The outstanding tourist multi-tracks

[sfuqua]

OK, all is well.
I'm making steady progress, which makes for a boring blog, but enjoyable studying.

I've been doing glossika lately, and it does work more or less as advertised. I'm spitting out big long sentences in French, which make some sort of sense, but which probably have a ton of mistakes
Glossika isn't really a course as much as it is an activity. I think I need a better explicit understanding of the underlying grammar to speak or write optimally.
It does does come in nice 20-30 minute chunks.
I'm up to 23000 reps in both Spanish and French.
An FSI course is much closer to a complete language program.
It is a little frustrating sometimes, that so many promising language training strategies never get tested to any extent. Is it possible that language learning, at its simplest is:

1) Developing comprehension by receiving input that contains "i+1" and
2) Developing fluency by producing output that contains "o+1" (output things that you understand and contain structures that you haven't produced before).

I've been reading in both French and Spanish every day. I keep trying to read things in French that really too difficult for me. I'm pretty bored by material for children, and adult novels are pretty challenging still yet. I could read Harry Potter, but I don't want to.

I've made a few French novels into bilingual books, and I've been reading them in the easiest way possible, reading each sentence in English and then in French. I read each sentence this way until I understand the meaning of the whole sentence and then I move forward. I'm not really sure that a great deal of suffering is necessary for improvement in a language.

I probably won't need to do this very long, it seems to me that my French comprehension is exploding...
I'm really excited about getting into French literature...

[jeff_lindqvist]

I've been reading in both French and Spanish every day. I keep trying to read things in French that really too difficult for me. I'm pretty bored by material for children, and adult novels are pretty challenging still yet. I could read Harry Potter, but I don't want to.

What content do you read? How difficult is "too difficult"?

I've had a go at Deutsche Welle's Learning by Ear sections for French and Portuguese, plus the Veintemundos articles for Spanish. French is my weakest language of the three, but I can still follow what's going on by listening to the podcasts and reading the transcripts (I find it really beneficial to do both at the same time). As it happens, I follow the same series in Portuguese, so I already know the content. And for Spanish (my strongest language of the three), I've worked with Intermediate and Advanced articles without any major problems.

Doing this every day has really opened my eyes (ears?).

[sfuqua]

Learning by Ear looks like a great resource.

I'm going to play with it some tonight.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Yeah, I like it a lot. So far, I've only used podcast series with transcripts (and funnily enough, I don't read ahead as much as with "regular" L/R - maybe because I'm focusing on the learning aspect?).

[sfuqua]

I'm going to bring this log to an end.
I haven't been updating it, since I don't have much new to add.

Multitasking definitely is the way to go to push through the beginner stages of a language. It probably makes sense all the way up to C2.

What did I accomplish.
I got through 7 units of FSI French and FSI Spanish. FSI Spanish was harder than I expected, even though I had worked through these units a few years ago, they still took some effort.
FSI French was easier than I expected. I had it all built up in my mind that it would be too hard for me, but it was just regular hard, not too hard.

I read at least 5 pages of one of the languages each day.

Trying to multitask two languages, one of which is at the beginner level, demands patience. Everything takes twice as long when you're trying to do two languages.

In a couple of personal notes, I had an abusive supervisor for a couple of years; I've never seen anyone like her. I received bad evaluations, and I had to do a bunch of busy work as she tried to get me to resign or retire. She had been reassigned, now she has been fired. Now I just have to get through clearing up the damage done to my record from the bad evaluations.

We have had a bad health scare for my wife. She has been ill for about 6 weeks, with a variety of nasty symptoms. Her physicians kept trying things and doing tests while she got worse and worse. After a bunch of unpleasant invasive tests; she and I talked through things and read all of her health information in her file, including her medications... We noticed that there could be a rare interaction between her medications. Her physician looked at what we found and agreed that it was worth a test...and... The first day without one of her medications, she said that she thought she felt better. The second day she got out of bed. By the third day there was a sparkle back in her eyes...today she went back to work

As I've found in other personal crises, language study makes a nice change from sitting around thinking about problems.
I'm going to start another log to track my progress through the superchallenge.