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”Weekly” Update------------------------------
Overall, this has been a good week for Spanish. I’m enjoying Netflix’s,
La niña but some of the accents are really sending me for a loop. I’ve watched the first 8 episodes and it’s becoming a bit easier to understand accents but I think the word choices of the characters may have something to do with my difficulty with understanding. It's OK as long as I'm not multitasking. In any event, it’s an interesting series and I like that it’s not directly about el narcotráfico. Also, the nature of the dialog is very helpful and better resembles the kinds of conversations I’m likely to hear or engage in myself. I liked
El patrón del mal, for example, but I tend not to speak like a thug.
I slacked a bit on reading last week, but I’m OK with that given the other things I’ve started doing. Regarding Spanish, I’ve concluded that the one thing I’m not doing, is the one thing I should be doing. Writing, it is!
Inspired in part by
this post by emk, since the 6th, I’ve endeavored to write at least 100 words a day. Writing has to be my weakest skill and working to improve it should translate well to my speaking and listening abilities. At first, I thought I would just write about whatever came to mind, as emk did.
However, I discovered a few things:
- My thoughts were a bit too ‘random’ and I was wasting 15 minutes just deciding what to write about. Not a huge amount of time, but it was adding up.
- I was running out of thing’s I’d like to be able to write about that I could also fit into 100 words.
- I’d like to systematically improve my writing. I felt I would benefit from seeing good writing and working, without plagiarizing, to appreciate the style and imitate it. Along the lines of, good artists borrow but great artists steal
(← Steve Jobs originally said that). I figured the efficient thing to do would be to seek guidance, albeit from a book.
- Ok, so what do I write about?
I headed to a local used bookstore and, after an hour of browsing, decided on two books; ‘a comprehensive advanced Spanish language text’ named
Espanol avanzado, ¡toda vela! by Herra Lamontagne and
Enfoques student activity manual, a workbook designed for an intermediate university Spanish course. I can’t claim that these are best best options out there but I wanted something that would give me examples of what good writing looked like, or, that would at least lead me in, what seemed like, a progressive way towards improving my writing by perhaps focusing on one aspect of writing, at a time.
Both books are written completely in Spanish which I saw as a plus.
¡A toda vela! seemed like it would do a good job at integrating advanced vocabulary into my writing, through well designed reading and writing assignments.
I wish I had the main book for
Enfoques, it seems like it would be useful to have. It’s prompts are interesting, but resemble something I’d use to prepare to write a formal exam. Sometimes, it will ask that I listen to X interview with famous person Y and write my opinion, or that I write a letter of complaint, or analyze a historical event. Since I don’t have the accompanying CD’s, in these cases, I search YouTube for videos about the person/ historical event, social issue, etc. and start writing.
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The breakdown:---------------------
-1. Open the book and do the reading. Each reading usually has highlighted words and while I’m not unfamiliar with all the words, there are many words I don’t know. I asked a friend and it seemed that most of these words are actually worth learning.
-2. I skip the vocabulary exercises but do try to at least familiarize myself with the words and make a list of ones I’d like to use in my writing.
-3. Take 30 minutes and write as much as I can on the topic while trying to incorporate the words from the previous step.
-4. Activities within the same chapter all reinforce the same vocabulary/grammar point so I just continue, one chapter at a time, trying to pay special attention to improving the ‘one’ important aspect.
-5. Review what I wrote the next morning, making corrections as I’m able to identify them.
-6. Post to Lang-8.
-7. On the weekend, print what I wrote, correct it again by comparing it with suggestions I received on Lang-8.
-8. Correct it on the computer, and add parts of interest to Anki by creating cloze-deletion cards.
--------------------------------------------I’ve been taking about 1.5 hours to prepare for, and actually complete, the assignment. Although I originally planned to commit 30 minutes to writing, I actually enjoy reading/ watching something before I write and will plan on continuing this in way for a while. With everything else I do, it’s a fairly big time commitment but for 4 weeks, it shouldn't be a problem. The thing is, the topics are interesting and once I get going, It’s super easy to write more than 100 words. In fact, 250 words has been my average.
Last week was a trial run but the plan is to continue like this for 5 days a week
(no weekends), for the next 4 weeks. After doing about 3 days of doing this, I found myself thinking in Spanish for more extended periods. It’s a good feeling. Afterwards, I’ll probably focus on another skill.
An advanced writing book was not strictly necessary. I could have very well decided to choose articles and videos of interest, and write about them, or, do as emk did and just write about whatever comes to mind. Still, I’m enjoying the structure the books offer and I can simply skip a chapter if it’s about a topic that doesn’t interest me.