To be an outstanding tourist.

[jeff_lindqvist]

I spent a couple too many days reviewing and repeating lessons aiming for perfection. Waste of time; I'm a beginner, and I sound like a beginner. I need to keep moving forward instead of aiming for some sort of perfection.

I thought about this the other day when I was reviewing my Assimil courses (I wrote about it in my latest log post). After just reading and/or translating the lessons, I thought that I should spend more time on each lessons, perhaps even learning the dialogue to perfection. (Yeah, right, as if I would ever talk about going to the zoo to see the pandas...) I changed my mind again and kept reading.

I've been interested in how blind people often listen to speeded up audio to get through more content in a short time, and I know some people swear by it for listening to native language media. I've wondered if this wouldn't be a good thing to do once one gets up to an advanced level in an L2.

I used to do this many years ago with the German lessons from LingQ. As long as I could understand most of them, speed wasn't a problem. The lessons at *pod101 have a speed feature. It's quite useful even at a beginner level when you have really long lessons with a lot of slow repetition. For pure dialogue content, I'd probably just listen at x1.

I've also tried reading aloud the lessons that I'm reviewing. This is a little different that shadowing; there is no time pressure. It's a little more relaxed. It also made me recognize some of the pronunciation problems that I have ignored (apparently) while shadowing. I think I am going to get a tutor to work on my pronunciation.

I agree - reading aloud exposes us. I can read Spanish alright, but Chinese tones? French liasions? Maybe it's the very action of reading aloud which trips me up. Shadowing is like running along a partner who's in better shape than yourself and finishes the track with more ease. Just listening is good too. And silent reading. There's a lot of things you can do with your Assimil content.

[sfuqua]

There I was, all settled down to run through Assimil...

After a little exploring and thinking, I decided to try FSI French and Spanish today (I already got 75% of the way through Spanish before).

I've been reluctant to start FSI, since it is a huge course and would take forever to finish, but I've been thinking about it for 6 months. If I had spent the 6 months on that, I probably would be a big chunk of the way through. I figure I would need 2 years at least to finish both courses with any degree of completeness.

I'll probably go back to Assimil tomorrow.

If I only do a half hour of FSI, we are looking at an even longer time. But if I only did a half hour of FSI, I would have time for extensive reading and listening. I've always wondered what would happen to a learner if they did FSI and a Superchallenge at the same time. Both of these approaches have been very effective at helping learners push their language to a higher level. I suspect there would be a powerful synergy.

Aside from the sheer size of the course, FSI focuses on one grammatical feature at a time, which makes me worry that I'm forgetting Unit 1 while I'm learning Unit 2. There are approaches that would minimize this issue, but massive native input would assure that there would always be exposure to the whole language, even while concentrating on particular grammatical features in FSI.

Native media is generally more amusing than either FSI or Assimil, so there is that too.

Let's see...

600 hours to C1 through FSI (FSI's numbers). Probably too high if one is doing a lot of extensive reading/watching. 300?
FSI French, 91 hours (including the French phonology course). 7X each lesson on average?
FSI Spanish, 56 hours. 10X each lesson on average?
Superchallenge sized reading 5000-10000 pages (or 20000 for what I call the full Cavesa)
Superchallenge sized watching 9000-10000 minutes (or 20000 for a full Cavesa)
Perhaps I should start cycling through FSI while doing a lot of reading.

This would be a massive undertaking, but learning a language to a very high level takes a lot of time.

Perhaps my attraction to FSI is just because I really want to do extensive reading. If doing FSI drills will let me start reading sooner, maybe I should.
I really, really want to improve my French (and Spanish).

[sfuqua]

Let's look at the bars for that:

FSI: 45 / 55 spanish
FS: 1 / 34 French
100: 50 / 100 Spanish books
100: 1 / 100 French books
100: 100 / 100 Spanish movies
100: 5 / 100 French movies

I've got a good start on Spanish, but a long way to go with French. I should probably zero out everything if I do this.

[Systematiker]

Superchallenge sized reading 5000-10000 pages (or 20000 for what I call the full Cavesa)
Superchallenge sized watching 9000-10000 minutes (or 20000 for a full Cavesa)

Can we make this a thing? A "full Cavesa"?

(sorry, I just found that a great term)

[sfuqua]

I did FSI and some reading tonight, and I really liked it. I can read Spanish pretty well, and it was so nice to just take off and read. I finished the first unit of FSI Phonology and then read 10 pages of Spanish (_Diana o la cazadora solitaria_, yes the weird Jean Seberg obsession) by Carlos Fuentes.
Wow, the joy and happy feelings of reading Spanish without really worrying about "studying".
the FSI French Phonology course, which was used as an introduction to the Basic course in the old days at FSI, the phonology course seems very easy. Of course I only did the first lesson. It may be easy, but I was just whining about my my French "R" a few days ago. I don't think that the Phonology course is better than sliced bread, but it seems like it might be worth a couple of weeks.
Tomorrow, I'll do FSI Spanish and read in French. I'm going to try _Une Vie_ by David Richards. It's translated from English and it's a biography, so it should be pretty easy (a quick look shows that it's not too easy..).

Maybe I'll switch to translated Ken Follett novels if I start to grind down to a stop with my first start at books.

Look, it is going to take me forever to finish FSI, but they seem like the most comprehensive French and Spanish courses. And I love to read. Maybe I'll do this for a while and then go back to Assimil...

[sfuqua]

I'm going to switch back into Assimil today. If I do less shadowing, I should have more time for reading. One good thing about reading is that I can fit it into different parts of the day, the way that I did with anki.
Assimil can be finished by summer if I stop fooling around with other courses.
I think that the tourist survival stuff is already in reach with a week's review of a phrasebook, whatever main study method I use.

[sfuqua]

Hmmn, I seem to be doing FSI and a big anki deck of vocabulary words.

My extensive reading in French is pretty slow and painful, naturally, from a lack of vocabulary. I am certain that if I just do a thousand pages of extensive reading, things will clear up.

However, I think that doing a few thousand words in an anki deck might speed up this process. I'm not really sure how many I need to learn, since I already have (probably) a couple of thousand words in words available for recognition in French.

FSI is, well, FSI. I think I will be able to get a long way through it if I just keep going, don't set any deadlines or strive for perfection. The FSI courses we have today in French and Spanish go back to the days of the "good old time religion" of audiolingualism. My first teacher training as a language teacher was then, and I can't help thinking that if you have to learn language in a classroom, you can't really beat FSI as a training method. I loved it that I always knew what to do next based on how my students were doing. The fall of behaviorist psychology, meant that audio lingual drills fell out of popularity, but the effectiveness of audio lingual instruction was never disproven.

While all courses have weaknesses, FSI courses are:
1. Free
2. huge
3. effective (at least in the old days).

I'm going to fool around with FSI, my anki deck, and extensive reading. Once I get to a point of pretty free extensive reading, I'll start some massive listening also. Maybe I'll finish Assimil too, but I've found it annoying lately.

I'm not in any hurry. I think I'm a couple of days of reading a phrasebook away from being ready to be a tourist in France or Spain.

[sfuqua]

I'm doing FSI French and Spanish.

I'm starting out with the French Phonology course.
I'm two units in. It's very easy.
I'm staring out with the Spanish programmatic course; it is very easy, but I've always been interested in it. This goes back to the 70's when I was a contractor for Peace Corps. Spanish programmatic was the latest thing in government language courses then.
I'm two units in here too.
I've been trying to get through the early, too easy parts of the FSI sequence so that I can dig into those "fun" audiolingual drills that come later.