Friday update:
Feeling more positive this week, I am starting to be able to integrate Spanish into my life, it's s good feeling after struggling so much with how to move forward after finishing my courses.
Speaking: I have managed 18 hours of iTalki lessons this year so far (7 last year, so 25 hours in total) and I am finally starting to feel more comfortable with my speaking. I find myself trying to translate my English thoughts into Spanish these days, I still can't manage it most of the time but it's interesting that my brain feels the need to attempt such a thing. I'm not sure my speaking has improved much but I am much more comfortable with my butchering of it at least and I am finally feeling after 25 hours that my iTalki lessons aren't just a complete waste of my time.
Writing: I am still not really doing much, I am starting to feel like I should again. Not just for the challenge but for some reason I feel a strange compulsion to try and play with some of the sentences in my head. It's an odd feeling, not sure how to explain it. I am not sure how this will convert into me actually writing but we'll see.
Reading: Finally starting to pick up a little reading each day, it's definitely a lot easier after using Clozemaster so much. I have seen nearly 45,000 sentences in the past 3 months (0-500 most common words mostly) and when I picked up my kindle at the beginning of this week...I can read sentences, no more single words and constant look-ups. I haven't had much time this week but I've read 80 pages of my short stories book. I have been reading one short story and then the next time, I re-read it before reading the next story. My reading speed and comprehension is massively improved on the second pass. Seems the SC might be possible after all
Listening/Films: I only managed to watch one episode of Ministerio del Tiempo this week (Episode 4) and my comprehension was the worst so far, I missed huge chunks of it, couldn't follow it for some reason. I just couldn't process the Spanish fast enough and kept getting lost/left behind. I think I shall read the script and then attempt watching this episode again.
All in all though my comprehension accross the board is improving, I have racked up over 180 hours (definitely
minimum time spent, for example: I estimate my reading time spent based on my number of pages read, then calculate time using reading speed of a slow native reader and I am definitely much slower than that. I use a similar calculation for writing) of Spanish so far this year and I am now staring to feel the benefits. I have a 600 hour target in my head for this year...for some reason I wanted to see what difference 600 hours would make...I'm not sure why
Here are my totals so far...
Gotta love a spreadsheet