Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

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Spaceman
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Languages: English (N), Spanish (Intermediate Receptive), German (Rusty), French (Very Rusty)
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Tue Oct 04, 2022 2:12 pm

Goals for the next year

Get to 3 million words read in Spanish (currently at 840k). At my current pace this would be reading 42 minutes a day, presumably my reading pace will continue to increase.

Average an hour a day of listening to Spanish podcasts. This is easy if keep it as my default activity while driving and walking.

Watch 100 hours of undubbed Spanish-language TV. I'm not much of a TV watcher, but I think this will be very useful at understanding a variety of accents and registers.

10 new Anki cards per day.

Write something in Spanish 300 days. I need to make it a habit as something I do.

5 minutes a day with a textbook.

"Will start doing at some point in the future"
Start shadowing podcasts for some amount of time in the car to get my mouth used to speaking the language.
Italki (or similar) sessions at some point if/when my life makes such a thing possible.
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Spaceman
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Languages: English (N), Spanish (Intermediate Receptive), German (Rusty), French (Very Rusty)
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Wed Oct 05, 2022 12:21 pm

What I'm doing right now:
Reading La Sombra Del Viento. I'm about halfway through and it is very good and at a very good level for me. Perhaps a little less unknown vocab than is truly ideal, but that just makes reading more fun. The Shadow of the Wind is the name in English (and I'm sure there's translations in pretty much every major language), and I highly recommend it, with the caveat that I'm only halfway through.

Listening to an audiobook, a YA novel that's the second of a series (Guardianes de la Ciudadela). I read a lot by this author and really enjoy her stuff, but realized at some point that it was far too easy reading for me and switched to audio. Not sure if I should count this under reading or listening, but that's purely academic.

I'm in a bit of a podcast hole. Jumping around to a bunch of different podcasts, but nothing has hooked me for a while now. Listening to mostly news and Radio Ambulante until I find something.

I'm on day 2 of writing about 3 sentences a day and getting corrections on Reddit. I'm relatively pleased with it so far, but it's definitely a struggle to ways to say things with my current ability. Definitely shows where my gaps are.

Trying to casually read a new grammar textbook, but it's a lot of mental effort and I haven't been consistent.
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Thu Oct 06, 2022 1:31 pm

It's remarkable how exhausting it still is.

The last month or so I haven't had my usual Spanish podcast listening times, so I've been averaging probably 20 minutes a day instead of my usual 1-1.5 hours. Meanwhile I've upped my reading and have been trying to do an hour a day of that. I'm back to my usual routine this week, plus som catch-up on errands and have been getting 1.5-2 hours of Spanish podcasts. Plus still trying to do an hour a day of reading.

After a few days of that, I crashed a bit yesterday. Read about 15 minutes and found myself just staring at the page. I'm at the point where doing what I'm used to doing doesn't particularly taxing, but doing any more than that just wipes me out. Shows just how much mental effort understanding Spanish still takes me. I wonder if that will ever change. If reading or listening watching TV in Spanish will ever feel as purely effortless as it does in English.
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Fri Oct 07, 2022 3:58 pm

I've been trying for the last month or 6 weeks to read in Spanish an hour a day. My strategy is to read 15 minutes every time my son falls asleep (3x per day). He usually takes a few minutes to settle, so I don't like to stomp around for a while anyway, so it's a good opportunity to read.

The negative for me is the strange mental dance around doing or not doing things that I "should" be doing. If I'm reading because I should, it's harder because I feel like I'm doing it under duress. Then if I'm not reading, I feel guilt because I'm not doing what I should be doing. But on the other hand, reading is so much easier and more fun when you're reading a lot and it's going to take some effort to step up that quantity. So I'm just dealing with it and hopefully soon enough it'll be easy enough that I can just be in the habit of reading more and not have to worry about "making myself do it."
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Spaceman
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Languages: English (N), Spanish (Intermediate Receptive), German (Rusty), French (Very Rusty)
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Mon Oct 10, 2022 3:06 pm

I have been reading a Spanish YA author (Laura Gallego García) for quite a while, currently reading my 4th book of hers (and these are 500-600 page books). I enjoy them quite a bit (though I dnf'ed one because the teen romance got too cringey for me, a 38 year old), they're mostly all action and pretty good fantasy world building.

I've recently moved to listening to them as audiobooks after realizing just how high my comprehension is of them at this point. There's almost no new vocab, and what there is just fairly obscure nouns (e.g. someone acquires a crossbow). Since I haven't found any new podcasts that really spark my interest lately, it's nice to have audiobooks as an option too, but I do feel a little bit bad replacing podcasts with audiobooks. Most of what I listen to is conversational and provides a completely different type of input than what I get from books. Reducing that type of input doesn't seem ideal.
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Wed Oct 12, 2022 7:56 pm

I'm now 10 days in to writing something in Spanish every day. Just 3-5 sentences a day so far, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's going. I had a huge number of corrections the first few days, but once I built up my mental list of "things to pay attention to" it's gone down pretty quickly. Still usually some carelessness, but mostly idiomatic errors that are much harder to catch and fix yourself. And every day it gets a little bit easier mentally to find the words and know what I can and can't trust my instincts on. I'm hoping that after 3-6 months of this my Spanish writing will be pretty good!
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Sun Oct 16, 2022 2:41 pm

I've got a pretty nice routine going with reading in Spanish. I have my old kindle on the couch downstairs with a non-fiction book (currently a Spaniard walking around the world), and my new kindle beside my bed, where I read a novel. I listen to a YA book on audible for about half my Spanish listening.

I'm not sure how I feel about the audiobook concept yet. Whenever I switch back to podcasts, it takes me a few minutes to adjust to how quickly they talk compared to the audiobook narrator. I suppose I could probably crank up the speed on the audiobook and still understand pretty well, but I'm not sure I want to go down that path yet.

All my books are at fairly slow parts right now, which means I'm reading at a fairly leisurely pace. Reading slowly, it doesn't feel particularly taxing. Looking up words doesn't feel annoying either, because I'm not rushing to see what happens next, I'm just enjoying myself and satisfying my curiosity by looking up words. I think it's probably good to read in a variety of ways, and reading slowly is nice for a change.
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Wed Nov 16, 2022 7:19 pm

I've been feeling pretty unmotivated the last month or so, or maybe just busy and tired. Which is never great, of course, but I'm also pretty pleased with how my Spanish has continued pretty well on autopilot. Having a bad weem might mean I average 45 minutes of listening instead of an hour. And 30 minutes of reading instead of an hour. But that's still objectively pretty good! I'm happy with the state of things if it's two steps forward, none steps back.
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Spaceman
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Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2022 12:49 pm
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Thu Nov 17, 2022 3:10 pm

I'm about halfway through reading Como Agua Para Chocolate in Spanish, and remembering just how much I enjoy reading Magical Realism. To me the best books are either hyper-realistic portrayals of how human emotions and interactions actually work or they are so over the top and unrealistic that belief is completely suspended and you are left with a only the impression of how it feels to be a human being. I think the latter may work even slightly better when reading in language you don't know perfectly. Reading it as through a glass, darkly, can somehow make it more real and just go straight to the subconscious.

Obviously I have absolutely no education on the subject and I'm sure that sounds like absolute garbage to anyone who has actually studied literature.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu Nov 17, 2022 5:59 pm

Spaceman wrote:I'm about halfway through reading Como Agua Para Chocolate in Spanish, and remembering just how much I enjoy reading Magical Realism. To me the best books are either hyper-realistic portrayals of how human emotions and interactions actually work or they are so over the top and unrealistic that belief is completely suspended and you are left with a only the impression of how it feels to be a human being. I think the latter may work even slightly better when reading in language you don't know perfectly. Reading it as through a glass, darkly, can somehow make it more real and just go straight to the subconscious.

Obviously I have absolutely no education on the subject and I'm sure that sounds like absolute garbage to anyone who has actually studied literature.
This is well put, it seems to me. The book gave me a great deal of pleasure, too, and the movie was not half bad.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson


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