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 » Tue Aug 03, 2021 2:17 pm

jeffers wrote:I'm sure you've said before, but where and how do you do the drills? Are you sitting at a desk with a computer? Walking about? Are you looking at the manual while doing them?

Hey jeffers. You know I was into Spanish a long time ago (15 years) and revived it here in the last year or so, so there's a good bit of variety.

Back in day:
Listen/drill in the car driving to work. Generally do this "there and back". (that was often 45 minutes each direction).
Walking the dog. Do the drills with the headphones or whatever.
Not enough time with the manual.

These days:
Was mostly in the car when I was driving more. Had a "there and back" daily drive about 12 minutes each direction and that was a good amount of study time for me. Would also would do FSI in the car for errands, lunch, etc.

Then my "12 minute trip" pretty much went away. So, from a "time on task", a big reduction in FSI time. So I started doing more FSI while at home. Sometimes sitting at the computer (often) or pacing around the room (this is better than sitting). Based on that Helen Abadzi video, also carried some light dumbbells up to the "study room/office". If I'm feeling it, will do some light movements during the drill. The movement is helpful because the exercise is light and the combination reduce "boredom". Although I use the word "boredom" a lot, I don't think FSI drills are boring. They're challenges, sometimes small, always incremental, sometimes more so. If I'm getting tired of it, I just move on to something else.

I think of FSI drilling a bit like exercise. Something I should do. It's the centerpiece of my program to learn Spanish, but not where I spend the most time. I watch a lot of youtube. That's not generally not study per se, but there's a tremendous amount of interesting content out there, so I do a good bit of that. (and I want to be Don Quixote "dreaming the impossible dream"):



With the pandemic, I've taken to driving to visit some family members who live about 14 hours away by car. There I splice some FSI in with audiobooks. I'm driving alone. Splicing in a variety of books and FSI drills is much better from my perspective than grinding through a 15-20 hour audiobook that's over my head. Better to do easy books, current FSI drills, etc. On FSI during these long trips, I've taken to a "go ahead" approach.

Example of "go ahead with FSI" on a very long trip (with audiobooks spliced in, and audiobooks are the majority of the drive time, some radio too when I find a Spanish channel, but will occasionally just find some good music.

while trip is not finished:
Drill each mp3 until (good, tired, or enough for today).
Go to next mp3.
if (enough FSI or audiobook or radio)
switch to something else
end if
done

And on a "go ahead", don't even worry about what drills you've "got down" and therefore should delete. You'll know after the trip is over the next time you do the drill that you've "got it down" and can just delete it then. Don't worry about making notes and using rest stops to boot up your computer to delete a few files. (I've done that. So when I'm saying "you" here, I'm just talking to myself with a realization that came after a few trips when I started giving FSI more attention).

I'm spending more time with the manual than I've ever done. Generally I don't use it with drills. I use it with the dialogs and there annotation and actually read the "explanations" a few times. (Back in the olden days, I'd generally just look at the summary or table that comes after the "presentation of pattern". I might read the longer explanation that comes after the drills if I was really confused, but didn't use the manual enough (looking back now)).

So, although I was committed to the course back in the olden days and did things like edit the audio a lot and drill the hell out of it, I didn't think, "this is a lifetime resource". When I get this down really well, I can always come back to it if I quit using Spanish for some years.

The thing I like about the FSI Basic Spanish is the "novella" they create with the dialogs. Same characters, but different situations.

FSI Basic French is also good. If I were the boss, I'd have suggested to the FSI French guys to:
1) Use consistent "characters" in all these f-ing dialogs. (that's such an easy tweak).
2) Cut those units in 1/2 or thirds or 1/5s or whatever. FSI Basic Spanish is 55. FSI French is 24. The classes lasted the same time, and the French guys would argue, "we do one unit a week", but then, being the boss, I'd say, "hey you guys, is there a way to split this up into "days" or "a day", rather than a week or a half week.

But us amateurs can do with the course what we want.

About "metrics". They're useful, but we're dealing with amorphous analog data, not binary. So, metrics have to be taken with a grain of salt.

And apologies to any programmers who notice a bug in the above. I'm still a work in progress.

By the way, Britain's got Talent!
Last edited by luke on Tue Aug 03, 2021 7:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
3 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

jeffers
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby jeffers » Tue Aug 03, 2021 2:42 pm

luke wrote:And apologies to any programmers who notice a bug in the above. I'm still a work in progress.


Needs indentation. :P
3 x
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien (roughly, the perfect is the enemy of the good)

French SC Books: 0 / 5000 (0/5000 pp)
French SC Films: 0 / 9000 (0/9000 mins)

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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Tue Aug 03, 2021 3:00 pm

jeffers wrote:
luke wrote:And apologies to any programmers who notice a bug in the above. I'm still a work in progress.


Needs indentation. :P

Yes, it is code, and there's a tag for that. Much appreciated. Will fix, in fact, I'll do it here so your comment makes sense to historians :) (extra spaces are swallowed by default, so we're all on the same page):

FSI Listen Ahead Algorithm

Code: Select all

while long_trip is not finished:
        If FSI
           set audioplayer to repeat
           Drill mp3 until (good, tired, or enough for today).
           unset repeat
                Go to next mp3.
                Exit if (enough FSI for now)
        end if
        switch to audiobook or radio or FSI until you want to switch again
done


Also reminded me about one of the things I came up with and did when FSI Basic French was the course du jour. Topic called "Hard Core FSI".

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... fsi#p58782

The reason it came to mind is that editing the FSI French mp3s in the manner noted in Hard Core FSI doesn't take much time. Nothing like what I spent editing FSI Spanish drills.
3 x

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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Wed Aug 04, 2021 4:30 am

I found out the How To Spanish channel has a related channel, How To Learn Spanish. The "Learn" channel has all the upsides of the first channel, good mics, HD video, sweet Mexican voices, smooth flow and a husband and wife team that's in love.

The difference is that "How To Learn Spanish" channel focuses on grammatical tidbits. These are nice because they give natural examples in a straight forward way. 5-7 minutes on one topic with native insight.

It's all in Spanish, except when English is used for clarification.

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

Christi
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby Christi » Wed Aug 04, 2021 5:06 pm

How do you share a youtube video?
Seeing you share all these videos makes me want to share trailers of Spanish movies I've watched, but I forgot how and my google skills are somehow not up to it :oops:
0 x
2020 resolution words learned: 472 / 1000
Pages read at end of 2020: 220 / 1500

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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Wed Aug 04, 2021 7:23 pm

Christi wrote:How do you share a youtube video?
Seeing you share all these videos makes me want to share trailers of Spanish movies I've watched, but I forgot how and my google skills are somehow not up to it :oops:

Hi Christi. Youtube URLs look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-Akyc4f8I

Not everyone shows the URL in the browser, but all browsers should be able to show it.

You just copy/paste the part after /watch?v= and paste that into a youtube tag.

That looks like this when I do it:

Code: Select all

[youtube]uF-Akyc4f8I[/youtube]

You can think of that "v=" part of the URL as meaning "video=". Since the youtube tag already knows where youtube is and the format of the URL, it only needs the "payload" that comes after v=

Looking forward to your fancy posts in the future. :)
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Le Baron
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby Le Baron » Wed Aug 04, 2021 11:05 pm

I subbed to their podcast link after following the link to the video. Cheers!
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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sat Aug 07, 2021 2:47 am

notas

Very short Mexican Slang Dictionary - Alasdair Baverstock - foreign correspondent - might be basis for a good Anki deck some day:

https://alasdairbaverstock.com/dictiona ... dictionary

Image
Marcial Prado's advanced spanish grammar has been on my bookshelf for many years. Except for the preface, the book is in Spanish. Once upon a time I thought if I wrote it, it would give me motivation to finish it. That experiment failed on page 64. The good new is that Examen 1 is on page 65. @jeffers got me thinking about how to address unknown grammar points systematically without making a commitment to a whole workbook. I can use the exams as an assessment and then focus on my weakest points.

Cien años de soledad
After considering various methods to continue approaching Gabo's masterwork, came up with this:
    1) Listen/Read (español/English)
    2) Listen/Read (English/español)
    3) Listen/Read (español/español)

I won't go into all the other approaches I thought about. The above order is making sense right now. The idea is to use the continuity of the story to drive the process. The bold is a reminder that in Listen/Read, my focus should be on Reading the story. I.E., let the English audio support the Reading, but use Reading to "get the story".
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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Sonjaconjota
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby Sonjaconjota » Sat Aug 07, 2021 1:43 pm

luke wrote:while trip is not finished:
Drill each mp3 until (good, tired, or enough for today).
Go to next mp3.
if (enough FSI or audiobook or radio)
switch to something else
end if done


I've got a practical question: How do you change between mp3s or audiobooks during your trip? Do you prepare everything in the right order beforehand, or do you use a voice assistant, or does your car have a radio (or media centre or however it's called today) with a big enough panel to choose things manually while driving?
2 x

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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sat Aug 07, 2021 5:41 pm

Sonjaconjota wrote:
luke wrote:while trip is not finished:
Drill each mp3 until (good, tired, or enough for today).
Go to next mp3.
switch to something else if (enough FSI or audiobook or radio)
done


How do you change between mp3s or audiobooks during your trip?

Here's the short answer:


Driving alone is a key:

Image

I navigate very well with my knees. I always leave a big "space time cushion" when I drive. There's a "4 second rule" for safe driving. 4 seconds between you and the car in front. Be aware of all the other directions too. (when I was a kid, there was a "one car length per 10 mph rule. That's not a good rule and some idiots around here can't even follow that. Then there was a "2 second rule", which is better. Newer "safe driving" classes teach a 4 second rule). It goes back to physics, kinetic energy, reaction time, etc.
3 x


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