Zac29's Spanish Platiquemos FSI log

[zac299]

Thanks once again to you both for such thoughtful posts and great information

Yup! The idea is that a little bit of "intensive" study goes a long way—it can help boost your baseline a bit, get you used to voices, help with vocabulary that's common to a series, etc. Then you can benefit from that.

I know I posted this image lately, probably in your old log? "Intensive" study is what turns an opaque wall of text into something you can decipher. "Extensive" listening and reading is what turns things you can decipher into things that are nearly effortless.

Great and thanks for your explanation emk. It's settled, I'll spend some time tomorrow making full translations of a few upcoming episodes and really study them a few times over.

And thanks for using that image again. It was in your original logs summarizing your journey from A2 to B2 and it really struck me (As did the rest of those first few posts of yours). Great information.

Yup! That's a totally valid approach. There was once a pretty amazing language-learning paper by a researcher who has been teaching immigrant women how to speak English. He'd brought in a series called "Sweet Valley High", which has early books aimed at native student in low grade levels, and more advanced books for older students. And apparently these students really got into the series, and they made ridiculously good progress.

Sometimes you can find (or make) "parallel" books, with two different languages on facing pages. There are lots of tricks like this to give you an early boost. Honestly, almost any devious trick that artificially boosts your comprehension will work.

Like I said, what matters the most is that (1) you understand enough of what's going on that your brain can guess a bit more, and (2) you're enjoying the process. That enjoyment can come from either interesting content, or from the sheer joy of figuring something out. As long as you have both (1) and (2), you should be able to make significant gains from extensive reading.

That's such a cool and inspiring story to hear. I know here in Australia, most of my south american friends who come here on a student visa, their english school throws them into books as soon as possible as well. Their level of progress in the english language after just 6-9 months for the committed, is absolutely astounding.

So, I'm going to go through the list of books that have been recommended in the past (Many which I've linked to in post 03 of this blog) and start planning my reading attack soon.

I should be finished with my marketing book in about 2 weeks time, so I'll be able to soon start. In the meantime, I'll grab a kindle to read them on and have the instant-look-up available.

This depends on the person and the series! For example, the French dub almost everything from other countries, but they tend to do a pretty amazing job at it. And lots of French dubs have clean enunciation. So in that case, I was happy to start out by watching two dubbed series straight through!

On the other hand, maybe there's a native telenovela that you're really into, and the actors speak clearly. If so, go for it!

But at first, it's usually best to avoid "gritty" stuff, where people speak very rapidly and use tons of slang. That's usually better to put aside until you're around C1. Although, again, if you happen get amazing subtitles which actually match the speech, then you could make good use of more challenging series.

In the end, I think the core of almost all answers seems to be revolving around what's personally enjoyable and pushing you further, rather than being comfortable.

Thanks once again for these insights.

I absolutely guarantee, however, that if you read 2,500 pages of Spanish and watch 10 seaaons of fun, easy television, you'll see big gains. And this will be true even if you're pretty lazy about looking stuff up. But the beginning will require a bit more experimentation, to find things that are easy and fun. And a few intensive study sessions here and there can help you get past various sticking points.

Each time you've written/recommended this, it has filled me with even more optimism. While I've always had an interest in jumping into spanish books, you've really lit the proverbial fire under my ass.

I'm going to make it an official goal of mine to read 1000 pages this year.

However, knowing how I go with reading, I'd like to imagine once I get started, it'll hopefully cascade far past that number by the end of the year.

Thanks once again for taking your time to stop by this blog and share your insights.

Welcome to the forum Zac29! Another person who's super psyched on Spanish. Love it! I just went through your posts and I can already tell that you're loving and are going to love this process and journey of learning Spanish and that you'll no doubt reach very high levels in the language. If you can maintain this energy and interest and zeal for Spanish, then you'll go far. And how could you not! Spanish is such an incredible language with so many amazing cultures and countries and peoples who speak it as their mother tongue.

You remind me a little of myself when I started learning Spanish back in 2009 (full of psych and motivation), and I'm still absolutely enthralled with it and still enjoying learning new things and engaging with the language daily through people and culture. Going to South America that first time and subsequently on returning to Australia and learning Spanish, has completely changed my life and enriched it in so many obvious and profound ways. I'm really excited for you and looking forward to reading about your journey with the language and seeing your skills and confidence in Spanish grow.

Chmury! Great to have you find this log and share your kind post as well.

It'll sound funny but I actually discovered your log 5 or 6 days ago. While reading your latest posts, i picked up that you were a fellow Aussie.

I wrote a response in your log "Hola Chmury, eres Aussie tambien? De Sydney?"

But I guess the moderators/admins sometimes get lost in what posts they have approved or not approved so far. Because I've noticed my post in your log hasn't since shown up. Yet, some posts I've made afterwards in other forum threads have been approved.

Anyways, what a great coincidence you'd find your way to this log anyways.

I'm glad to hear you've gotten so much out of spanish and not only stuck with it for 15 YEARS now, but been psyched and enjoyed it the whole time.

That's all I can hope and dream for as well.

Where did you visit during your first S.America trip?

Sounds like you've already got una barbaridad de (heaps of) fantastic and proven ways to make progress in the language, so just slowly make your way through those Platiquemos books (where do they aim to get there students to? B2 level? C1?), get lots of listening in, read articles, books, instagram posts, whatever you enjoy reading,

Yes, you're right, luckily I've got a lot of great information available and a lot of fantastic resources.

From most previous platiquemos/FSI logs, most people seem to finish the course somewhere around a medium to advanced B1 level.

I'd personally be ecstastic if the course takes me there. Combined with the TV I'm watching, the podcasts I'm listening to each day and the books I soon plan to read...

I really hope that multi-track approach will help me arrive towards that strong B1 level by the time I finish it. There's no rush, but it would be an absolute pleasure to be using useful and interesting books as the majority of my future study/consolidation.

Of course, including speaking in spanish with all my friends as well. I'm very lucky to be friends with some very patient people who already indulge me and my hilarious spanish far too much

and if you don't have many opportunities to speak or simply aren't ready for that yet, which I don't think applies to you since you've already spent 6 months living in Buenos Aires, I'd recommend writing (I'd recommend it in any case). Keep a journal in Spanish, as writing is essentially thinking deeply in a language, producing the language, and unlike speaking, you have as much time as you want to express things in the best way that you can.

Chmury, could I ask you how important throughout your learning process you'd consider your journal writing to be?

Because in theory I get it. But there's been multiple times I've tried to keep one in English and never formed the habit long enough to stick with it. I'd imagine that problem would be amplified with the additional mental taxation of doing it in spanish.

Would you say it's an issue worth pushing through and forcing myself to adapt? Or it can be replaced by, for example, copying/rewriting existing texts in spanish? Not as deep-thought from the beginning, but something I'd see myself doing much more consistently. In fact, this platiquemos course has me writing about 2 pages worth of spanish each week/unit.

Thanks once again for finding your way to this thread and writing such a fantastic and inspiring post!

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Updates:

Well, I said it'd happen once per week. With some tech issues, obviously this hasn't happend.

I'm now up to unit 25 of platiquemos.

I've listened to a minimum of 30 minutes worth of spanish podcast each day of the week for the last (However long it has been since my first post in this log). Without missing a single day.

In reality, I'd say the average would be closer to 1 hour. On the weekends, probably close to 2.5 hours.

For example, right now i'm going to catch a bus to the beach and probably spend the next 3 hours listening to these podcasts while I'm there.

I'm up to episode 43 of Escobar patron del mar.

[Chmury]

Chmury! Great to have you find this log and share your kind post as well.

It'll sound funny but I actually discovered your log 5 or 6 days ago. While reading your latest posts, i picked up that you were a fellow Aussie.

I wrote a response in your log "Hola Chmury, eres Aussie tambien? De Sydney?"

But I guess the moderators/admins sometimes get lost in what posts they have approved or not approved so far. Because I've noticed my post in your log hasn't since shown up. Yet, some posts I've made afterwards in other forum threads have been approved.

Anyways, what a great coincidence you'd find your way to this log anyways.

I'm glad to hear you've gotten so much out of spanish and not only stuck with it for 15 YEARS now, but been psyched and enjoyed it the whole time.

That's all I can hope and dream for as well.

Where did you visit during your first S.America trip?

That's weird that your post didn't show up.

My first trip was to Ecuador, Perú and Bolivia, which truly was life changing, as it lit the fire in me for languages. Then 4 years later I returned to Perú, Bolivia and Argentina. Will definitely be heading back again in the near future.

Chmury, could I ask you how important throughout your learning process you'd consider your journal writing to be?

Because in theory I get it. But there's been multiple times I've tried to keep one in English and never formed the habit long enough to stick with it. I'd imagine that problem would be amplified with the additional mental taxation of doing it in spanish.

Would you say it's an issue worth pushing through and forcing myself to adapt? Or it can be replaced by, for example, copying/rewriting existing texts in spanish? Not as deep-thought from the beginning, but something I'd see myself doing much more consistently. In fact, this platiquemos course has me writing about 2 pages worth of spanish each week/unit.

Thanks once again for finding your way to this thread and writing such a fantastic and inspiring post!

-------

For me personally, I know it's been a huge aspect to my language learning routine which has helped me immensely over the years. As I described, it just forces you to think a lot in the language and it helps to expose a lot of gaps in one's knowledge. But everyone learns differently you know? So you might simply loathe the practice and therefore struggle to do it consistently, and therefore it's just not going to be an effective practice for you. Though I do believe writing in the language, whether it be journalling, or bidirectional translation (both are slightly different skills but both useful), is going to help you in big ways.

I view writing in the language as kind of like doing compound lifts, like doing pull-ups let's say. It's engaging and recruiting so many language related muscle fibres that it's almost a comprehensively systemic linguistic workout. To be honest though, I really have no idea as to how many people on the forum keep up a similar practice to myself, though I imagine that there are vast numbers of people, likely the majority of language learners, who have learnt multiple languages to very high levels without having journal routines or having writing in the language as a key component. So you've just got to figure out what works for you. That's another beautiful thing about learning a language, you're also going to learn along the way how you enjoy learning things, and after a year or two you will have a deep understanding of how you learn best and what's effective for you, which is an incredible skill all in itself.

Keep up the great start to your Spanish and looking forward to following your progress Zac.

[zac299]

My first trip was to Ecuador, Perú and Bolivia, which truly was life changing, as it lit the fire in me for languages. Then 4 years later I returned to Perú, Bolivia and Argentina. Will definitely be heading back again in the near future.

Dude that's so cool, you must have had a blast. I'm guessing you witnessed Machu Picchu in all its glory as well.

I've got my eye on a beachside town in Ecuador to go and do a 3 month spanish school intensive next year when I'm hopefully around an intermediate level and decided it's finally time to go back to living all around South America.

For me personally, I know it's been a huge aspect to my language learning routine which has helped me immensely over the years. As I described, it just forces you to think a lot in the language and it helps to expose a lot of gaps in one's knowledge. But everyone learns differently you know? So you might simply loathe the practice and therefore struggle to do it consistently, and therefore it's just not going to be an effective practice for you. Though I do believe writing in the language, whether it be journalling, or bidirectional translation (both are slightly different skills but both useful), is going to help you in big ways.

I view writing in the language as kind of like doing compound lifts, like doing pull-ups let's say. It's engaging and recruiting so many language related muscle fibres that it's almost a comprehensively systemic linguistic workout. To be honest though, I really have no idea as to how many people on the forum keep up a similar practice to myself, though I imagine that there are vast numbers of people, likely the majority of language learners, who have learnt multiple languages to very high levels without having journal routines or having writing in the language as a key component. So you've just got to figure out what works for you. That's another beautiful thing about learning a language, you're also going to learn along the way how you enjoy learning things, and after a year or two you will have a deep understanding of how you learn best and what's effective for you, which is an incredible skill all in itself.

Keep up the great start to your Spanish and looking forward to following your progress Zac.

I absolutely get what you're saying. I probably write a few 100s of words each day in spanish between all the whatsapp messages with friends and it really is enjoyable.

So, I might try and incorporate your journalling idea soon and seeing if I find it relatively effortless to stick with, like most of the other things I've started for spanish study have been so far.

Cheers again

------------

Your Guide How To Make Neat And Tidy Television Episode Transcriptions:

Well, after Emk's suggestion to get 3 transcriptions of my TV series and study them thoroughly...

I thought I'd share the process of putting together usable transcripts in the hope it'll help someone else.

Because it's actually quite a simple 3-Step process.

I'll outline those steps now and break each one down very simply for even the most techno-phobic amongst us...

This process makes 2 assumptions.

First, there's no transcripts available online for you to simply copy/paste
Second, you've got the television episode downloaded and it has its own subtitle files inside the video file


The 3 steps of this process are as follows:

1) We need to "extract" the subtitle file (Normally srt) from your episode video

2) We need to remove all the extra "crap" that comes with subtitle files (The timestamps, the excess white space, etc)

3) We need to format this all together into a nice word document which takes up the minimum amount of pages so you can print the transcript and follow-along when watching your TV episode


A note before we begin:

There are many 'subtitle websites' where you can go, pick the episode(s) of most of your favourite TV shows, pick the language you want and simply download the subtitle srt file from there

If that's your case, you can go straight to step 2.

Let's begin.


Step 1) Getting the subtitle srt file extracted.

You don't need to know anything about these 2 pieces of software. But you simply need to download and install them

First: MKVToolNix from here...

https://mkvtoolnix.download/downloads.html

For most of you, you'll select "windows" option and choose the 64-bit installer to download.

Again, you don't need to know anything about how any of this works, just follow the steps and it'll be flawless

Simply go through the installation process when you've downloaded it.

Second: gMKVExtract Gui

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmkvextractgui/

Download this and save it on your desktop.

Inside the zip file is the program "gMKVExtractGUI.exe"

You double click on this to run it

I'd also create a folder on your desktop called "test" and put the video episodes you want to make transcripts for, inside this folder.
This will keep everything organised and easy to keep track of.



At this stage, everything is easy.

"Drag and drop" the episode you want to create your transcripts for, into this gMKVExtractGUI program

It will automatically load the different subtitle files your episode has available.

Check the box of the one you want



You can see I want the spanish subtitles


Now just click the "extract" button. In 20 seconds you'll have your subtitle .srt file.

Here's how it looks when you open up the file



Now you can see what I mean by "heaps of extra crap".


That leads us to step 02...

Step 2) Removing all the extra "crap" that comes with subtitle files (The timestamps, the excess white space, etc)

Thankfully, everything from here on out is super simple.

Go to this website:

https://www.happyscribe.com/subtitle-to ... rt-to-word

Click the "add srt file" button and choose the subtitle file you created in step 01

Select "Microsoft word.docx" as the output file

It will take a few seconds and then give you will automatically download the new word document.

Here's what it will look like:



It's already looking better. Doesn't have timestamps or numbers.


But, it's still too much white space. This document is over 40 pages for a 45 minute tv episode.

So, now we go to step 3 to trim this transcript down to size...


Step 3) Formatting a nice transcript word document...

Again, super simple.

Go to this website:

https://textcleaner.net/

Now, you have to open your word document you created in step 02.

Inside the document, copy EVERYTHING. On windows, this is as simple as clicking "CTRL A" and everything will be highlighted. Then CTRL C to copy everything.

In the above website, paste EVERYTHING into the box

Then, copy the settings that I've used in this picture below



You'll check 5 boxes below as seen. Also, don't miss clicking the "wrap lines" button at the top-right corner.


Once you've done that...

Click the "clean" button

It will automatically turn your transcript into 1 long paragraph as seen in this pic below





Again, inside this box, CTRL A and CTRL C to select and copy everything.

In a new word document, now paste all this text.

With "normal spacing" this is now a 6 page transcript document which looks like this:





I personally changed the document to a "double spaced" file by selecting at the top of your word document:

> Design > Paragraph Spacing > Double


And this is how my (Now 12 page) transcript looks:





I did this double spacing because now I have room to "study" these transcripts, do my own translations, circle words/sentences, play around in any way I want with the physical transcripts.


I hope this guide helps someone. Even one person and it will have been worth my time.

Question:

Is this the type of info I should turn into it's own dedicated post in another forum on this website so it doesn't get lost to just a post in my personal log here?

Would this be useful information for others?

I went through this process because Emk recommended I make a few episode transcriptions to study. Of course, I'm new to language learning and all this, so I had to find out how to do all this.

Is this a pretty well-known thing for more advanced language learners to a point where most people on this website already know how to make their own transcripts and this post isn't adding much?


Cheers,
Zac229

.

[zac299]

Updates:

Working through unit 26 of platiquemos

I've created transcripts for episodes 50, 51 and 52 of Pablo escobar patron del mar.

That'll be upcoming study because I'm only up to episode 45. I'd imagine I'll be up to those transcripts by the beginning of next week.

I've been listening to more of the podcasts each morning. About 1 hour each time.

I've also created 3 side-by-side spanish-english transcripts for 3 Radio Ambulente podcast episodes. They're 40ish minutes long and seem to go into pretty deep details about their topic of the podcast.

I figured making these transcripts for 3 episodes and studying them intensely is going to give me a huge boost as well in terms of vocab. This would be very welcomed because these podcasts are very close to native-speed, so I'd personally like to be moving onto either these podcasts or podcasts around 20 minutes long but at this faster native speed, sooner rather than later, just to really train my ear.

What else?

I'm still shopping around for an ebook reader so I can get started on some graded spanish ebooks. The cheapest nowadays seem to be $170ish AUD for a new one.

[zac299]

Bit of luck fell my way...

Went to 4 different pawnbrokers around the city and the last one had a real old sony ebook reader. Nothing fancy, nothing flashy. Don't know what generation it is... Don't care!

$30 bucks and it does the job. I checked in store and it had the pop-up dictionary for english.

Got home and put a spanish book on it. And thankfully I've worked out how to get the spanish pop up dictionary as well!

Fantastic, I can start reading spanish books. I've already put on a graded reader and will start tomorrow if I get some free time. I'm so excited to see the possibilites this will open up to me.

Now I just need to work out how to save new words and get them emailed to myself so I can make a list later, which I've seen other talk about

[emk]

Congratulations on the ereader!

Now I just need to work out how to save new words and get them emailed to myself so I can make a list later, which I've seen other talk about

If it's a Kindle, you can see all of your highlights in the online notebook. This is super useful, and other ereaders may work differently.

Here were my personal rules of thumb. Your mileage may vary! But I want to offer you an example of a real-world workflow.

1. You can't (and shouldn't) try to fully understand and memorize everything. You need a mix of looking things up, and of just getting sheer volume. And that mix leans further towards sheer volume than many people think. Back when I was just starting reading real books, I did the "underline words to look up later." But in practice, I only looked up a small fraction of the unknown words. But a funny thing happened: If I flipped back 200 pages, I actually understood many of the words I hadn't bothered to look up. Of course, if you can look things up with a pop-up dictionary, then it makes sense to look up more. But remember, sheer volume is magic.
2. Optional: If you're planning to make Anki cards, consider highlighting entire sentences, not just individual words. If you're using the Kindle "notebook", you can copy/paste these in bulk. Then just paste them onto Anki cards, boldface the interesting word, and maybe copy/paste a definition on the back of the card. If you can find a tool or process that lets you do this quickly, that's great. Otherwise don't bother. When reviewing cards, mark them as "pass" if you more-or-less understood the interesting word in context.

I probably picked up 10% of my vocabulary from doing Anki sentence cards. The other 90% were either obvious cognates, or I learned them from extensive reading, or just looking them up briefly while I read using a pop-up dictionary. So a tool like Anki is strictly optional, but it can help with the most annoying stuff—if you can find a way to set it up without investing tons of time.

As always, the trick is finding a good balance of intensive study and more extensive input. The details don't matter so much. But sheer volume really does make a difference, because it's turning stuff you can painfully decipher into things you can read without thinking. And that will give you a huge boost.

[zac299]

If it's a Kindle, you can see all of your highlights in the online notebook. This is super useful, and other ereaders may work differently.

Cheers mate. Not a Kindle, but I'll search around for the sony-equivalent solution.

1. You can't (and shouldn't) try to fully understand and memorize everything. You need a mix of looking things up, and of just getting sheer volume. And that mix leans further towards sheer volume than many people think. Back when I was just starting reading real books, I did the "underline words to look up later." But in practice, I only looked up a small fraction of the unknown words. But a funny thing happened: If I flipped back 200 pages, I actually understood many of the words I hadn't bothered to look up. Of course, if you can look things up with a pop-up dictionary, then it makes sense to look up more. But remember, sheer volume is magic.
2. Optional: If you're planning to make Anki cards, consider highlighting entire sentences, not just individual words. If you're using the Kindle "notebook", you can copy/paste these in bulk. Then just paste them onto Anki cards, boldface the interesting word, and maybe copy/paste a definition on the back of the card. If you can find a tool or process that lets you do this quickly, that's great. Otherwise don't bother. When reviewing cards, mark them as "pass" if you more-or-less understood the interesting word in context.

I probably picked up 10% of my vocabulary from doing Anki sentence cards. The other 90% were either obvious cognates, or I learned them from extensive reading, or just looking them up briefly while I read using a pop-up dictionary. So a tool like Anki is strictly optional, but it can help with the most annoying stuff—if you can find a way to set it up without investing tons of time.

As always, the trick is finding a good balance of intensive study and more extensive input. The details don't matter so much. But sheer volume really does make a difference, because it's turning stuff you can painfully decipher into things you can read without thinking. And that will give you a huge boost.

Thanks again for your insights and sharing your workflow with all your reading.

I've read about 30 pages and have simply been writing down the new words in a good old fashion paper book.

I know myself and know I'll never get into using Anki for vocab memorization. Heck, I struggle to force myself to go back over my workbook for Platiquemos/FSI to remind myself of the words from that. Luckily it's so well drilled there's not too much I'm forgetting.

What I'm finding useful so far, in terms of reading, is forcing myself to flip through the 2 or 3 pages of words I've previously encountered and hence written down. This slight "annoyance" of having to take a moment and do some "work" as a "punishment" for forgetting the word when I come across it again, seem to be helping me slowly remember more and more of them.

I've got 1 or 2 more questions related to reading, but I'm going to wait until I've finished this whole book before I ask. Hopefully with the next 75 pages i'll either answer my own questions or at least have some added perspective for the questions.

Cheers once again for your insightful message and thanks for taking the time to share.

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Update:

I'm on unit 27 of platiquemos. This one is going to take me a bit longer. The reasons are 2-fold. My next 2 weeks of work are extremely busy and I simply won't be able to run through the unit daily.

Plus, the unit itself is very long. Almost 2.5 hours. It's focusing and attacking the formal and informal command version of regular and irregular verbs in the present and past tenses.

One one hand, it's great. I'm now getting a formal explanation to so many "questions" I've had for a while when seeing words like "sea", "ponga" and "hagame un favor" when watching The Pablo Escobar telenovella. Especially sea... God I've been curious about how this is used for a long time now.

On the other hand... Gee it's throwing a whole LOT at me for this unit.

It's truly exciting though. I can't believe how much of the language this course has covered AND the course isn't even half finished. Exciting to see where it's going to take me with the next lessons.

What else?

I'm up to Escobar episode 47. Not long before the intense study sessions with transcripts.

The morning podcasts continue. I really should track exactly how much I listen to daily for interest sake, but it's usually a 30 minute minimum, generally much more.

What's exciting is how much more I'm already noticing myself understanding. The podcasts are about 20 minutes long. I've got about 2 hours 40 minutes worth of Castellano podcast and 2 hours 40 minute of South American spanish as well. So technically ever 5 hours and 20 minutes I start the cycle again. This is giving me spaced repetition and repeated exposure to the stories and I really am understanding more and more with each run through them.

I was out with a Colombian girl on Saturday night. The whole night was in Spanish. I had to remind her probably 10 times throughout the night to slow down a bit, but I was really impressed by my comprehension throughout the night. There were 1 or 2 particular topics of conversation I really couldn't believe how well I was doing to express what I wanted to express, in ways I've never even tried before.

It was a really cool moment.

The ebook reading has been a wonderful addition to the study work-flow. I've begun with an A2 graded reader. I'm 27 pages into a 98 page book. I'll make more notes about this in upcoming posts.

[zac299]

Updates:

As expected, a very busy week. As it will be this week as well.

Couldn't touch the platiquemos course and don't plan to until next week.

But still, about 1 hour of listening to podcasts each morning.

And I found a few spare hours over the course of the week to read some more.

I'm up to episode 50 of Pablo Escobar. So, this episode begins my 3 printed transcripts. The problem is I don't think I've got the time to dedicate to studying them intensely before next week. But I don't wanna stop at least watching the show as a 'wind down' spanish activity during the later night.

So I think I'll just continue watching as normal and then when things are less busy, go back and just start from episode 50 again with the transcripts for some indepth study.

[stell]

I've also created 3 side-by-side spanish-english transcripts for 3 Radio Ambulente podcast episodes. They're 40ish minutes long and seem to go into pretty deep details about their topic of the podcast.

I figured making these transcripts for 3 episodes and studying them intensely is going to give me a huge boost as well in terms of vocab. This would be very welcomed because these podcasts are very close to native-speed, so I'd personally like to be moving onto either these podcasts or podcasts around 20 minutes long but at this faster native speed, sooner rather than later, just to really train my ear.

Radio Ambulante isn’t close to native speed…it IS native speed! While the podcasts are a phenomenal resource for Spanish learners, with full transcripts, the episodes themselves aren’t aimed specifically at learners. Large parts of them are scripted and read, so they’ll be easier to understand than a natural unscripted conversation, but they’re not simplified or slowed down for second language learners.

I love Radio Ambulante. Enjoy!

[emk]

I know myself and know I'll never get into using Anki for vocab memorization. Heck, I struggle to force myself to go back over my workbook for Platiquemos/FSI to remind myself of the words from that.

Yeah, I use Anki in a very specific way, and it's hard to do without special tools that aren't necessarily available. I particular, I only did a tradional "vocab" deck once, with French on one side, and English on the other. It was OK for a few weeks? But then the near synonyms started piling up, and it turned into constant suffering. I'd rather get a cavity filled than use Anki that way.

After I ritually burned that deck, nearly 100% of my new cards were snippets of text from something I read, or (for Spanish) audio cards made in bulk from cool television shows. It was a "greatest hits", basically, mixed with "Wait, you can say it like that? Cool." Sometimes I'd turn something into a card because it was hilarious. And any time a card popped up in my deck and made me groan, I threw it out. No biggie; I had tools that allowed me to make a hundred more cards from things I was reading and watching. And I had a tool like Migaku's card creator that made it easy to add definitions to cards if I wanted.

So basically, I'd pop out my phone for 5 minutes, stick in a wireless ear bud, and zoom through cool stuff in French. This was a small part of my studies, and I did a lot of it while waiting in line somewhere.

The way I thought about this wasn't "learning flashcards." Instead, I was taking my extensive watching and reading, and distilling certain interesting bits so that I'd see them more often. I don't want pretend this was some deep secret technique that produced amazing results—I think most of my comprehension improvement in French came from binge-watching TV, and from tons of reading during the Super Challenge. (And the numbers support it. I learned the large majority of my French vocab from context, not from Anki.) But I think my Anki cards replaced some conscious study. I didn't always need to learn the official rules, because I could just ear-worm myself with entertaining material that applied the rules.

Uh, I should probably build more tools, though, because it's more fun than Duolingo and I'm pretty sure it works a lot better.

On the other hand... Gee it's throwing a whole LOT at me for this unit.

Yeah, Platiquemos is based on FSI. And FSI is hard core.

I've often argued, "Never take language-learning advice from people who haven't learned a second language to fluency." But FSI and DLI teach languages at industrial scale, and failure is not acceptable. "Hey, we're going to need another 500 Arabic speakers in the next three years. Can you give me a budget and timelines?" And they've been doing this successfully for decades. Their advice, when they give it publicly, is very much worth listening to.

However, these programs are happy to have 5 hours of class and 4 hours of homework a day. And according to the blog of one FSI student, there were some students who broke down in tears on an almost daily basis. And if you wash out, you'll get sent back to your old boss with a letter implying, "Sorry, they just couldn't cut it." Plus, I don't think you can even get into FSI or DSI without minimum test scores on linguistic aptitude tests. So, yeah, it's normal to feel like an FSI course is drowning you in things you need to learn right now. After all, it's the same teaching philosophy that produces Marine Corps drill instructors. As Rudyard Kipling wrote about boot camp:

The young recruit is 'ammered - 'e takes it very hard;
'E 'angs 'is 'ead an' mutters - 'e sulks about the yard;
'E talks o' "cruel tyrants" which 'e'll swing for by-an-by,
An 'the others 'ears an' mocks 'im, an' the boy goes orf to cry.

The young recruit is silly - 'e thinks o' suicide.
‘Es lost 'is gutter-devil; 'e 'asn't got 'is pride;
But day by day they kicks 'im, which 'elps 'im on a bit,
Till 'e finds 'isself one mornin' with a full an' proper kit.

Gettin' clear o’ dirtiness, gettin' done with mess,
Gettin' shut o' doin' things rather-more-or-less;

Me? I'm not an FSI person. Too many flashbacks to bad audio-lingual drills in college Italian. But I have tons of respect for them as instructors. There's more than one road that leads to Rome. But even FSI instructors are only trying to get their students to a high B2/low C1. Beyond that, several FSI instructors have written about the "next steps", and even they suggest that the most successful advanced students are the ones who read and who use the language.

I'm up to Escobar episode 47. Not long before the intense study sessions with transcripts.
...
What's exciting is how much more I'm already noticing myself understanding.
...
I was out with a Colombian girl on Saturday night. The whole night was in Spanish. I had to remind her probably 10 times throughout the night to slow down a bit, but I was really impressed by my comprehension throughout the night. There were 1 or 2 particular topics of conversation I really couldn't believe how well I was doing to express what I wanted to express, in ways I've never even tried before.

It was a really cool moment.

The ebook reading has been a wonderful addition to the study work-flow. I've begun with an A2 graded reader. I'm 27 pages into a 98 page book. I'll make more notes about this in upcoming posts.

Oooh, you're at the fun part. Keep doing this stuff, and your progress will snowball. The next few months will make a dramatic difference. And a couple of years from now, you'll be able to read anything you want in Spanish, you'll be following multiple TV series, and (if you get enough speaking practice) you'll take your ability to speak for granted. I've seen it happen in dozens of language logs here on this form. There are current posters who now have multiple languages in the C1+ range that I remember being exactly where you are now.

You're at the part where the scary ancient language learning machinery in your brain wakes up and says let's do this, we're the top species on this planet for a reason. We can talk. As an adult, that machinery might be slightly rusty, and in need of an oil change. But it's still there, and it can still work remarkably fast. (The accent module, however, typically gets gummed up between ages 6 and 12. And the "gender agreement" module may only run at 97% of original specs. So you'll probably need to help things along a bit. And you still would even if you were totally immersed.)

I'm up to episode 50 of Pablo Escobar. So, this episode begins my 3 printed transcripts. The problem is I don't think I've got the time to dedicate to studying them intensely before next week. But I don't wanna stop at least watching the show as a 'wind down' spanish activity during the later night.

Yup, good call. Full speed ahead!