merino's log sin límites

[merino_iceberg]

Hey all, welcome!

I thought I'd jump into the fray here. I'm a false beginner in Spanish, and about a month or two into a major resuscitation effort for the language. I had taken the usual high school Spanish classes, and then over the course of the last year had my interest in learning Spanish, both relearning it and really learning it, revitalized. The sparks were mostly due to a few trips to Mexico, during which I realized how much I was just scraping by in the language, and how inadequate my Spanish skills were for any meaningful communication. I could understand a decent number of words, parse menus and signs, and pigeonspeak my way through basic conversations, but I was pretty far from having any kind of natural or fluid conversation with a native speaker. If I expressed a sentiment, it wasn't with any precision. I'm planning some return trips to Mexico, as well as a more extended stay in Spain this coming year, and wanted to achieve a (let me be vague here) reasonable conversational level before these trips. Longer term, I'd like to push into C1/C2 territory, but I don't have a great sense of how long this will take yet.

I'm taking a reading-heavy approach at the moment, largely because I like reading and am generally interested in Latin American literature. I've mainly been reading books that I would want to read anyway, which means that they're more or less 'above' my level at the moment. With an intensive approach this still seems manageable and enjoyable thus far. I imagine that I'll end up learning a lot of more literary words that won't necessarily be useful for, say, chatting with people my age in Spain -- I'm fine with this. Long term, I'd like to be able to read novels with reasonable facility.

The concrete goal here is 10,000 pages read by the end of the calendar year. My tracking spreadsheet reports that I'm at 315 pages so far, but I think this will pick up a bit as I get more comfortable with reading.

I also make heavy use of Anki. This doesn't feel like just rote memorization, especially since I've more or less abandoned isolated vocabulary cards. I put in sentences from what I'm reading, which are usually sentences with an unknown word (but relatively simple grammar), or sentences with known vocabulary that have grammar patterns I don't yet feel comfortable with or don't feel that I could reliably produce. There are also sentences that don't meet either of these criteria, typically just because I found the sentence interesting or memorable in some way (I've actually been thinking of doing this just for English, it's nice to have a little collection). This deck also collects general detritus, or things that come up in whatever context that I really feel like I should know. For instance, most of the mistakes I make when speaking (especially if they're noted or pointed out to me by someone else), go in the Anki deck. Or if there's a word I'm reaching for but can't quite get to, I do a bit of research and then it's straight to the pile. Common idiomatic phrasings also make their way in here. This has already shown some usefulness for my verbal fluency -- when I'm speaking, I reach into my pocket and find words that weren't there even a few weeks ago.

My concrete goal here is 10,000 mature cards in this deck by the end of the calendar year.

10,000 is a bit arbitrary, and possibly subject to change. The current stats read 2,910 total cards, with 1,566 (53.81%) mature and 94.52% accuracy for mature cards.

In addition to the big fat main deck, I also have an audio-only deck aimed at listening comprehension. I've been generating the audio deck from the shows and movies I've been watching in a way that I think is similar to the sub2srs strategy I've seen mentioned in these forums. Essentially, any time I can't quite hear a line, I pull the audio and send it straight to the anki deck. As it's going through the srs pipeline, I get to listen to it over and over, and I'll typically only pass the card once I can pick out each word exactly.

The listening deck seems to be hugely beneficial so far, even though I've only been doing this for about a month. It also helps with my silly neuroticism over feeling that watching TV is a 'waste of time', and in a strange way helps me enjoy it more. With the ability to make cards, I know that I'll be pulling a ton of audio and that it'll add to a growing body of targeted material I'll be able to return to. These cards are nice as a reference as well, since I always have my phone on me and can easily search for a phrase I've only half remembered.

In addition to these, I'm also listening to Radio Ambulante (somewhat sporadically) and having daily WhatsApp conversations with friends from Mexico and Peru. The general combo seems to be working well so far, although I might need to do some more targeted grammar study at some point. In the meantime though, I'm basically having a blast.

Cheers,
MI

[merino_iceberg]

I just finished a novela by José Emilio Pachecho (Las Batallas en el Desierto) as well as a collection of his stories (El Principio del Placer). Some great tragic endings, as well as some twisty and already tragic middles. I'd highly recommend him to other intermediate learners jumping into books. Nice stories, reasonable vocab, and very approachable writing, especially compared to some of the titans of LatAm lit.

Still inhaling Spanish when I can, and up to 368 pages for the year.

[merino_iceberg]

Another day toiling away in the learning Spanish mines (after toiling away in the physics research mines, which is my actual job).

Last weekend I watched a Mexican movie with a friend, who needed to see it for a class he's preparing to teach. We couldn't find subtitles in any language, but I was curious as to how much I'd actually be able to sop up. I understood probably 75% percent of it, and then felt many small details wooshing past my left ear. It was also nice to chat about it afterwards, only using Spanish. In the movie there had been an incredible scene with more and more metal bars/tubes being placed between two jail cell walls during a prison fight, until finally so many tubes have been put through the bars that the bloody prisoners and guards become essentially suspended on them in the air. Talking about this scene was much easier once my friend put a word to the bars -- tubos. Of course.

I'm also up to 447 pages read. The discerning reader might note that this leaves me quite far behind the pace I would need to reach 10,000 pages this year. I might have to revisit that number. For now, though, I like a semi-impossible goal and will keep the 10,000 as a monument to the beauty of a naive and earnest optimism.

My most recently finished book was Carlos Fuentes' novela, Aura. It's good, but I'm also tempted to label it gimmicky (although what, truly, is a gimmick? I'm realizing that I don't have an explicit operational definition of gimmick at hand, or that I don't know quite where the limit between gimmick and non-gimmick lies. Maybe the point is that it gets a little blurry).

I also acquired a biography about Leonora Carrington, which I'm absolutely jazzed to start. I've been a fan of her painting for a long time, and had taken a road trip up to San Luis Potosí two years ago to see some of her drawings and sculptures in person. Hoping the biography does her justice.

Anki continues to be a small salvation as well. I've been using it as deliberate practice for areas I would like to improve, in addition to the standard vocabulary solidification. For instance, I spent a few weeks zooming in on the imperfect subjunctive, and was mining sentences with new subjunctive triggers, conjugations I wanted a better handle on, etc. While this hasn't been a huge fraction of my study time, it does feel worthwhile. The past few days I've noticed that I've been producing the imperfect subjunctive without too much thought both when writing and speaking. Hooray -- I should probably start looking for a new use of the subjunctive to self-flagellate with.

Cheers!

[emk]

Welcome to the forum!

In addition to the big fat main deck, I also have an audio-only deck aimed at listening comprehension. I've been generating the audio deck from the shows and movies I've been watching in a way that I think is similar to the sub2srs strategy I've seen mentioned in these forums. Essentially, any time I can't quite hear a line, I pull the audio and send it straight to the anki deck. As it's going through the srs pipeline, I get to listen to it over and over, and I'll typically only pass the card once I can pick out each word exactly.

The listening deck seems to be hugely beneficial so far, even though I've only been doing this for about a month. It also helps with my silly neuroticism over feeling that watching TV is a 'waste of time', and in a strange way helps me enjoy it more.

TV is definitely not a waste of time. It's a great tool for improving your listening comprehension, because it contains rapid colloquial speech, but also because it comes with a visual aid. Also, TV series contain large amounts of content using narrow topics and a limited number of voices. This often makes TV easier than movies at the intermediate level.

In fact, one good language learning habit is to allow yourself to indulge in any kind of "guilty pleasure" media that you couldn't justify in English.

I am, however, very interested in how you capture audio from TV shows and turn it into Anki cards. I last tried to do this a few years ago, and it was so incredibly effort intensive I didn't think it made sense at the intermediate level.

I'm also up to 447 pages read. The discerning reader might note that this leaves me quite far behind the pace I would need to reach 10,000 pages this year. I might have to revisit that number. For now, though, I like a semi-impossible goal and will keep the 10,000 as a monument to the beauty of a naive and earnest optimism.

I was one of a few people who finished the original, full-sized "Super Challenge" of 10,000 pages in 20 months. It was definitely a project! But it was incredibly valuable and I'm very happy to have done it.

One thing to keep in mind is that you'll speed up. I think I "leveled up" around 500 pages, then again around 2,500 and 7,500. At 7,500, I was reading 40 pages an hour with an "opaque" vocabulary word (i.e., I couldn't even guess what it meant) every few pages.

I don't know when you started your challenge, but if you're 450 pages in by the end of the first month, you can do 10,000 in a year. But maybe 5,000 pages/year is aggressive enough for many people!

Good luck with your studies!

[merino_iceberg]

Welcome to the forum!

In addition to the big fat main deck, I also have an audio-only deck aimed at listening comprehension. I've been generating the audio deck from the shows and movies I've been watching in a way that I think is similar to the sub2srs strategy I've seen mentioned in these forums. Essentially, any time I can't quite hear a line, I pull the audio and send it straight to the anki deck. As it's going through the srs pipeline, I get to listen to it over and over, and I'll typically only pass the card once I can pick out each word exactly.

The listening deck seems to be hugely beneficial so far, even though I've only been doing this for about a month. It also helps with my silly neuroticism over feeling that watching TV is a 'waste of time', and in a strange way helps me enjoy it more.

TV is definitely not a waste of time. It's a great tool for improving your listening comprehension, because it contains rapid colloquial speech, but also because it comes with a visual aid. Also, TV series contain large amounts of content using narrow topics and a limited number of voices. This often makes TV easier than movies at the intermediate level.

In fact, one good language learning habit is to allow yourself to indulge in any kind of "guilty pleasure" media that you couldn't justify in English.

I am, however, very interested in how you capture audio from TV shows and turn it into Anki cards. I last tried to do this a few years ago, and it was so incredibly effort intensive I didn't think it made sense at the intermediate level.

Oh absolutely, re: TV not being a waste of time. I think this is more a relic of what was beaten into my head as a child, ha. I probably should've been more clear that this was tongue in cheek! Still, I'm not sure TV really hits guilty pleasure territory for me. Guilt or no, I just don't know that I like it ~that much. This could be a function of not having found the right series, but I don't know that I've been truly taken in by a show in a long time. Mexican twitter, on the other hand...

For the audio deck I've been using Migaku. I don't know if there are better options out there, but I stumbled upon it about a month ago and it's been great for my purposes. The bad news is that it isn't free (5$ a month after a 7 day free trial). I'm justifying it because the audio has been so fantastic to have and I'm really not spending much on learning spanish otherwise.

The good news is that it works for netflix, youtube videos (with subtitles, unless you're fine with the occasional error from autogenerated ones), and movies/whatever mp4's you might be playing locally.
I think there's an option to bulk make all the subtitles into cards, which I think? is similar to the sub2srs. I usually just make them as I watch along since I only end up wanting a fraction of any episode's subtitles to end up in the deck. This entails just watching through as I normally would and hitting two keys on the keyboard any time I want to capture a line. Then, the player rewinds to that line to record the audio before continuing to play from where it left off, rinse n repeat. It's also easy to scroll through all the subtitles in a separate little window, and specifically click each one you'd like to make into a flashcard. I don't do this, but it could be a good way to, ie, go about making the flashcards easily after the fact. I have everything set to export to Anki (audio on front, corresponding spanish subtitle on back), but theoretically you can add other info to the cards and/or export to the migaku flashcard app as well.

The reward/effort ratio has been pretty high, but I can see this tapering off at some point. I think I might start using some of the cards for shadowing soon also. If this works well, I think it could be a nice little twofer for the whole process.

I'm also up to 447 pages read. The discerning reader might note that this leaves me quite far behind the pace I would need to reach 10,000 pages this year. I might have to revisit that number. For now, though, I like a semi-impossible goal and will keep the 10,000 as a monument to the beauty of a naive and earnest optimism.

I was one of a few people who finished the original, full-sized "Super Challenge" of 10,000 pages in 20 months. It was definitely a project! But it was incredibly valuable and I'm very happy to have done it.

One thing to keep in mind is that you'll speed up. I think I "leveled up" around 500 pages, then again around 2,500 and 7,500. At 7,500, I was reading 40 pages an hour with an "opaque" vocabulary word (i.e., I couldn't even guess what it meant) every few pages.

I don't know when you started your challenge, but if you're 450 pages in by the end of the first month, you can do 10,000 in a year. But maybe 5,000 pages/year is aggressive enough for many people!

Good luck with your studies![/quote]

Ah, congrats on your own challenge! These anecdotes are very helpful to hear (and a good reminder to go trawl some some of the older logs here). I'm at almost 500 as of today, although not quite sure if a leveling up has happened. Reading has clearly, definitely, gotten easier, but it's still not "easy", or at least not always. Maybe the bigger round numbers will be more solid benchmarks! Out of curiosity though, how much of your improvement during this time do you feel was due to the reading itself, as opposed to the other things you were doing?

In the end, I think hitting the 10,000 or not will come down to the balance of intensive/extensive reading I land on. If I keep improving, and also start letting myself float down the river on an extensive reading inner tube, it should definitely be in reach. If I keep most of the reading intensive though (which is still my short term inclination), the pace will obviously be a bit slower. I don't think I'm overly pressed about these details right now. Keeping the 10k in view is more, at current, a nice reminder to keep the volume high

[emk]

I usually just make them as I watch along since I only end up wanting a fraction of any episode's subtitles to end up in the deck. This entails just watching through as I normally would and hitting two keys on the keyboard any time I want to capture a line. Then, the player rewinds to that line to record the audio before continuing to play from where it left off, rinse n repeat.

Oh, excellent. This is actually perfect for intermediate levels. I'm glad someone finally built a good version of this.

Ah, congrats on your own challenge! These anecdotes are very helpful to hear (and a good reminder to go trawl some some of the older logs here). I'm at almost 500 as of today, although not quite sure if a leveling up has happened. Reading has clearly, definitely, gotten easier, but it's still not "easy", or at least not always. Maybe the bigger round numbers will be more solid benchmarks! Out of curiosity though, how much of your improvement during this time do you feel was due to the reading itself, as opposed to the other things you were doing?

I was a B2 by the start of the Super Challenge and I'd probably already read, say, two books and a bunch of news articles by the time it officially started. (And I'm counting my page milestones from my first book, not the official start of the Challenge.)

I made it from A2 to B2 in four months of full-time study, during which time I used a bunch of techniques. (My B2 was confirmed by taking the DELF B2 exam, which is actually a bit tough by B2 standards—especially the oral exam.) At this point, I could read, thanks to those 1,000 pages. But it still took effort to read, and I could still be confused by parts of B2 texts.

But during the Super Challenge itself, my only real "study" was extensive reading, extensive watching of TV, speaking French with my wife regularly, and doing 1,500 Anki sentence cards. By the end of the Super Challenge, sample C1 and C2 reading exams were completely trivial. I could read and answer the questions in about 10-20% of the allotted time. 40 pages per hour with an "opaque" word every few pages makes reading exams easy.

So to answer your question, my study during the Super Challenge was overwhelmingly extensive reading. My starting base wasn't terrible, but most people will reach my starting reading level within 1,000 pages anyways. At the scale of a 10,000 page Super Challenge in a Romance language, it literally doesn't matter where you start. By the time you hit 10,000 pages, your reading will be excellent, automatic and rapid.

In the end, I think hitting the 10,000 or not will come down to the balance of intensive/extensive reading I land on. If I keep improving, and also start letting myself float down the river on an extensive reading inner tube, it should definitely be in reach. If I keep most of the reading intensive though (which is still my short term inclination), the pace will obviously be a bit slower.

As you proceed from 500 to 1,000 pages, I would encourage you to shift the balance more towards extensive reading.

One of my posts that I copied over from the original forum was "Cheating & Consolidating". This the summary of everything I learned about extensive input during the Challenge. I even made a handy visual aid!

cheating-consolidating.png

My argument is that you need both "cheating" and "consolidating." Cheating helps turn "opaque" input into something you can decipher with conscious effort. Essentially all intensive study falls under "cheating."

But the other important part of this is "consolidating." This is where you turn things you can laboriously decipher into things that you can read at a glance without thinking. And once the "consolidating" process is well underway, you don't need nearly as much cheating. This is because 80-90% of new vocabulary and idioms will become apparent from context.

By the 2,000 page mark, I'd say my ideal ratio was at least 9:1 in favor of extensive reading. At this point, my only real "intensive" tools were the pop-up dictionary in my e-reader, plus highlighting about 300 sentences per month, max, for conversion to Anki cards. I also read a lot on paper and virtually never looked any of those words up at all.

There are also two good tricks that can help a lot in the beginning:

1. Read some longer books. The first 20 pages of any book are the hardest, and require the most extensive work. Everything after that leans heavily towards "consolidating." If you limit yourself to nothing but news articles and web pages at this level, you'll make your life a lot harder.
2. Read translations of your favorite books. If you're in a Spanish bookstore, keep your eyes peeled for anything you've read at least 5 times in English. Flip through a few pages and see if you like the style. If you do, go for it. This will give you a very nice boost, allowing you to focus on just reading. I probably read 5 books this way, especially during the earlier parts of the Challenge.

TL;dr: To borrow your metaphor, go get that inner tube and start floating down that river! Sheer volume is what makes reading fast and automatic. Intensive work is a useful tool, absolutely. But at best, it only buys you decipherability. You also need to upgrade that decipherability and lock in those gains.

[merino_iceberg]

A very quick update, since I've been absent for a minute:

I'm up to 1,866 pages in Spanish on the year and it feels great. This is still 'behind schedule' for reaching 10k pages this year, but this goal now feels somewhat realistic in a way that I wasn't sure it would be.

I've been reading a few of Carlos Ruiz Zafón books (El príncipe de la niebla, Marina, la sombra del viento), and everyone who has commented on this forum with the advice to stick to one or a few authors was even wiser than I believed. My familiarity with this one guy's vocabulary has been a huge part of why I've been able to get through so many pages recently.

I've begun to drink the extensive reading koolaid as well. I think 'getting' this happened for a few reasons. The first and more practical reason was that reading just got easier at some point over the last 1000 pages. The second was that it psychologically became much easier to accept that there were going to be a bunch of words that would whizz right past me, at least for right now. Inhaling a large quantity of pages really emphasizes how little any one (or the words on any one of them) really matter. Everything comes back, and the words keep churning. I'm not reading completely extensively however. I do look things up, and I do selectively pluck sentences out to make flashcards with. I have what I think is a nice little routine with this, which I would elaborate on if I weren't 7 minutes from bedtime. Soon!

I've really appreciated EMK's notes on his reading progress over an extended period, and I think (sorry, I might be misremembering! but I think) Cavesa's as well, elsewhere on this forum. In case another reader might find a third (or nth, I almost certainly haven't found all the logs of those who have read 10k or 20k+ pages and reported back) data point useful: I'd say that I first noticed a big, significant leap in reading comprehension around about 1000 pages or so. This was the point at which most of the struggles of the first couple hundred pages had more or less melted away. Of course, there are still struggles! It's more that the most difficult parts now seem to be related to details and subtleties, or just not knowing the word for, ie, power drill. These things don't usually impede my general understanding of the narrative of most of the novels I'm reading, even though I'm certainly still missing some thisorthat. 1,800 pages feels like a nice rung to be at, with the understanding that there's still a lot of ladder left. On this note, I'd also love to see anyone else's 'reading progress reports' over longer periods of time. Is there a compendium of these somewhere?

I've also noticed that my reading has had a very satisfying transfer to other skills. My speaking has measurably improved, even with relatively little speaking practice (although I will have more soon!). After reading a number of books I feel like I *have* certain phrases and sentence constructions that I previously had only recognized.

Granted, this hasn't been entirely from reading novels. While reading has been my main method of Spanish study, I've also spending some time with Radio Ambulante every week, a few radiodramas, Anki (both sentence cards mined from books I'm reading and Migaku audio cards), daily WhatsApp messages, and some journaling.

Cheers,

MI