Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

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Kullman
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby Kullman » Sat Nov 19, 2022 5:30 pm

If I may...

Let me provide some audios which could be interesting for practicing your ear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jnZtF ... VD3IAJSC3y

Juan Antonio Cebrian was a spanish journalist who hosted a radio show named "La Rosa de los Vientos" (Compass Rose in english).

One long running section of this show were the "Historical Passages", sometimes focused on historical events, other times biographies... but always entertaining.

I think than his slow cadence and deep voice could be a good tool for spanish learning.

There were also two books "Pasajes de la Historia" and "Pasajes de la historia II: Tiempo de heroes" based on this same section.
2 x

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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sat Nov 19, 2022 7:53 pm

Kullman wrote:Let me provide some audios which could be interesting for practicing your ear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jnZtF ... VD3IAJSC3y

Juan Antonio Cebrian was a spanish journalist who hosted a radio show named "La Rosa de los Vientos".

There were also two books "Pasajes de la Historia" and "Pasajes de la historia II: Tiempo de heroes" based on this same section.

Thanks for tip. The video you linked to reminds me of the King Tut exhibit I saw with a coworker many years ago when it was touring the US.
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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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Wed Dec 07, 2022 10:39 pm

Return from holiday
It wasn't all time off of work, but I had several days off during my family visit.

I've caught up my Anki decks. This is the reviews for the last 90 days for the collection (all decks). The "time" box is checked, to give an idea that I've regularly been spending more than 30 minutes per day on Anki. A little over 30 days ago, I started ramping down the new cards and you can see the daily time begin to drop. After the blank spot, where no cards were studied while I was away, you see the big bump to catch up:

20221207_repasos_90_collecciOn.png

The orange tips on the bars are for new cards. I ramped those down before the trip too.
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 16x

I went through chapters 17-20 (of 20) of Cien años de soledad. Some of that was in car. Some was with the parallel text. Here is a snippet from the parallel text I've been working on:
cien_capitulo_17.png

I listened to Assimil Using Spanish on the way up and while I was there:
: 60 / 60 Using Spanish

Finished up a couple others
: 365 / 365 Anaya El Quijote 7x
: 13 / 13 Doce cuentos peregrinos

The 12 short stories by Gabo is his 4th book of short stories.

I've got about a week and a half before the next family visit. I'm starting to make plans for the next phase of my studies. In the meantime, I'm wrapping up some things:
: 39 / 45 FSI 1-45 review
: 9 / 10 FSI 46-55 review
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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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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sat Dec 17, 2022 11:08 pm

Preparing for another road trip
Tomorrow I'll be heading out to visit my brother and family. This is what I have in the hopper for studies while away for the holidays:

I completed my review of FSI lessons 46-55 (of 55) this morning. Those same lessons will be joining the other review track I had going:
: 41 / 45 FSI 1-45 review
: 10 / 10 FSI 46-55 review

Ultimately, that will give me a 3x review of the final volume of Foreign Service Institute Basic Spanish.

Street Spanish
A few years ago, my sister got me into the NetFlix series Tidying up with Marie Kondo. Two of the side effects were that I went through all the episodes and did a vast cleaning of my domicile and I got rid of a lot of books related to learning Spanish. At that time, I wasn't studying and didn't really have any plan to ever restart learning it. Marie Kondo had a specific episode about handling books.

That long prelude just to say, I took my Street Spanish and Streetwise Spanish books to the thrift store (GoodWill, here in the USA). Well, I have regretted many of the books that I tossed, including those and the Big Red Book of Spanish Vocabulary, which had a section on word roots that I've often wanted to consult with respect to the prefix sobre. E.G., sobresaliente, sobrecogido, etc.

Well, I still have an MP3 CD I made of the dialogues from the 4 Steet Spanish books and I'm bringing that on my road trip.

NBLA
My brother has me interested in studying a new book. I got the Nueva Biblia de las Américas (NBLA) a few days back. It is a translation by the Lockman group, who also published the New American Standard Bible (NASB). They are both meant to be rather literal, word-for-word translations.

The version of NBLA I got is a John MacArthur study version. His notes are available for a lot of different bibles. One of the big advantages is that the notes, which in general are about 66% of the text expand on the meaning of words and passages and try to bring coherence to the entire work. They often refer back to Greek words. This helps with vocabulary as well as understanding.

The main text is 11 point, which is not tiny. They even refer to it as large.

I also got the NBLA from Amazon's Audible. It has a good narrator.

Last point on NBLA is that it uses ustedes rather than vosotros. That's a big advantage for me here in the Americas. FSI primarily taught ustedes y tu. Vosotros and Vos are taught at the tail end of the course because they aren't widespread on this side of the planet.

This progress bar is tracking the audiobook, which is about 80 hours long:
: 78 / 1193 NBLA

So far, I've been using a study method John MacArthur mentioned, which involves studying a single book of the New Testament for about 30 days and also going through the Old Testiment in parallel, but a lot faster. I'm not planning that far ahead, but using this technique, one may cover the New Testament in about 3 years and the Old in about 1.

I have appreciated that a lot of words I've learned from Cien años de soledad have come popped up in my listening. Jinete (horseman) and ramera (harlot) are a couple that come to mind.
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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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sun Jan 08, 2023 3:24 pm

Made it home
Home can be nebulous, depending on where your family lives, but I'm back where I usually live.

During my trip away, I listened through the audio of Streetwise Spanish. Actually wish I still had the book, as it struck me as rather well done.
: 60 / 60 Streetwise Spanish

FSI review
My FSI review has consolidated into a single progress bar. I completed the 46-55 before my holiday. Now, that other track is starting to catch up again, so I'll start reviewing the final volume of FSI Basic Spanish again soon.
: 44 / 55 FSI 1-55 review

The Nueva Biblia de las Américas (NBLA) is an 80+ hour audiobook. This translation doesn't use vosotros forms, which makes sense on this side of the planet.

I also bought a bilingual version of LBLA/NASB (La Biblia de las Américas/New American Standard Bible), which are translations by the same publisher with the same overall goals. I.E., modern word-for-word translations.

I misread LBLA for NBLA when I made the purchase. LBLA uses vosotros rather than ustedes. Not a huge deal. Getting more familiar with European Spanish won't hurt me.

The upside of the bilingual book is that it's easy to highlight words that I use the translation for. That makes for easy, simple review too. I can just look at the highlighted words and do a quick check if I've learnt the word or need to glance at the highlighted translation again. Helpful.
: 179 / 1193 NBLA

Anki plans
I quit adding cards to Cien años de soledad after chapter 17 (of 20) about 67 days ago. I plan to let the deck continue maturing for another 4 months before I add the final chapters.

In the meantime, I've been giving more daily minutes to these 3 decks:
: 1192 / 4994 A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish (Mature)
: 4780 / 9496 Essential Spanish Vocabulary Top 5000 (Mature)
: 2267 / 7741 FSI Basic Spanish (Mature)

More minutes means I've gradually increased the time per deck to over 7 minutes per day. I do that by doing "personalized study" each day, rather than a set number of cards. The idea is to use minutes per day to keep the decks under control.

20230109 intervals_30_f4994.png

Above are "Intervals" for the next 30 days in A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish. The thing I note is the big bump in the near term (3-5 days) and that there are less cards as we get out towards 30 days. 30 days is when a card crosses the Anki threshold to "mature". All this means it may take a few weeks before the "mature" card count starts to go up appreciably.

Other input
I've also started watching some DW Noticias en español to keep vocabulary from the wild coming in.
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11 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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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sun Jan 15, 2023 3:11 pm

FSI review
I'm back to the three or four track FSI review.
1) USB stick in the car
2) Live Lingua on the trail
3) CD en el baño
4) FSI Anki deck
: 46 / 55 FSI 1-55 review

I'm into unit 47 now. The first review of FSI volume 4 (of 4) was still rather brutal at times. For example, I may have listened to the same drill more than once on the same walk to bring my performance up to an acceptable level, plus repeats on subsequent walks and subsequent days. Volume 4 is units 46-55. It's too early to tell if the challenge of volume 4 will still be high at times. So far, so good.

LBLA/NASB/NBLA
I'm reading about a chapter per day in the bilingual LBLA/NASB (La Biblia de las Américas/New American Standard Bible). If I were listening to it, most chapters would be about 5 minutes. I'm letting myself go here and there in the reading. Right now, in El evangelio según San Juan.

On the listen front, I'm tracking the book from beginning to end.
: 241 / 1193 NBLA

Anki
I've been focusing a lot lately on these 3 decks so far this year:
: 1200 / 4994 A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish (Mature)
: 4790 / 9496 Essential Spanish Vocabulary Top 5000 (Mature)
: 2269 / 7741 FSI Basic Spanish (Mature)

That means I've been increasing the time per deck to about 12-15 minutes per day. If you were to compare the bars directly above to those from a week ago, it would look like very little progress. That should change soon. Apparently, it takes about 2 weeks or so for easy cards to start maturing. Reviews go from 4-5 days, then 13-15 days, then mature (21+ days).

Here's my theory in pictures. This first shows the holiday break with no cards, the catch up after holiday, and then a ramp up of new cards (orange bars):
20230115 reviews_30.png


The 1 month "Intervals" image shows the big pile up for 3-5 days, then a smaller secondary hump from 7-15 days, then very low card counts. Those low card counts for 19-31 days are likely for more difficult cards. I use the standard 4 button Anki ratings. I'm thinking these are ones that had at least some "hard" ratings, as opposed to "good" and "easy".
20230115_intervals_30.png


The pie chart count shows a lot of "buried until tomorrow" (enterrado) cards. That's because this deck has 2 sided cards and is set to not show both sides on the same day (so they are buried until the next day):

Today I did 113 cards in this deck. The average card took 7 seconds:
20230115 pie.png


The 90 day forecast shows if I quit adding new cards, it would not take long for the count of daily cards to drop a lot. That will help if I change priorities:
20230115 forecast.png


Other input
Trying to watch some interesting videos on YouTube each day.
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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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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sun Jan 22, 2023 11:53 pm

I got through the review of the first two units of the final volume, 46 and 47, in under 2 weeks, which is quite good.
: 47 / 55 FSI 1-55 review

My Anki reviews are starting to get out of hand again. I've been cutting the minutes per day and the cards to add to get bring it back under control. This is the "collection" of all decks. The "Tiempo" (time) button is checked. You can see I was putting in over and hour a day and I'm starting to bring that down:
20230122 collection_reviews30.png

: 4875 / 9492 Anki Essential Spanish Vocabulary Top 5000 (Mature)
: 2308 / 7741 Anki FSI Basic Spanish (Mature)
: 1286 / 4994 A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish (Mature)

A Brave New World - Un Mundo Feliz
I started Un mundo feliz this past week. I have a bilingual text with annotations. It's a good way to approach the book and audio, as there are some rather arcane and eccentric references. It looks like this:
un_mundo_feliz.png

What I've come to be doing on this run is read the Spanish and highlight stuff that isn't immediately obvious. Then I listen to the audio as I re-read the text. The audio is about 8 hours. The audiobook has 20 chapters. It's a little grueling this first time through.
: 8 / 20 Un mundo feliz

Biblia
What I like about the 80 hour audiobook is that the chapters tend to be rather short, 4-8 minutes. It is good for interspersing FSI drills between chapters on my walks.
: 313 / 1193 NBLA

I've been reading the bilingual text and just finished the Gospel according to John. I'm going to start Psalms, which has very short chapters. I'm hoping that will help reduce my workload. I've gotten myself in over my head recently with everything on my plate.
: 21 / 21 San Juan
: 0 / 150 Salmos

Getting in some DW en vivo (Deutsche Welle Live) on YouTube. I can watch a bit for a bit and don't have to commit to an extended documentary. They do a good job with both.
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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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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sun Jan 29, 2023 3:28 pm

Brave New World / Un mundo feliz
I finished up Un mundo feliz this morning. I think it's an important and somewhat prescient book. The Spanish translation that I have is incomplete. I have that parallel text I snapshotted above last week. There are several sections that the translator left out. Most of that appears to have been perhaps because some parts are obscure and are perhaps difficult to translate and don't move the story forward too much. This isn't an "abridgement". It's probably just a reality that some translations cut corners.
: 20 / 20 Un mundo feliz
un_mundo_feliz.png


One unit further in FSI
I'm into unit 49 in the FSI Basic Spanish review now.
: 48 / 55 FSI 1-55 review
: 2397 / 7741 Anki FSI Basic Spanish (Mature)
: 392 / 1193 NBLA
: 15 / 150 Salmos

A Tale of Two Ankis
I've been gradually working on this 9,492 card deck for 555 days. My current plan is ramp up my study time and perhaps get through all the new cards this year:
: 5071 / 9492 Anki Essential Spanish Vocabulary Top 5000 (Mature)
20230129 repasos_10000.png

Above, the orange tips show that I've been studying "new cards" pretty much all the way through. The overall length of the bars shows that after a strong start, I cut back my study time a lot. Now I'm ramping it up again.

The other Anki I want to talk about is Cien años de soledad. I've got a few "sign posts" on the way to calling the deck "tamed" before I do the final run at adding cards. (I have 3 of 20 chapters left of card adding, as I recall).
20230129 Cien_added.png

In two days, it will be 90 since I've added any cards to the deck.
20230129 Cien_reviews.png

The right side of the "reviews" chart is the most recent. It shows I'm studying way less cards than before, there are no orange tips (new cards) for 88 days, and most of the bars are that darker green, which means the cards are "mature".

Besides "no added cards in over 90 days", I'd like to have daily reviews for this deck consistently under 20 cards and have the average card maturity over 6 months. Average card maturity today is 5.53 months. That means I would see the average card I saw today in 5 1/2 months.

New book/Audiobook
I haven't actually got it yet, but I'm thinking rather than fiction, my next one will be non-fiction. Thinking it will be one originally written in Spanish.
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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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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Thu Feb 02, 2023 8:48 pm

Last week I wrote about finishing Un mundo feliz (Brave New World) and hadn't decided exactly where to turn next:
luke wrote:New book/Audiobook
I haven't actually got it yet, but I'm thinking rather than fiction, my next one will be non-fiction. Thinking it will be one originally written in Spanish.

I ordered a three books. Even with free shipping they arrived this morning. Thank you, Mr. Bezos and those who support your enterprise. :lol:

This one is coming off my progress bars for now:
: 17 / 150 Salmos

To be replaced by:
: 7 / 507 Batalla Cultural

What made me decide to write a log entry today is that in Un mundo feliz, the name (Henry) Ford is somewhat synonymous with Lord. Huxley coins a few neologisms containing the string "Ford" and they are generally used with a sense of reverence.

So, I'm reading the table of contents for my next book and I see Capítulo 4, sección III, Posfordismo e "industrias culturales y creativas". I don't know what will be in that chapter yet, but Posfordismo got me searching the fine web and Wikipedia did not disappoint: Fordismo

The audiobook is a different work, but also originally in Spanish, non-fiction, modern, with a good narrator:
salvase_quien_pueda.png

: 191 / 792 ¡Sálvese quien pueda!

It's about the future of work, robots, artificial intelligence, etc. The chapters are long, but have a lot of subsections. This is helpful so I can listen to smaller chunks.

My Anki decks are going fine. I will probably remove the FSI deck from my progress bar sometime soon. I'm focusing on the other deck right now.
: 5209 / 9492 Anki Essential Spanish Vocabulary Top 5000 (Mature)
: 2448 / 7741 Anki FSI Basic Spanish (Mature)

Modern non-fiction seems a good bit easier than Gabriel García Márquez. It's an invigorating detour.
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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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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Mon Feb 06, 2023 5:30 pm

In the last 4 weeks or so, I've been able to review a unit each week. I finished unit 49 over the weekend.
: 49 / 55 FSI 1-55 review

New Cycle
I've been giving this frequency deck a lot of attention for the last few weeks. I'm thinking a nice goal for the next 3 months or so is to finish getting started on the deck. That is, to see all the cards.
: 5341 / 9488 Anki Essential Spanish Vocabulary Top 5000 (Mature)

20230206 freq_90day_reviews.png

Above are the reviews for the last 90 days. You can see two vacation breaks. You also see that since the last holiday break, I've ramped up new cards, which gradually grows the young (light green) and mature (darker green) cards.

I see a lot of words I already know, but also some unfamiliar words. Some words have more than one meaning, such as comisión, which is both a committee and a sales commission. I'm trying to get familiar with these secondary and tertiary definitions. I've been limiting myself to about 12-15 minutes per day and I'm getting through a lot of cards.

I'm thinking the Frequency 5000 deck will be helpful for works like these next two:
: 364 / 792 ¡Sálvese quien pueda!
: 54 / 507 Batalla Cultural

¡Sálvese quien pueda! is interesting enough to hold my attention. The author tries to tell both the optimistic as well as darker sides of emerging technologies like automation, robots, artificial intelligence, etc.

Batalla Cultural is the book I'm reading. It's not as fast going as ¡Sálvese quien pueda!, which I'm only listening to. Batalla Cultural is more academic, has more historical references, and perhaps more Argentinian argot than "pop" non-fiction. I've been telling myself that if I were to watch more of the videos the author has made, it would make the reading easier.
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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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