Cazgram's Spanish Log

[cazgram]

Language Learning Background:
I took two years of high school Spanish and one year of high school French. I had an excellent French teacher and pretty lousy Spanish teacher, so I probably learned a quarter as much in Spanish as French. I studied about one year of Japanese while at university through an intensive Japanese program.

From 2002-2006, I made many 2-3 day trips to Central and South America for work. In 2005 I played around with Russian due to a work trip that took me there. I almost moved to China at one point in 2007-2008, so I studied Mandarin for a spell. I picked up French again in 2010 - 2011 completely for pleasure and got to maybe A2 level. Last year I started teaching English at the local library to new speakers and it turned in to an English/Spanish language exchange. This jump started my motivation but I've put it on the back burner until I finished my master's degree. Now I'm free to spend my extra time playing with language without feeling guilty about neglecting school.

[tldr: I studied some languages at A1 level, now I'm studying Spanish]

[cazgram]

YouTube
I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I want to go through Spanish. Currently I'm thinking I will center my efforts around Youtube. The main difference between my efforts previously and my efforts now is the enormous amounts of spoken language on video without it being directed at "English learners". Also, there are all of these video-based cultures that have grown out of Youtube.

Music
I've spent the past week exploring the Spanish language side of Youtube and I'm in awe of the amount of culture, music, art, etcetera. I spent hours discovering dozens of artists that reflect my musical tastes, as well as tons of really high quality Spanish covers of songs I already know. For example, the channel April '99 has done covers of 21 Pilots. Most of the big hit songs of the last 4-5 years have a really high quality cover done is Spanish if you look around. Here's a few links to some stuff I liked:

21 Pilots - Stressed Out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j55BGqTB6KY
The "Once I was 7 Years Old" song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MF7RJUYnv0&list
Great Big World - Say Something https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcGmiLHIQrI

I don't think I'll be listening to covers for ever, and I have found quite a few artists I'll eventually explore, but a lot of the covers have lyrics that are much more clear to understand than original Spanish music, just because of the nature of covers.

Animations/Drawings
I stumbled upon a video of one of the cover artists making a "Draw my life" video. Basically them narrating as they draw frames describing their life up until now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfbnyybyoFY I'm going to keep looking for videos like this, as well as educational videos that animate or draw to create more i+1 input.

subs2srs
I'm very interested in using subs2srs. I stumbled on to emk's subs2srs thread and made a deck that I'm going through right now for the first episode of Avatar. I actually really liked Avatar and have seen the original series all the way through, as well as Legend of Korra. I'm going to keep exploring more source material for this.

Books/Courses
I also have Assimil Spanish with Ease and Dicendi's FSI Basic Spanish for iBook. I really appreciated the formatting of the iBook and definitely recommend it to anyone playing around with FSI Basic Spanish. I will probably incorporate Destinos, as well as Extr@ en espagnol. I'm approaching these as medicine that I will take any time I feel up to it, but not necessarily as a requirement. (Although, I do kind of want to keep watching Destinos just to find out what happens.) I tend to burn out on these more course-like materials. It also feeds in to my desire for perfection and completeness, which doesn't work well with language learning.

I'm starting a job soon that will have me spending a lot of time throughout the work day going from place to place in my car. I'm hoping to fit Assimil in to this time, and move to native language podcasts as soon as possible. If I had to pick one medium that I use more than any other in my first language, it is podcasts. So I'm looking forward to that.

[coldrainwater]

Welcome. I am glad you started this log and I'll be following with interest. Podcasts are turning out to be my primary method for continued listening acquisition and it looks like we may be headed down a similar listening road. There are also a good handful of us who are strongly interested in basing our video-related studies in Youtube content.

[cazgram]

I'm about a week into my effort to create language learning habits. So far, my use of Anki is abysmal. I tend to need to focus pretty hard to get anything meaningful out of it, so I tend to not engage in it very much unless I can sit down and focus.

With each post, I'm going to try to add a link to a YouTube video that I liked.

YouTube
So this post's video is from Javier Santaollala, a YouTuber that produces videos about physics (he has a PhD in Physics?). He looks at the movie the Martian and talks about what is accurate and what is not, from a scientific perspective. I love this stuff. I've read the book and seen the movie, so a lot of the content is accessible, even though my vocabulary isn't nearly strong enough. The video also has Spanish subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bhRTWYHCno

Here's some other channels I'll be exploring more:

minutodefisica https://www.youtube.com/user/minutodefisica (<-- if you've seen the webcomic XKCD, this channel seems inspired by that, with even some of the same problems from What If on XKCD.)
UnPuntoCircular https://www.youtube.com/user/EverST88 (<-- this might not have broad appeal, but I'm a math teacher, so...)

[cazgram]

I didn't get a lot done in November/December, but I had a good run of about six weeks before that.

subs2srs: I got through the first few episodes of Avatar without feeling like it was super annoying. I then acquired the first few seasons of Ministerio Del Tiempo with functional subtitles, but then I couldn't get subs2srs to work. It kept outputting weirdly formatting cards. I got a annoyed and stopped tinkering at some point.

Assimil: On 28 of 100. I've made some progress with this, but it was mostly over about one month. My job is proving to have a lot of time to spend on language, but I've only recently felt grounded enough to spend car time on it.

YouTube: I found some songs and listened a while. Nothing really to report here, as I haven't spent much more time on it.

Podcasts: I like listening to Notes in Spanish, but I think I might stop listening because most of the colloquialisms or culture I've picked up from it hasn't translated to LA Spanish. I'm still on the hunt for good Spanish podcasts.

[cazgram]

I joined the Output Challenge 2018 today.

For my first output, I'm going to make role-playing videos for different situations I could put myself in where I live. About 1/2 mile from my house there is a panaderia. My kids attend a two-way immersion school for Spanish where all the teachers are bilingual. Those two contexts should give me something to work with for a while.

[cazgram]

Output Challenge - Day 1:
I wrote 66 words. It only took an hour or so! This is really good for me because I spent that time using SpanishDict to look up conjugations and example sentences for parts of speech. I'm horrible at remembering the names of tenses, so this has been a struggle where SpanishDict seems really helpful. Most of my production is still grammatically English, so example sentences are also good.

Assimil:
I got back through a review of previously covered lessons. Hopefully get going on new lessons within the next day or two.

I'm looking for a good language meet up or class. I went to a class at the local community center, but it was the second to last day and it was very basic. The more advanced class only meets during the day when I'm at work. I looked in to the local community colleges/universities but they are either full or super expensive. Any suggestions out there for building in accountability if classes aren't an option?

[Stelle]

I'm looking for a good language meet up or class. I went to a class at the local community center, but it was the second to last day and it was very basic. The more advanced class only meets during the day when I'm at work. I looked in to the local community colleges/universities but they are either full or super expensive. Any suggestions out there for building in accountability if classes aren't an option?

Find someone to talk to online. I can recommend some good tutors on italki! Your money will go a lot further than it would in group classes, your instruction will be targeted at your own personal needs, and you'll have a lot less "rest time". It's definitely more intense than a group class, especially at first, but you'll progress a lot faster. Plus, you can do it at home in your pyjamas.

If you don't want to spend money, you could also find a language partner and commit to weekly sessions via Skype.

¡Buena suerte!

[iguanamon]

...Find someone to talk to online. I can recommend some good tutors on italki! Your money will go a lot further than it would in group classes, your instruction will be targeted at your own personal needs, and you'll have a lot less "rest time". It's definitely more intense than a group class, especially at first, but you'll progress a lot faster. Plus, you can do it at home in your pyjamas.
If you don't want to spend money, you could also find a language partner and commit to weekly sessions via Skype. ...

I agree with Stelle. There are also alternatives to italki such as the Guatemalan schools nulengua and Proyecto Lingüistico Quetzalteco Educativo.org with online classes at about $10/US per hour via skype. Even an hour a week or every two weeks will do wonders for your Spanish. Also, the free option of finding a language exchange partner is a very good way to practice and consolidate your Spanish. As well, have a look at our Spanish Group. There you will find a community of learners and advanced speakers of Spanish ready to help you along the way. Not everyone reads everyone else's logs. So it's a good place to get your qestions and doubts answered. Welcome to the forum, Cazgram! ¡Suerte!