Re: James29's Spanish and French Log
Posted: Sun Mar 18, 2018 10:03 am
Spanish is still great, as always. I am enjoying the series El Vato. I wish it had more seasons. The characters are likable and the story is interesting, believable and different. I'll finish it pretty soon. I'll probably do a bit less Spanish this coming week as I have some real life things that will take some extra time. When I am done with El Vato I'll move on to watching the new Argentinian Netflix series Edha with Juana Viale
I am still slowly working my way through Atlas Shrugged. I'm about 3/4 of the way done now. I am only reading on the weekends. I manage about 1.5 hours a week. There is a ton of high level vocabulary in the book so it is good to see so many words. I'm listening to the audio book as I read so I'm getting quite a bit of Spanish pounded into my head.
I go to a nearby meetup nearly every week too. This is a fun change of pace and the group of people seems to change from time to time which is kind of nice. I have also started the habit of going to a local Mexican restaurant for lunch once a week. This habit seemed to just start by accident. I have gotten to know the owner as he comes out and talks with me each time I am in the restaurant.
My Spanish is as good as it needs to be for basically everything I need to do. I had to write a short letter in Spanish this past week and I felt a bit embarrassed about my written Spanish, but I got the job done just fine. At first I was going to have one of my native speaking friends review the letter, but I just sent it out anyway as I knew it was basically fine. Writing is my weakest Spanish skill, by far.
My life is such that I really need my Spanish time to be relaxing. The thought of turning my Spanish time into something that requires a taxing mental effort is not appealing. I'd love to learn French to a usable level, but I just don't think I'd be able to handle serious "studying" right now. I've thought about just taking three or four months and pounding out French to a level where I can just take input. Hopefully sometime soon I'll develop the motivation and inspiration to just put in some hard work with French for a few months. The frustrating part is that I don't think it would take too much to get me to a usable input level in French... I just need to make the commitment. I will be scaling back my running this summer so maybe I'll just try to devote 20 minutes a day or something like that to French.
I am still slowly working my way through Atlas Shrugged. I'm about 3/4 of the way done now. I am only reading on the weekends. I manage about 1.5 hours a week. There is a ton of high level vocabulary in the book so it is good to see so many words. I'm listening to the audio book as I read so I'm getting quite a bit of Spanish pounded into my head.
I go to a nearby meetup nearly every week too. This is a fun change of pace and the group of people seems to change from time to time which is kind of nice. I have also started the habit of going to a local Mexican restaurant for lunch once a week. This habit seemed to just start by accident. I have gotten to know the owner as he comes out and talks with me each time I am in the restaurant.
My Spanish is as good as it needs to be for basically everything I need to do. I had to write a short letter in Spanish this past week and I felt a bit embarrassed about my written Spanish, but I got the job done just fine. At first I was going to have one of my native speaking friends review the letter, but I just sent it out anyway as I knew it was basically fine. Writing is my weakest Spanish skill, by far.
My life is such that I really need my Spanish time to be relaxing. The thought of turning my Spanish time into something that requires a taxing mental effort is not appealing. I'd love to learn French to a usable level, but I just don't think I'd be able to handle serious "studying" right now. I've thought about just taking three or four months and pounding out French to a level where I can just take input. Hopefully sometime soon I'll develop the motivation and inspiration to just put in some hard work with French for a few months. The frustrating part is that I don't think it would take too much to get me to a usable input level in French... I just need to make the commitment. I will be scaling back my running this summer so maybe I'll just try to devote 20 minutes a day or something like that to French.