Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

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Spaceman
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Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Thu Sep 29, 2022 2:36 pm

After lurking for a while, I've decided to finally join and start a log. Mostly I'm trying to be a little bit more accountable and avoid being complacent and doing the same old thing every day.

I've been studying Spanish for exactly one year, starting from false beginner, and am overall very pleased with my progress to date, but it has been extremely focused progress. I listen to podcasts and read in Spanish and have gotten pretty good at those things. I've watched very little TV. Dubbed TV is no problem, but native TV is less comfortable -- mostly understandable for me, but not comfortable. I have made absolutely no attempts at speaking or writing. This is partly because of my goals and partly because of my circumstances.

I'll pop back later to talk more about my goals and circumstances, but I wanted to get the ball rolling.
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Thu Sep 29, 2022 5:09 pm

My circumstances:
Most accurately, I would describe myself as a stay-at-home parent of two. Which means I have almost no time, and also oddly a lot of time. A lot of driving and errands where I can listen to podcasts. A decent amount of time when the baby has just fallen asleep and reading is the only thing quiet enough to do for 10-15 minutes. And, increasingly, quite a bit of time when the kids are playing with each other and need only light supervision. This is when I do my Anki and easy (usually non-fiction) reading. It's also when I'm typing this.

I have basically no time when I could do something like an Italki lesson, at least not without inconveniencing my spouse. I'm also perpetually on the edge of exhaustion, so making myself do something new or challenging is difficult. It would definitely be worthwhile to do some sort of grammar review. And I probably should start some sort of writing in Spanish habit. But it's hard to get up the energy to start, which is mostly why I am here to try to make myself accountable.
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Fri Sep 30, 2022 1:03 pm

What I've done in the last year:
I keep reasonable records of what I've done in the past year. Quick Summary: Took about a month going through a beginner textbook and listening to the Language Transfer course. Spent a few months going through the 5k most frequent words with Anki. A few weeks in, I started reading easy stuff and listening to intermediate comprehensible input podcasts, after a few months moving up to native podcasts and novels. Overall, I read ~825,00 words (~3000 pages), listened to 360 hours of podcasts, and about 100 hours of (mostly dubbed) TV. I try to do 10 new words a day on Anki, mostly sentence mined from books.

Where I am:
I'm currently reading La Sombra del Viento, a modern Spanish novel (that's probably on the literary end of "popular," but not quite literary fiction), and in the 10 pages I read this morning, I didn't know 1 word out of every 200 (99.5%). Reading YA fiction, it's about 1 word in every 500). I read a popular non-fiction book last week and it was closer to 1 word in every 2000. I have problems with very informal podcasts with more than 2 speakers, I don't know much slang in any dialect. Otherwise I'll don't generally have any issues with near complete comprehension, at least with accents I've spent any time listening to.

Out of curiosity last week I spent a few minutes looking at the sample C1 test on the DELE site. Only spent about 10 minutes at each, so who really knows, but my sense was that I would almost certainly pass the reading and listening sections.

But, as mentioned earlier, I have made absolutely no attempts at speaking or writing. My guess is I could do ok functionally right now. I know all the words. But it would definitely be extremely painful for both me and whatever poor soul I'm talking to.
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Sat Oct 01, 2022 12:46 pm

What are my goals with Spanish? Part 1 (?)

I started learning Spanish seriously solely because I needed something that wasn't the drudgery of childrearing to occupy some part of my time and mind. Something challenging, but not stressful. And my youngest was a spectacularly bad sleeper as a newborn. Which left me with a lot of time sitting next to him while he slept and staring at my phone.

I didn't really have any goals at all when I started. Learn Spanish til I got bored with it and then move on to refreshing my German and maybe my French. Well I didn't get bored, quite the opposite. I got obsessed with understanding Spanish. First with the feeling of my brain making new connections and sort of magically putting it all together. Then with the new world of content and culture that is available to me (and every marginal piece of that will be available as I get better and better).

The more I get into it the further I want to go, but for now I'm trying to think in terms of doing another year of this and seeing how far I can get. Reading is my current priority. It certainly seems like the deepest rabbit hole, but one that I'm enjoying a lot. I know I need ("need") to start writing and speaking at some point, but I'm not sure what concrete goals I will or should have there. I guess I'll explore that further in tomorrow's installment.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Oct 01, 2022 5:53 pm

Welcome to the Forum, Spaceman. You seem well on your way. Good luck.
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Sat Oct 01, 2022 9:02 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Welcome to the Forum, Spaceman. You seem well on your way. Good luck.


Thanks Mork!
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Sun Oct 02, 2022 2:22 pm

Goals, part 2, or what do I want from my spoken Spanish?

I'm having a difficult time with this. Trying to define my motivations and goals with regards to speaking.

I have spent a lot of time in Spanish speaking countries, probably 5-6 months in the last 7 years, but that was all before I had kids. And before I knew any meaningful amount of Spanish, for that matter. I do think there's actually a decent chance I'll move to Spain in a few years. No idea if that will ever actually happen, but it might. I don't think there's much chance that I'll ever have a job or a social life in Spanish though. I have a family and realistically will always be an expat wherever I live.

Which I guess is all to say that I want and may eventually "need" some reasonable functional spoken Spanish, but will never likely need any sort of mastery. To put CEFR levels on things, I definitely want something close to C2 comprehension, but not sure I will ever need more than B1 output.

But what I will ever need is obviously only one component here. Before I started listening and reading, I wasn't thinking about getting anywhere near where I am now. I just started doing it and enjoyed the process. Perhaps the same will happen for output, once I get started. So I suppose there's nothing to do but get started.

This all leaves the big questions: how and when? Which I'll talk and think through tomorrow.
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Mon Oct 03, 2022 2:30 pm

The biggest question in my mind is whether it would be more efficient to start doing some output now, or to wait longer to start. If I start now will it prime my mind to better pickup structures I hear and read that I could use in my output? Or will waiting longer mean I'll pick up more knowledge of the language and it will take less effort to start outputting? Basically it's Output Hypothesis vs Input Hypothesis, but fairly weak forms of each.

Given that I'm a year in, and have pretty decent comprehension already, it seems like starting output now is probably the right idea. At least I'm pretty sure that if I put a poll up that's what the majority internet opinion would be. I think even the refold people say I should have started outputting a while ago. So maybe I'm just using the theoretical discussion as an excuse to be lazy.

So I suppose I need to drop that excuse and start doing some output, which, given the constraints on my time, probably means I should start a daily spanish writing habit. I know there's a subreddit for this exact purpose, where people will give you corrections on what you wrote. I'll start there, slowly slowly, and see what happens.
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dlt529
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby dlt529 » Tue Oct 04, 2022 11:23 am

I also like Journaly https://journaly.com/ for writing, it doesn't have the pressure of writing every day and my posts there tend to get returned pretty quickly with helpful corrections!
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Spaceman
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Re: Spaceman's Second Year Learning Spanish

Postby Spaceman » Tue Oct 04, 2022 1:58 pm

dlt529 wrote:I also like Journaly https://journaly.com/ for writing, it doesn't have the pressure of writing every day and my posts there tend to get returned pretty quickly with helpful corrections!


Cool, thanks! I hadn't heard of that
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