Trying to take it easy

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BeaP
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Languages: Hungarian (N), English, German, Spanish, French, Italian
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Trying to take it easy

Postby BeaP » Wed Nov 03, 2021 8:38 am

I'm Bea from Budapest. I'm mainly here at the forum to share information, because I myself find very little practical help when it comes to language learning. I don't believe in magic methods, 'the best way to learn a language', as I think it's different and personal for everyone. On the other hand, I think I need to be flexible, and other people's ideas can help a lot to find a better way for myself. So in my log I'd like to write about the methods and resources I've used or am using, partly for myself to form an opinion I can base my learning plan on, partly for anyone who is interested.
I started to study English in the pre-internet era, when it was still a privilege. Russian was the compulsory language back then. I learned Russian too, but I don't remember much, which is a shame. I'd love to speak Russian now. I took up German in high school, and passed the B2 exam in less than 2 years. I studied philology at university, where I had the chance to take Italian classes. I started to learn French and Spanish later, as an adult. I've never taken classes from these two languages.
My strongest languages are English and Spanish at the moment, I feel 'at home' in these two, but I need to put more effort into maintaining them, because I can lose my skills quite quickly.
First I'd like to concentrate on Spanish, and my long-term goal is to pass the DELE C2. I already have the level in reading and listening comprehension, so I need to work on speaking and writing. We've spent the autumn school break in Italy, which fuelled my motivation for learning Italian. I'd also like to use this well, and work on my Italian at least for 30 minutes every day.
I gave this title to my log because I tend to set the wrong goals for myself, I always want to achieve too much, and then I get frustrated and drained. I don't need to study any language or pass a test from a financial point of view, I'm only doing this as a hobby, for my own enjoyment and personal development. I need to remind myself of that constantly.
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BeaP
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Re: Trying to take it easy

Postby BeaP » Wed Nov 03, 2021 9:32 am

Grammar is bashed a lot, so I think I'll start my log by telling you how much I hate the communicative approach. Already when I was at high school, in the first half of the 1990s, we used communicative course books. I have no idea why people still blame the failure of school language education on grammar and translations. For me communicative books are awfully boring, they push you to stammer with your desk partner in fake situations. More often than not creating a content is harder than forming it linguistically. An example: You're shipwrecked. Discuss with your group who should be pushed out of the lifeboat. The one who has the most important profession wins. Another example: Make a brochure about your town, present that places that are worth visiting. OK, but couldn't we just learn the language instead?
When I started to learn English in the primary, there weren't many books available. My mother made a photocopy of Access to English, which I rented from the school library, and we also copied the cassette. I loved it. If I had a time machine, I'd buy 10. It had 4 volumes, all of them with the same protagonists: Arthur, a librarian who was desperately in love with his colleague, Mary. But Mary had a rich boyfriend. It was really funny and interesting, I wanted to go on, and read the next chapter. Now I think a good language learning books is a book you can finish. And this was the type of book you could finish. I'm constantly looking for books like this, but they are very hard to find. It's obviously easier to write a dialogue in a clothes' shop, than to build up a whole story with likeable characters and suspense. But sometimes I think that the communicative approach made writers lazy, and learners indifferent.
I've just recently found the Un nuovo giorno in Italia series from Bonacci/Loescher. It promises the same structure as Access to English. We'll see. I'm planning to go through it quickly, and refresh the basics this way. I've also bought another course book from this publishing house, Il Balboni, which looked different from the usual stuff, and I've bought a grammar, GP by Marco Mezzadri. I'll check these out as well, but I'll try to focus on the narrative-style book. I've started to read Camilleri's La voce del violino from the Montalbano series. So far it's an easy and funny read.
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jimmy
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Re: Trying to take it easy

Postby jimmy » Wed Nov 03, 2021 12:04 pm

BeaP wrote:I tend to set the wrong goals for myself.


hi,

after having some experiences, I personally realised that not just it was important to learn much, but also what you selected to learn!

what about language learning?

I can clearly see that you had selected all of foreign languages from western regions/countries.
I personally believe you should select at least one or two of these languages as new.

1) Arabic language
2) chinese

....
we of course cannot make a clear prediction on what would happen in future, but some of us are stronger in their prediction. You could also conasider iranian language (i.e. persian)

but I see none of these selected in the current list.

normally ,selection/learning of difficult knowledges does not mean that it was good selection at the same time. I hope I shall have option to improve my chinese while working Arabic.
2 x
Self Taught - Autodidactic

BeaP
Green Belt
Posts: 405
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:18 am
Languages: Hungarian (N), English, German, Spanish, French, Italian
x 1990

Re: Trying to take it easy

Postby BeaP » Wed Nov 03, 2021 2:30 pm

Thank you for your comment, you've raised an interesting question for me. I don't know how much your youth and the era you were born in defines your languages, but in my case, these have defined them totally. I don't really see them as a personal choice, as there wasn't much to choose from. I'm 45 at the moment, and haven't started a new language in the past 15 years. The languages you see that I'm studying are the ones that I begun at the school, or a short time after school from the resources that were available for me at that moment. Although in the 80s there was still an abundance of Russian materials, most of them was very bad, and the teachers were using inefficient methods. It also went totally against the trend to be an avid Russian learner, and I was a small child. When I started high school, the Russian teachers were converted into English teachers basically overnight, so the chance to study Russian disappeared. Starting to study Chinese or Arabic was a real privilege before the internet, that only very few people could get. I had the idea to take up Arabic at the university, but unlike in the case of western languages, you couldn't take it up as a language learned a couple of times a week, only as a major. So it would have required a lot of dedication on my part. I'm sticking to these languages because I've already invested a lot of effort in them, and I don't want to waste it. I have very little free time at the moment, and I'm afraid we're heading towards the third round of digital education in Hungary, which puts a huge workload on me as a mother. I see your point, and I do agree that I would benefit a lot from studying any of the languages mentioned by you. I just don't really see them as realistic options, if I'm honest with myself. Even starting a totally new language that is not particularly hard seems to be very difficult. I do believe that the learning capacity decreases with age, and after studying Spanish for 15 years or so, I still sometimes feel that I haven't achieved the fluency that I had in German after 3 years of studying in high school. Anyway, I still think about starting a more exotic language now and again, but I always give up the idea quickly. Maybe when my children will start to learn languages more seriously, I'll start Chinese or Arabic with them.
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jimmy
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Re: Trying to take it easy

Postby jimmy » Wed Nov 03, 2021 6:53 pm

......
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Self Taught - Autodidactic

BeaP
Green Belt
Posts: 405
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:18 am
Languages: Hungarian (N), English, German, Spanish, French, Italian
x 1990

Re: Trying to take it easy

Postby BeaP » Mon Nov 08, 2021 8:12 am

How I started learning Spanish

Spanish was the first language that I've learned on my own. My original challenge was to pass the DELE C2 without any help from a teacher, but now I think it's a bit idiotic, and I'll get some lessons before the exam concentrating on the oral and written production. The longest time I've spent in Spain is two weeks and I don't have any Spanish natives in my vicinity, so yes, it's still an idiotic challenge.
When I started to learn Spanish, I already had three languages under my belt, with experiences and takeaways for myself, which I'll quickly sum up.

1. English
I had a horroristic amount of lessons at school (primary, high and university) with very low returns. The primary was great, but the high school gave me zero development, and the university only a little bit more. My adolescence was the era when satellite TV was in boom, and the movie channels were not coded yet. There was no internet, but luckily, there were a lot of TV channels with enjoyable series and movies. I spent years watching English TV every day, and at the end I was completely fluent, but I spoke with a lot of grammar mistakes. At the university I had to speak and write essays, but my speaking was never corrected. I left university with relatively good writing skills, but the massive input I got only improved my grammar up to a limit. Some years later I found a very good grammar book and learned it. I didn't need to do any exercises, I just learned the book with the rules and example sentences. I haven't learned English since, I just use it. Takeaway: Massive input works if I want fluency, but it's time-consuming. Sooner or later I need formal grammar instruction.

2. German
I started German at high school, passed the B2 exam, but went on learning, and reached a weak C1. How did I do it? I had 3 German classes in school, which were not particularly good, but at least we had a book that we went through. I went to a language school twice a week. Again, nothing outstanding, but we had a book that we finished. I did all of the exercises. Although the communicative books were boring, after going through them the 4 skills were on the same level in my German knowledge, and they were solid. The books we've used were Deutsch aktiv and Themen.
Takeaway: CEFR course books lead to CEFR exam success. If you concentrate on one course book, and finish it, you can save a lot of time.

3. Italian
To my surprise, we didn't use a communicative book at the university Italian course. We learned from La lingua italiana per stranieri by Katerinov, which is basically an old-school grammar book with grammar drills and some dialogues. I learned the whole book, watched some TV, and reached B2 in less than 2 years.
Takeaway: Any book works, that is written by real professionals and is published by a big publisher. If I don't want to pass an exam, I don't need a CEFR course book. I was right to get to the conclusion that sticking to one book is the most important thing.

I started learning Spanish with this experience 15 years ago, and I still don't have a real C2 level. What went wrong? I'll tell you in the next post.
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BeaP
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Re: Trying to take it easy

Postby BeaP » Mon Nov 08, 2021 1:33 pm

I started learning Spanish from a bilingual (Spanish-Hungarian) book for high school students. Side note: it might worth it to take a look at the high school course books if you're a beginner in a language. Especially the older (20-30 years old, not 70 years old) ones. My book explained everything very clearly, gave a translation for everything, contained effective exercises, and helped me build the basics for learning Spanish. But then came the internet, the easy availability of books with CDs, downloads, softwares, and at the end analysis paralysis and the paradox of choice. The difference was immense. When I begun university, I was already thinking about studying Spanish or French. I went to the biggest bookstore in a mall, and could find 3 books for French and 1 for Spanish. Cassettes or CDs? None. I'd saved the money to pay for the pack of CDs, but they weren't available. I thought the books were useless without them, so I didn't buy anything.
When suddenly all those materials became available, I wanted to learn from the best one. I was constantly searching for something shinier, better, bought and downloaded basically everything. I invariably found them boring and tedious, and at the end I didn't learn from anything. It's important to underline that the books that I'd learned German or Italian from were not better than most of the new Spanish ones. I just considered them unquestionable choices, because they were the ones I was provided with by the school. I accepted them and learned them.
When I discovered the publisher Difusión, I thought I'd hit the jackpot. Difusión course books are very well aligned with CEFR, they are modern, contain a lot of authentic materials, videos and audio. You only need to buy a book, everything else is free, moreover, if you subscribe to their online campus (which is very cheap), you get the digital version of all of their course books plus a ton of material. Huge overkill. I jumped from one book to another, from one activity to another, and although I still think Difusión materials are among the best for classroom use, I didn't get much use out of them.
The reason is obvious: I'm not a class. I have much less free time than a student, and I have very limited time to concentrate deeply on a task. I can't do a listening, a reading, a new grammar point, some exercises and an essay (all follow-up of each other) at one sitting. Seeing that mountain of materials just makes me uneasy: how will I get to the end of it? I don't have a teacher who chooses the materials for me, and makes me write tests so that I need to work on retention as well. It's not hard to guess what happened. I hardly ever had the mood to sit down and work with the course books, I watched TV, read a lot of books, and studied Spanish just like I had studied English before, with massive input during more than a decade. And again I ended up having serious gaps in grammar.
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BeaP
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Languages: Hungarian (N), English, German, Spanish, French, Italian
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Re: Trying to take it easy

Postby BeaP » Mon Nov 08, 2021 2:12 pm

Why do I want to take the DELE?

I want to take the DELE to complete my challenge, to force myself to fill in the grammar gaps and to improve my speaking to the level I want to be at. I also want to take it to be able to finish learning Spanish, and move on the study of my other languages.

Why C2? Why not only C1?
I'm pretty sure that for me C2 is easier. It's almost only formal language, while C1 is both formal and informal. I've studied philology, and some skills are general, not connected to one (foreign) language. I'm obviously a C2 reader generally speaking, I'm a C2 essay writer, and I'm a C2 oral presenter. It's a consequence of university, these are the things I've studied.

What is C2?
I also have a huge advantage, I've already studied English to C2 level, so I know what C2 means. Although I've lost a lot of my speaking and writing skills since then, I still use English automatically, and that's the most important aspect. My performance is not C2 any more, because I don't use a wide variety of structures and vocabulary, but I speak and write totally fluently, without hesitation and without having to look up things in a dictionary. Structures and vocabulary can be re-learned or refreshed in a matter of months, C2 fluency can only be attained in several years. The biggest difference between C1 and C2 is the time-frame, the automatism of the language use. For example when I see an English text with gaps, I don't have to look at the multiple-choice possibilities to fill the gaps, the solution comes to my mind automatically. Or when I have to transform a sentence, the same thing happens. C2 is not harder than C1, it's just quicker. It would be totally stupid to ask words never-heard-of from a C2 examinee, knowing these is the job of a linguist, a researcher, not a language-user. So the only factor we can change to make the exam harder is the time. I don't have problems with that, because I'd like my Spanish to become automatic. How will I achieve that? I don't know yet exactly, but I'll try.

Materials
I've had enough of Spanish coursebooks, so I'll try not to use them. We'll see if I can discipline myself. I have 4 books with mock exams that are not without faults. (More about the topic later.)
El Cronómetro C2 (Edinumen)
Preparación al DELE C2 (Edelsa)
Ramón Diez Galán: Nuevo DELE C2 (bought together with an online course on spanishclasseslive.com, these are just videos about the exam, nothing interactive)
David Giménez Folqués: Nuevo Examen DELE C2 (bought from Bubok)
I'm looking forward to Mar's online course on the aporeldele website.
From mock exams you can't have too much.
Grammar: Gramática de uso del español B1-B2, C1-C2, Anaya Gramática B2 and C1, the espanolavanzado website
Vocabulary: El país subscription
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thevagrant88
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Re: Trying to take it easy

Postby thevagrant88 » Tue Nov 09, 2021 2:09 am

Hello!

How do you like/have you tried the Gramática de uso del español? I have a copy of the C1-C2 but I wasn't super keen on it. Typically, if there was an area of Spanish I wanted to work on, I'd seek that out specifically via google or youtube searches. The sections of this book didn't really seem to have any real pattern to them and I found myself spending more time in the table of contents trying to find a specific lesson rather than just working through it. It's been a very long time since I've done any specific "learning" of Spanish rather than just reading and listening a lot so I'm always curious to see what others are doing. I feel I'm at a similar level to what you described as I also feel what I lack the most is automaticity.

Looking forward to following your progress!
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BeaP
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Re: Trying to take it easy

Postby BeaP » Tue Nov 09, 2021 8:47 am

thevagrant88 wrote:How do you like/have you tried the Gramática de uso del español?

I've bought these books, because they seem to be the most popular, they are recommended everywhere. First I was very disappointed, because I saw that none of the exercises contain full texts, only sentences. I think this is a really outdated method, the new books try to give you authentic texts and everything in context. The other book I've brought, the Anaya one, is much better from this point of view. They sat on my shelves for quite a long time, and I only begun to use them recently for exam preparation. My opinion got better, because I recognised that Gramática de uso has some real advantages for me. The biggest one is the short length of the lessons. I really can't do much on one sitting, and unfortunately it's not just a time management problem, it's rather the lack of concentration. I can do a unit in this book in 10 minutes or so, and that's fine. The Anaya book on the other hand has 20-page-long units, which is intimidating, especially at C1-C2 level. I've also realised that the short lessons help me develop a kind of repetition system (no Anki). I try to do a cycle with every unit:
1. just reading and understanding
2. reading and doing the exercises orally
3. reading and doing the exercises in a notebook
4. reading and doing the exercises in the book itself
5. reading and doing the exercises orally, highlighting the things I still don't remember
6. revise the highlighted things
I can do 2-3 units a day, maybe in different phases. Or if this is too easy, I might do several phases of one unit on one day. I don't know yet how it will work out, I'll change the system if it's not good.
Contentwise, I think it's a very good book, and I have to curb my perfectionism. I can't research every grammar point for days, because it has very low returns. There is no grammar book that contains everything, but this book in my opinion has the most important topics and points that I need for the exam. I had the idea to write a grammar notebook, but I've discarded it. It is just simply not worth it. What I need at this point is a lot of exercise, active recall, and especially doing a lot exercises orally and possibly quickly. I remember that in the primary school we often did sentence drills, and did the same ones multiple times, which was a bit boring but effective. I don't know the FSI courses, but as I've heard they work with the same type of drills. FSI seems to be very popular, so they must have advantages for a lot of students.

If I find a new structure in an article or want to check a problem specifically, I don't search it in the book, but on google, and first on the espanolavanzado.com website. I could also cover every gap this way, but I think starting from the grammar book, so going the other way round works equally fine. For example if I study a structure from the book and then read a novel in the evening, I always meet the structure several times in the book. I don't know, I think it just calls my attention more, I recognise it easier because I've recently studied it.

I'll be reading your log with interest as well. I found it yesterday, and also had the feeling that we are in similar boats.
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