabulary just by seeing it, so maybe there's something to be said for recognition sentence cards and/or i+2, i+3, etc. cards, though I still suspect there are diminishing returns there overall. Also very helpful for what I call "i+1.5" cards (not sure if I stole that or made it up), basically cards where one of the other words/verbal phrases/grammar points in the sentence I'm not trying to learn is not really an unknown but still kind of fuzzy.
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Wed Sep 29, 2021 5:13 pm

AllSubNoDub wrote:
luke wrote:#2 might be the most helpful. It's the biggest shift from what I've been doing. Thinking the reading plus an hour of "news" per week would make a lot of the Anki 5000 words show up on the regular, which helps them come alive.

Which deck is this? Do you know if it's based on the Mark Davies list? If so, I would assume you would breeze right through it.

Yes, there have been some surprises in the Davies top 5000 for me for sure, but I've found a lot of the stuff outside the top 5k to be a goldmine. Specifically referring to the thematic lists. For example, stuff like "bisabuela", "suegra", "camioneta", "helicóptero", "zanahoria", "jamón", "pavo", "nuca", "pulgar", "rana", just to name a few outside of the top 5k which, 1. really surprised me that they weren't higher frequency (obviously, I already knew a lot of these) , 2. I couldn't imagine not knowing.

It is the Mark Davies list. I have the book too. I like hitting "easy", "easy", "medium", "easy", with some harder stuff mixed in. It's pleasant. Fits in with coffee and quiet in the morning. (Internet reading is probably better). Anki also has the stats and numbers, which is at least concrete and measurable. I always take numbers like this with a grain of salt, because they are only indications and not the reality of whatever one is trying to measure per se.

I understand the inherent limitations of frequency lists once you get beyond 1-2k. The "frequency" isn't as meaningful or helpful because it depends so much on the domain of Davies' corpus and how much intersection there is with the individual's use of language. And 5000 is just getting started for vocabulary. I believe in The Brain Book's author's notion that with Romance languages for an English or other Romance language speaker you get the first 5k (of the requisite 15k) for free because of cognates, etc. (those 5k aren't all the most frequent, but a bunch are).

I think of the Anki 5000 as filling in some gaps for stuff I generally don't pay a lot of attention to (like the news), which is not irrelevant, but just something I don't give as much heed to as perhaps a more typical individual might.

So a second or two on a card like asociación (association) is a small waste. Those words quickly move to mature and very mature.

One could do the math and say all those seconds * all those cognates means you've wasted time and I wouldn't necessarily argue that, but I give more weight to those who are inclined to "encouragement and believe in self" as opposed to "perfect optimization", which for me could lead to "paralysis by analysis". I'm not saying you're doing that either. I'm just writing what I'm thinking :)

I know the 5k+ words that surprised you too. The thing is for people who study frequency lists is that the incremental frequency difference between word 4000 and 6000 or 8000 isn't really that much. I think I learned that from Mr. Iversen. The data definitely supports it.

I get it that many people don't like Anki or have more effective uses of it. No argument with anyone there. (and I know you're not arguing, or at least if you are, I've missed it :lol:)

Listening to Olly Richards interviewing Lýdia Machová while working and responding. Notes:
* Read/Read and Listen/Read (especially non-fiction) you're interested in (with translation for help).
* 1 good book + 3 seasons of a series. (to get you started - prepared for more native material)
* Find enjoyable material and spend a lot of time with it.
* Can be a novel, but novels sometimes have unusual and sometimes archaic language.
* She tends to delay speaking until listening and reading are at a high level.
* They talked a good bit about podcasts too. I need to find some interesting ones for the road.

BTW, I'm trying to figure out exactly what AllSubNoDub means. "Native sources with subtitles over dubbed shows"?

P.S., on the #2. By ramping up Anki and external sources, like internet reading, there's also the synergy where words that aren't in Anki are learned as well.
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: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
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: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby AllSubNoDub » Wed Sep 29, 2021 6:01 pm

luke wrote:It is the Mark Davies list. I have the book too. I like hitting "easy", "easy", "medium", "easy", with some harder stuff mixed in. It's pleasant. Fits in with coffee and quiet in the morning. (Internet reading is probably better). Anki also has the stats and numbers, which is at least concrete and measurable. I always take numbers like this with a grain of salt, because they are only indications and not the reality of whatever one is trying to measure per se.

I guess there is something to be said here for overlearning. I also find myself adding stuff I already "know", it is a nice confidence booster. I actually had a laugh today at one of my cards, for some reason I thought it was a good idea to add the Spanish word "total" (can't realistically see myself ever forgetting that). I can't remember what I was thinking at the time lol. :lol:

luke wrote:I understand the inherent limitations of frequency lists once you get beyond 1-2k. The "frequency" isn't as meaningful or helpful because it depends so much on the domain of Davies' corpus and how much intersection there is with the individual's use of language.

This is an excellent point. It never really dawned on me until you mentioned it. Probably lots of "ties" in most frequency lists as Zipf's law realizes itself. Davies' sources were quite broad though from what I recall.

luke wrote:I think of the Anki 5000 as filling in some gaps for stuff I generally don't pay a lot of attention to (like the news), which is not irrelevant, but just something I don't give as much heed to as perhaps a more typical individual might.

I agree, this is how I use the core 5k as well. I probably would have taken the approach of just going through the whole thing too, but I find myself changing a lot of his examples, especially the more fragmented ones. So it basically boils down to time.

luke wrote:I get it that many people don't like Anki or have more effective uses of it. No argument with anyone there. (and I know you're not arguing, or at least if you are, I've missed it :lol:)

Nope, you'll get no argument from me. My post was a selfish inquiry since I'm trying to learn for myself what others are doing to get results lol.

luke wrote:BTW, I'm trying to figure out exactly what AllSubNoDub means. "Native sources with subtitles over dubbed shows"?

You got it. An elitist weeaboo vestige from when I was heavily into anime in college. Little did I know that L2 audio with no subtitles was far superior. :lol: Just a throwaway name. Kind of ironic now, since I use L2/L3 dubs of previously watched shows to learn languages. :D
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Wed Sep 29, 2021 9:04 pm

AllSubNoDub wrote:I actually had a laugh today at one of my cards, for some reason I thought it was a good idea to add the Spanish word "total" (can't realistically see myself ever forgetting that). I can't remember what I was thinking at the time lol. :lol:

I totally agree. :lol:

AllSubNoDub wrote:
luke wrote:I understand the inherent limitations of frequency lists once you get beyond 1-2k. The "frequency" isn't as meaningful or helpful because it depends so much on the domain of Davies' corpus and how much intersection there is with the individual's use of language.

This is an excellent point. It never really dawned on me until you mentioned it. Probably lots of "ties" in most frequency lists as Zipf's law realizes itself. Davies' sources were quite broad though from what I recall.

Ooh, Ziph's law. So apparently word 8000 is only 1/2 as frequent as word 4000, but that's probably still pretty frequent. :)

AllSubNoDub wrote:
luke wrote:BTW, I'm trying to figure out exactly what AllSubNoDub means. "Native sources with subtitles over dubbed shows"?

You got it. An elitist weeaboo vestige from when I was heavily into anime in college. Little did I know that L2 audio with no subtitles was far superior. :lol: Kind of ironic now, since I use L2/L3 dubs of previously watched shows to learn languages. :D

Very nice. Definitely 133+ using anime and L3 dubs.

So if you need to upvote any of your stuff, maybe L3Dubs and we'll know what you're up to. :lol:
2 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 » Thu Sep 30, 2021 11:57 am

Image

Llega a su fin de nuevo, muy bonita escrita, la gran obra, historia del Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha.

: 96 / 96 Quijote del siglo XXI (4x)

Bonitos pensamientos me quedan. Uno de ellos es que, aunque La Mancha era un lugar en España, hoy día denomindo Castilla y La Mancha, la mancha tiene más significado que eso. Que nuestras vidas, aunque a veces manchadas, pueden ser bonitas, buenas, planeandas, con el alma bien fijado.

Que estés bien.

Vale!
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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