Paul's Spanish 2018 - Still Meandering Toward Fluency

[PaleoPaul]

Long chapter last night but I did manage to get my speed down below 5 mins/page. I'm hoping to get through 5 or 6 chapters this weekend. Here's the words that made it into my Memrise course...
a pesar de ...
el atardecer
la red
el teclado
el talon
una pila

I also watched the first 10 minutes of "Humano". This is a documentary on Netflix about a man's search for the meaning of life. So, you know, pretty light hearted fare. It actually works out pretty well for a language learner because the dialog is quite slow and somewhat intermittent. I'll probably keep watching.

[PaleoPaul]

Week 3 Progress

Blah - missed opportunity this weekend - I feel like I barely did any Spanish. I actually ended up with 3 hours work, including an hour lesson with my Italki teacher from BA and some Memrise and a single (short) chapter of my current book, El Alquimista. I was hoping to knock out several chapters, but oh well.

I did get through all 50 of my Words of the Week on Memrise. I also finished entering this week's words into the course and started the list for the next week in my paper notebook.

My lesson went ok. It had been three weeks since my last lesson and I could tell my spoken Spanish was extra rusty. We usually start out with 15-20 minutes of casual chat (how was your New Year's Eve, what are your plans for the weekend...) and I really felt like I was struggling for vocab and sentence structure. My wife walked through the room in the middle of this part of the lesson and she said I sounded nervous. I didn't feel nervous but clearly I wasn't on top of my spoken Spanish game. I think this is mostly to do with lack of practice (duh).

I had originally planned on changing teachers since my current teacher's schedule is a bit limiting. She only has three slots open on Saturday mornings (6-7, 7-8, 9-10). The 9am-10am slot is pretty good for me but I am apparently competing with someone else for this slot. I spent some time on Friday looking at other potential teachers on Italki but surprisingly few have Saturday morning hours, or if they do their hourly rate is too high, or if their rate is not too high, then their preview video is terrible. (I'm so picky) The longer I looked at other teacher profiles the more I liked my current teacher. So I asked if she could open up a slot from 10-11 on Saturday mornings which she could not, but she would open up the 8-9am slot. This is not ideal since Saturdays are my only day to sleep late but I decided I am serious enough about making progress to commit to this early class. So, I am now booked into the 8-9am slot every week until mid-April.

I did get a total of 643 minutes of Spanish work done this week which is less than last week's 801 but still very respectable and way better than I was doing last year.

[Bex]

... I spent some time on Friday looking at other potential teachers on Italki but surprisingly few have Saturday morning hours, or if they do their hourly rate is too high, or if their rate is not too high, then their preview video is terrible. (I'm so picky)

I spent ages doing this when looking for my Spanish teacher but I have ended up with a teacher that I nearly didn't try because his preview video was terrible but now that I have had a few lessons with him, I now know that he was just nervous in his preview video!

The thing that made me try him in the end was the amount of repeat sessions people were booking. He has students who have booked over 100 sessions. Most of his students come back for repeat lessons, 80+ lessons is not unusual and since the iTalki reviews don't really mean much, (because they're not anonymous)... if you ever need to book another teacher, bear in mind that repeat bookings by students tell you way more than the reviews

Oh and he is really cheap too....probably helps

Edited: terrible grammar

[PaleoPaul]

... I spent some time on Friday looking at other potential teachers on Italki but surprisingly few have Saturday morning hours, or if they do their hourly rate is too high, or if their rate is not too high, then their preview video is terrible. (I'm so picky)

I spent ages doing this when looking for my Spanish teacher but I have ended up with a teacher that I nearly didn't try because his preview video was terrible but now that I have had a few lessons with him, I now know that he was just nervous in his preview video!

The thing that made me try him in the end was the amount of repeat sessions people were booking. He has students who have booked over 100 sessions. Most of his students come back for repeat lessons, 80+ lessons is not unusual and since the iTalki reviews don't really mean much, (because they're not anonymous)... if you ever need to book another teacher, bear in mind that repeat bookings by students tell you way more than the reviews

Oh and he is really cheap too....probably helps

Edited: terrible grammar

This is so true. I had almost decided to try another instructor whose video was good but she had only given 8 lessons. Her rate was really low (I guess to encourage people to try her out). My current instructor is approaching 3000 lessons and many of her students have taken more than 100 lessons with her. I agree that that is a really good indicator.

[Bex]

I had almost decided to try another instructor whose video was good but she had only given 8 lessons. Her rate was really low (I guess to encourage people to try her out.

Maybe try her and it only wastes 30 mins if she's not suitable. But it's worth it to have a backup teacher for when yours is unavailable. Sometimes the new teachers are the most enthusiastic...

...sounds like your teacher is fab though! Good teachers are definately worth changing your schedule for