emk wrote:But if one day, you're like, "I just wanna read this book", then absolutely go for it. But never hesitate to "cheat" and artificially boost your understanding. The easiest adult books are usually either ones you've read several times in English, or ones which have simple and clear prose (or highly repetititve 19th century prose with lots of Latin cognates), or ones where you have easy access to a fast popup dictionary. When working with native media around B1, it's going to be a bit hit or miss. A good chunk of stuff will still be out of reach. So depending on how good your "cheating" skills and tools are, you'll generally need to try a few things until you find something that you can get into.
I've got a few in mind that could work for this. I'll go digging around for them. Good idea!
emk wrote:I did not, but mostly because acquiring a French audiobook in the United States without resorting to piracy was a whole project. But the idea you propose is also sometimes known as "Listening/Reading", and lots of people have been very happy and successful using it. And especially if you've already read the book before in English a couple of times, then being forced to "move along" is fine. That will mostly force you to focus on consolidating stuff that's already mostly within reach, and to skip over harder stuff. But as long as you're enjoying yourself and more-or-less following the plot, you'll get something out of it.
Like I said, as long as you're presenting your brain with lots of (language, meaning) pairs, then your brain is basically going build a model that maps language to meaning. This is a "field expedient" process designed to be successfuly operated by 3-year-olds, who are famous for not reading any instructions, and for doing things like sticking peanut butter sandwiches in the VCR because it "looked hungry." The language learning process is therefore very robust in the face of "user error." What you bring to the table as an adult is a slightly creaky version of the language learning machinery, plus a level of sheer cunning and life experience that allow you to make up for any weaknesses.
This is why I talk about "cheating", and it's the point behind half the whacky experiments in my log. Anything you can do match up Spanish audio or text with understandable meaning seems to speed the process along. And it's a self-reinforcing process, once it gets rolling.
I was also wondering if you ever had a period where you'd read your french books out loud as a way to force a lot more pronunciation practice?
It seems to slow down my spanish reading, but I think it's at the expense of both artificially adding to pronunciation practice and slowing myself down to fully grasp the meaning of each sentence, paragraph and page I read.
By the way, that 3 year old feeding the hungry-looking VHS player metaphor sounds a taaad too descriptive to be made up... You didn't happen to have a 3 year old at one stage, did you?
emk wrote:I am really looking forward to Radio Ambulente. That very clear radio voice, plus those bilingual transcripts. So many ways to use that! And yeah, the first time I listened to it, I also immediately thought of "listening like a bloodhound."
Not only is the audio fairly comfortable to listen to, the stories are quite an interestingly random disbursement of topics.
I'm starting to find that language study is already helping open interests in topics I'd normally not pay any attention to in English.
emk wrote:Also, you might get a kick out of this report from a recent student in the current FSI Spanish program. Apparently the FSI is trying a more "content-based" format for this particular group than they've used in the past. But it's just as intense, and just as successful as always. I particularly vibe with her description of a process based largely on input (and later, class discussions), combined with a small amount of focused grammar study. But the neighboring FSI French students did more traditional grammar work, and they turned out just fine, too.
It's great you came across that post.
When I first finished going through all of James29's logs, I remember doing a lot of google around for more info on FSI and the courses in general. I've read that particular article a number of times and enjoyed the recent reflections on the updated FSI in-school courses.
It always amused me that they talk about such little grammar study though. From what I'm seeing in platiquemos, there's a bunch of it and I think it's super-important.
I think James used to use the metaphor of grammar study being like building your bookshelf properly, piece by piece, so later on you can safely and comfortably rest all your books for the rest of eternity on it.
In fact, that's half the reason I'm thinking of picking up the B level of gramatica del uso within the next month or so and beginning with it. James said he started the book when he was a decent B2 and wished he'd started much earlier.
What does concern me a little in that reddit post is just how much praise the OP gives to her anki usage. I said earlier in this log I know I'd struggle to sit down and just review cards like that, but now I"m thinking I should force myself to give it a shot for a while. Especially after seeing your log and how highly you speak of your memory recall after about 20-30 days of a "mature card" (I hope I got all that right).
emk wrote:I think this all supports the idea that humans are built to learn languages. Toddlers do things the hard way, because they're in full immersion and they have no choice. (In fact, if toddlers can avoid learning a language, they will usually do so.) And sure, adults are worse at some things, particularly accents. And we're not often in 24/7 do-or-die immersion. But adults have tons of advantages, too. And in an absolute sense, we still learn languages weirdly fast. Yes, the 5,000 pages of the Super Challenge can be overwhelming while it's underway. But it's enough to rebuild a significant fraction of your fluent adult reading skills in a Romance language. As my son points out, there are popular fantasy series longer than that!
Absolutely. And in fact one of the fairly recent Radio Ambulante episodes was kind of about this, touching on the topic pretty nicely.
I'm sure between the spanish and the english transcript you'd probably enjoy that particular episode, emk. Would you like me to go for a big and find exactly which one it was?
Actually in fact I just listened to the whole episode this morning so the title is fresh in my head.
It's this one if you're interested:
https://radioambulante.org/audio/un-superpoder
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Updates:
I'm 3 runs through unit 30 of platiquemos. I'll finish it this week and then just do my own review for the next 2 or 3 days. That way I'll start unit 31 fresh next monday and be back on a more stable "schedule" of how I typically study this course.
I'd say I've really upped my average per/day podcast listening in the last week or so. There's been a lot of European football, so I've been waking up watching the replays straight away. This means I've done about 60 minutes of listening to the News in slow spanish, then the rest of the match I listen to radio ambulante.
I'm up to page 105 of my book.
I'm up to episode 61 of Escobar. Today I'll finish translating the first episode in full, so I'll give it a good study-session with the corresponding episode this week as well.
I spent about 20 minute speaking with a Mexican. Their spanish really is so much more comprehensible. It makes 100x difference between speaking with her and for example my argentinian friends.
But also, I think the speed of radio ambulante is already paying off. I've only started listening to it for about a week, but I seemed to grasp everything the Mexican was saying to me. At least, I was catching everything I could catch (As in, knew the words/phrases).
