ScooterZ's Spanish Log

[iguanamon]

I don't obsess, I get to a point with each episode where I am happy that I know enough.
I used to obsess but I found two things happened...
A) I forgot half of it and that was frustrating.
B) I got bored because I spent so long in each activity - I lost momentum.
I find momentum very useful for taking me through courses, series, books etc. ...

If I could vote for Bex' post a hundred times, I would. One of the biggest traps I've seen adult monolingual learners fall into is trying to suck every last drop out of a resource. Momentum is hugely important. "Moving on" allows a learner to build momentum and that momentum keeps them moving forward. The momentum builds on itself and snowballs. Words repeat, grammar repeats. You'll see it again in different contexts. Eventually, it will start to stick. The synergy of the two courses will help with this.

[ScooterZ]

If I could vote for Bex' post a hundred times, I would. One of the biggest traps I've seen adult monolingual learners fall into is trying to suck every last drop out of a resource. Momentum is hugely important. "Moving on" allows a learner to build momentum and that momentum keeps them moving forward. The momentum builds on itself and snowballs. Words repeat, grammar repeats. You'll see it again in different contexts. Eventually, it will start to stick. The synergy of the two courses will help with this.

I hear you. I know you are right about this. I guess part of me is very impatient. I want to learn all the things, like yesterday already. By the way I am over 50 and learning Spanish is new to me, though I did "take" a couple of other languages in high school and college. That is I took them but they did not take. lol.

Now over the past few years I have made some very close friends in Spain, and they do not speak English. (We met through a third person who has been there twice with me and that person ended up doing a lot of translation...something I want to avoid in the future.)

So there is a chance I may get back to Spain winter of 2019 and I want to know...well, everything. I'm just champing at the bit on this.

For example, according to Mark Davies knowing 231 verbs will give me about 91% coverage on all my verb usage for spoken Spanish. I want to cram all those conjugations into my head RIGHT NOW.

Another part of me is like, well hold up now Hoss. Get through Assimil and Destinos, flip through 20 new words on Anki every day, and then, at the end of 4-6 months of being diligent with those tools, start conjugating verbs for practice.

It seems like there is so much to get done in a year. I want to be as efficient as possible and learn as much as I can in the next twelve months.

Scooter

[ScooterZ]

1) I am pretty much staying on task with everything and trying to keep my updates current using those cool little bars in my signature.

2) At first, my plan was to watch each Destinos episode 7 times (once a day every day of the week) but that got kinda boring. Maybe I'll have to be that attentive in the future but for now I'm watching Destinos twice a day but each episode only three times before I move on to the next one. So the pattern now is to watch an episode without subtitles, then with Spanish subtitles (trying to repeat the narrator parts and the parts where Raquel speaks into the camera) and then watch it all again without the subtitles. I look up some things that often turn out to be idiomatic, like "falta poco."

3) I'm enjoying Assimil. I am not sure if it is sticking, though.

4) Anki is enjoyable too. And I am surprised at how often a word I'm stuck on in Anki comes up in Destinos or Assimil (or both). The multitrack process is a good thing.

5) I'm having fun learning to trill my r. I'm surprisingly good at it *if* the r is at the beginning of a word, even better if it is at the beginning of a sentence. The rr is a little harder for me, especially if I try to talk "fast." (That is in quotes because, well, I'm sure my "fast" is still pretty slow.) I'm trying to figure out how to talk faster with the trill. Part of the problem, I think, is that native American English speakers have a lot of vowel sounds that are pronounced in the back of the mouth, maybe even more so with Southern accents. Most of my Southern accent is gone but a lot of vowels (like my "i") come from somewhere way back there. Spanish feels more like it should all be pronounced in the front of the mouth. I think keeping my vowels in the front as much as possible might help me attack those rr trills more quickly. I don't know. Anyone else have an opinion on this? De todas formas, the goal now is to annunciate as clearly as possible and hope the speed just comes.

6) I have not yet started any formal grammar study. That means I have not yet sat down and done focused exercises conjugating verbs. As I mentioned in one of my first posts, I plan to do Destinos/Assimil, followed by telenovelas/FSI. I think I am a fan of both comprehensible input and the audiolingual method... although this is the first time I have tried this so I am learning as I am going.

^^^Where do focused grammar exercises (especially conjugating verbs) fit in a scheme like this? Is it too early to worry about that now?

Thanks for all the tips/hint/advice.

[ScooterZ]

I have been binge-watching Destinos... good for for my learning Spanish? Not so good? I guess it doesn't matter since I'll probably keep watching it obsessively until I'm bored. I'm really finding it addictive.

My goals are on track, plus I have ordered some of the Practice Makes Perfect books to answer grammar questions I might have.

So far, so good.