firedude's 2024/2025 Super Challenge Log (French/Spanish)

[firedude750]

Bonjour tout le monde ! This is my log for the 2024/2025 Super Challenge. I signed up for a full challenge for French and for Spanish. My French is around B2 and my Spanish is around A1. By the end of the challenge I hope to break into C1 for French and B2 for Spanish. That might be an agressive goal for Spanish, but due to the fact that I've been through the process before with French, and due to the similarities between the two languages, I think that the goal is attainable.

The reading side of the challenge will be fairly straightforward. For French, I will be reading native novels, though many of them will likely be translated from English. For Spanish, I am still stuck in the early-reader stage and will be reading translations of books I read as a kid. Despite being children's books they are still rich with varied vocabulary and should propel me forward fairly quickly.

For the watching/listening side, I will primarily be listening to podcasts. I have a 80 minute round-trip commute for work, plus I run several days a week giving me plenty of time for listening to podcasts. Plus podcasts are more language dense than a movie or series where there is often minutes of dead air. I will be watching movies/series occasionally, but podcasts will make up the lion's share of my listening time for the challenge.

I have set up a Google Sheets document to track my progress for the two languages and will be updating it daily. I will also be posting weekly summaries here on the log. I think this challenge will be a lot of fun and I hope to see significant progress in the two languages! Good luck to everyone participating!

Progress document: (there are different tabs for the two languages) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cH08SqMQkh5KEnyxMOv9K-XpTa8wSXmgVMwr8Lpijl4/edit?usp=sharing

[MorkTheFiddle]

Howdy, Firedude,
Welcome to LLORG!
Best wishes on your Super Challenge.

[firedude750]

Week 1 is down! I'm glad I signed up for this challenge because up until now my language learning has been a very go with the flow, do it when I feel like it kind of thing but this has forced me to be more deliberate and disciplined in my approach.

My first week(ish, since it started on a Wednesday) went pretty well. I am already noticing, however, a preference towards French. This isn't surprising because my French is at an intermediate level so I am more comfortable with it and can do things in the language that are more interesting than the things I'm limited to in Spanish for the time being.

For French I started reading the third Harry Potter book, "Le prisonnier d'Azkaban" and it has been going fairly well, around a chapter a day or so. I love harry potter and have read 6 of the books in English so I already know what is going to happen. I'm excited to finally read the seventh book once I get there. I have noticed my reading speed increasing in the last few months prior to this challenge and my ability to retain vocabulary has been getting better as well. I make Anki cards for unknown words that I deem worthy of keeping and I review those every day and it certainly helps, IMO, because waiting for the word to reappear naturally in immersion will take too long, especially for unknown words at the intermediate level. Anki keeps the words fresh so I have them the next time they show up.

My listening in French really needs work. I would estimate my reading level to be about B2 but I think my listening is closer to B1. That's one of the things I'm most excited about for this challenge, is to improve my listening skills. TBH, I'm not very interested in movies or series and have been instead using podcasts for my listening. I think using unscripted content could be beneficial since that's how people actually use the language in real life anyway. I'm listening to a couple of different podcasts: "La fabrique à polyglottes" which is a language-learning focused podcast about the science and techniques involved in improving your language learning. I'm also listening to "Fin du game" which is a podcast that looks at a video game and discusses the development and the story/gameplay of the game and a group of dudes discuss their opinions on it. I would estimate my comprehension to be around 65-70%, which is way too low. But after the challenge of 9000 minutes of listening this should increase.

As for Spanish, my options are a little bit less interesting, due to only being A1. For my reading, I am going through the kid's series "La casa del àrbol", which is the Spanish translation of the series "The Magic Tree House" which I read a lot as a kid. The premise is that a brother and sister find a magical tree house filled with books that can transport them to the setting of the book. So each entry in the series pertains to a certain historical setting. I figure this is a good series to read since each book deals with a fairly different topic and as such I'll be exposed to a wide birth of vocabulary.

As for listening I am using comprehensible input videos on YouTube, spoken entirely in Spanish, for Spanish learners. I did this a lot at the beginning for French and it helped immensely so I figured it would be a good idea for Spanish as well. I am using subtitles (in Spanish) for now but plan to take off the training wheels in the coming weeks/months. There's no shortage of Spanish learner material on YouTube so I shouldn't be hurting too much for lack of content.

Anyway, that's my weekly wrap-up. I plan on doing these every Monday. They will likely be shorter in the future since part of this one was detailing my long-term plan and some background, which I won't need to recap every week. I hope you enjoyed my ramblings and if you are participating in a Super Challenge yourself, good luck!

PS: I'm tracking all of my progress on this Google Sheets doc. Not the prettiest thing in the world but it works and it keeps me accountable.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cH08SqMQkh5KEnyxMOv9K-XpTa8wSXmgVMwr8Lpijl4/edit?usp=sharing