ShawnP's Spanish Adventure

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ShawnP
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Re: ShawnP's Spanish Adventure

Postby ShawnP » Sun Feb 26, 2017 3:19 am

Well, I've decided to cut my Guatemalan adventure a little short. I head from Panajachel to Antigua tomorrow for two days, then back to the states. Although staying longer may be beneficial, I have come to several conclusions why I think an earlier departure is best at this point. Although this experience has been wonderful with my school and home stay, I feel I'd be best taking what I've learned about my shortcomings and improve then come back with more knowledge and skill.

After 32 hours of lessons alone including all the hours of interaction with native speakers, I've learned my faults as well as what I need to do to improve and focus on. They are as follows in no certain order.

1. Learn more verbs and get the conjugations down solid. I've been talking up a storm but I fear I'll just keep making the same mistakes if I don't learn more verbs and conjugations. This is probably #1 actually. I got plenty of funny stares sometimes and just couldn't remember the simplest of verbs at times, much less the proper conjugations. My greatest fault indeed.

2. Up my vocabulary. I feel I've got a decent amount but just need to learn more. My goal is to use flash cards (which I haven't done yet) and read a lot more.

3. Work on my indirect, direct, and indirect+direct object pronouns.

4. Although I've been understood by home stay family and teachers, I'd like to work more on speaking Fluidity and dialing in my speech.

5. Listen to loads of native speech and improve my listening skills.

So, my plan of attack will be this.

1. Work with my "Verberrator" program to nail down verbs and conjugation, as well as write out all AR, ER/IR conjugations. I have it, It's boring and I quit it a long time ago but I'm realizing how important conjugations are now. If I can't take it, I'll pick up PMP master verb book and go that route with lots of paper and index cards.

2. I've never used SRS but I'm going to get or make a deck with single words only. NOBODY YELL NO. I'll get vocabulary in context by reading more. Lots of Anki fans here so I'll go that route. Not a fan of duolingo or me rise as it seems too slow for me.

3. Pronoun work will be accomplished mostly with Practice makes Perfect book, Complete Spanish Grammer which teaches much more. I never realized how helpful this book is and avoided textbooks like the plague. I plan to go through it and Madrigals Magical Key to Spanish (which I have) and make many index cards of sentences with these two books. Between the two are probably several thousand sentences. This also makes me wonder if the 10,000 sentence thing is a myth or a breakthrough. Or was it 10,000 hours, or both?

4. For working on my speech, I'm sticking with Glossika. I think Assimil and FSI have led many to fluency, and I contribute a lot of my successes to both although I couldn't complete either. However, after listening and speaking Spanish for hours on end to salespeople, Tuk Tuk drivers, waiters, family members, teachers, and random people trying to sell me stuff on the streets, I personally feel Glossika Mexican will get me further, faster. My plan is to nail down the Glossika program to a 80-90% success rate before I quit with it. My plan is to listen to 2-GSR files each day (1 from book 2 and 1 from book 3). And also read, listen, speak out loud 25 sentences a day, at least 30 minutes with the GMS files. It's pretty boring but doable. I've got book 1 (first 1000 sentences) pretty much down pat.

5. Listening. I feel my listening and speech have both skyrocketed. However, I've seriously gotta up my game at listening. Many times I'd get half a sentence and miss the rest. Sometimes I'd understand 90%, sometimes 10%. Just luck of the draw I guess. My plan here is quite simple. Lots and lots of native speech. Several things come to mind. SPANISHLISTENING.ORG and The UT Austin Spanish mp3's that can be found on the web for free. Also any random mp3's I can snag. What I really want are transcripts from the DLI Spanish conversations but they haven't been produced or I sure can't find them. If anyone has any idea where one might find mp3's with transcripts of people talking back and forth, please let me know. Most mp3's are of people answering questions, but I think people talking to each other will be the golden ticket.

Tomorrow, I'm taking my homestay family out for pizza then saying Adios. Gotta do the Antigua tourists thing. If anyone has questions or comments, fire away.

Next week will be back to logging my progress and materials used. Enough for now.

P.S. A quick shoutout to all on this forum for help, motivation, and advice. Without a forum such as this, I'd have probably quit long ago, let alone, travel to a Latin American country to work on a foreign language.
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Tomás
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Re: ShawnP's Spanish Adventure

Postby Tomás » Mon Feb 27, 2017 7:20 pm

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ShawnP
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Re: ShawnP's Spanish Adventure

Postby ShawnP » Mon Feb 27, 2017 7:44 pm

Tomas,

That's what I was talking about in last post. I've downloaded every single mp3 already and listen to many of them sporadically as I'm not able to understand much of it. Imagine how great it would be if all transcripts were available. I.E. GOLDMINE.

I'm positive my listening has improved dramatically over the last two weeks so I'll put some of those mp3's back on my iPod when I get back to the States. Thanks for looking out.
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ShawnP
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Re: ShawnP's Spanish Adventure

Postby ShawnP » Mon Mar 06, 2017 12:53 pm

This past week was a slow week. I returned from Guatemala on Tuesday evening and cleaned and rested on Wednesday. Thur-Sun was spent with family so no real studying occurred. However, I did do some light reading and listened to Glossika Mexican. Mostly children's books and graded readers, some bilingual and some not. I'm hoping to move past children's books before long but I haven't decided which "real" book I'd like to start with. I have a lot of free time the next two weeks so I'm hoping to get some good study time in.
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Possible Listening Recursos

Postby coldrainwater » Sun Mar 26, 2017 2:21 am

I believe your listening skills are likely a notch or two above mine. I am definitely still at a point where I elect to use resources with transcripts (this habit may soon wither). That said, I do have a few shared ideas that might be of interest.

The first is a matter of technique. If I wish to understand Spanish without a transcript, I first conjure an adequate portal and go to an optimal study spot. Then I click play on an electronic device and close my eyes. I focus on breathing much like a monk and am simply mindful of my aural surroundings. Then as the metaphoric music begins to play, I shift that concentration focus to Spanish. In real life conversation, I often must do the same (it even helps me in listening to English). Within the first three months of my Spanish studying (I am a false beginner and started afresh last June), it may have been the only way I could understand Mexican or Chilean Spanish in vivo. When I do this without vision, my comprehension jumps. If interested, you might add the concept to your existing repertoire.

Secondly, I may have a simple conversation with transcript source for you. Yabla (as I am sure you know about already), though not gratuitous, has loads of material with superb transcripts and several mountain ranges full of back and forth dialogue. That sort of dialogue is super hard for me as well (I am not even focusing on it currently).

As a tertiary point, I have heard unconfirmed rumor that some children´s listening resources (cartoons, kids comics et al) are more challenging (and thus preferred) precisely because of the amount of dialogue, grammar and verb conjugations used. If you can brook a highly flexible environment, you can always go your own route and fish for interesting listening resources on the boob tube (or Youtube hoy en día). Separately, classroom lectures over varied topics might be of interest to you although the dialogue can be a mite one-sided. MOOCS (like coursera) are offered in Spanish for example. I have listened to the better portion of ¨Aprender¨ and I liked it overall. YMMV. Echa un vistazo si lo deseas.
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Re: ShawnP's Spanish Adventure

Postby Tomás » Sun Mar 26, 2017 2:44 am

ShawnP wrote:Tomas,

That's what I was talking about in last post. I've downloaded every single mp3 already and listen to many of them sporadically as I'm not able to understand much of it. Imagine how great it would be if all transcripts were available. I.E. GOLDMINE.

I'm positive my listening has improved dramatically over the last two weeks so I'll put some of those mp3's back on my iPod when I get back to the States. Thanks for looking out.


The Tatoeba audio sentences were just uploaded to Anki's shared deck page a few days ago. If you don't like Anki you could download them in csv and then write them to a mp3 player or whatever. It's like a free Glossika.
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ShawnP
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Re: ShawnP's Spanish Adventure

Postby ShawnP » Sun Mar 26, 2017 2:48 pm

Coldrainwater,

I contribute my listening skills to mostly Assimil, SpanishLearning.org, stuff I learned at LingQ two or three years ago, podcasts such as ShowTime Spanish, Destinos/Extra, and just time spent with the language. If I were to pop in any movie right now, I'd walk away in disgust as I've got a long way to go. I've got a ton of mp3's I've acquired over time that are pretty short. I plan on incorporating them into my studies at least 30 minutes a day, just listening to native speakers. As for resources, I don't plan on buying anymore unless its ekindle books. I'm starting to enjoy reading a little more but it's slow going and I'm having to look up lots of words via ekindle dictionary. "Rome wasn't built in a day," I guess.

I've watched a few Yabla videos and Easy Spanish on YouTube. I think they're great if one can find the time to sit at a computer for a while. Good luck on your Spanish.
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ShawnP
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Re: ShawnP's Spanish Adventure

Postby ShawnP » Sun Mar 26, 2017 2:55 pm

Tomas,

Thanks for the Tatoeba suggestion. I definitely believe that will help. I purchased about 6 decks of index cards that I'm currently writing out sentences from my Cortina course. I plan to do the same with my PMP book. It will take a couple months I'm sure to accomplish this feat, but in the end I'll have thousands of sentences I can practice as many times as I want.

If I can figure out how to download all those sentences and print them out, my need for using my index cards may not be needed. Again, thanks for the suggestion.
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ShawnP
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Re: ShawnP's Spanish Adventure

Postby ShawnP » Sun Mar 26, 2017 3:07 pm

I skipped two weeks in my log as I didn't have too much to write about. Nothing special on my end except working through Glossika, Cortina Spanish course, and doing a good bit of reading on kindle and a little listening of native speaker mp3's. Most of the books were childrens books and I must say I think I'm glad I started out with childrens books. I'm still having to use the dictionary quite a bit but I'm getting to the point where I want to try something else.

Going off what James29 suggested, I'm thinking of picking up the first Harry Potter book or the first Theodore Boone book from John Grisham. I'm a big Grisham fan but I've also seen all the Harry Potter movies so right now it's a toss up between the two.
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ShawnP
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Re: ShawnP's Spanish Adventure

Postby ShawnP » Sun May 14, 2017 3:27 pm

How time flyes. I haven't done much study lately. Been some time since I updated this log. I got frustrated and just quit with it. I've done a lot of reflecting this last week and believe I just haven't been doin things right in the past. I need to remind myself its a marathon and not a sprint. I have plenty of material but felt I haven't progressed. Perhaps I'm just a slow learner. I've tried to ease myself back to Spanish this week. I didn't do any book study but I found the power of Netflix, which I should've done long ago.

This week I've been binge watching Marco Polo in Spanish with English subtitles. I must say I've thoroughly enjoyed this series. I'm now up to season 2, episode 6. Only 4 more episodes in the series I think. WOW. That's like 16 hours of Spanish audio in the last four days. I think TV will be my new go-to for a while as I can keep this up. I plan on just watching several TV series for a while then go back and do them again in order without subtitles.

I will throw in some form of bookwork each day but I wont focus on it so much. I'll think more on this today and start fresh again tomorrow.

On a side note, I'm off to Mexico 1 August for a week or two.
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