Un repaso de español
Posted: Wed May 02, 2018 11:32 am
I've been meaning to start a log for about six months or so. The problem has been site access. Downtime at work is when I catch up on stuff like Reddit and other forums. This site has been considered "dangerous" by the proxy filter at work since I joined it. There's nothing you can do about it but wait until inexplicably sites become "safe" even though there was nothing wrong with them in the first place - that happened this week - finally.
My languages have largely atrophied over the years - work has been busy but family commitments have played the major part over the last decade. Since the autumn of last year, there's been a change and that together with some embryonic plans to move to Spain in the next couple of years have provided the opportunity and motive to refocus on Spanish - in particular, Peninsular Spanish.
So this first post is more of a recap than anything.
The biggest initial problem seemed to me to be resources. I have a large number of Spanish learning materials collected over the years all of which I surveyed with little enthusiasm - been there - done that - and of course there would be nothing new available anyway would there? That proved to a wrong assumption!
First thing I came across that piqued my interest and that I hadn't seen before was Glossika. I read a lot of the reviews and after a bit of an online struggle, I managed to find a list of the recommended schedules some of which were targetted at people doing a language "re-activation". My timing seemed pretty bad as Glossika was about to ditch its old product base in favour of a shiny new one. I tried the new one; it has a number of drawbacks the major one being it was too expensive. So I purchased the "old" Peninsular Spanish at a discount. I've always worked on the basis of one primary resource with everything else fitting round that so as the re-activation schedules don't allow for much else it was Glossika, Glossika Glossika with a bit of other stuff as well.
Glossika, as delivered, proved a bit of a frustration. I loved the premise - language patterns delivered in an easy to assimilate format and spaced repetition built-in. What I didn't like were the errors... and there seemed to be lots... and this I gather was Peninsular Spanish second time around with all material re-recorded. So I stopped using it as delivered before Christmas and ended up putting the entirety of the "fixed" sentences into Anki using Awesome TTS to generated audio male-based audio (changing endings where needed in the sentences as well of course). The early sentences I suspended as I'd already done them so I worked through the rest and finished in January.
My overall impression is that I would have purchased additional old-style courses from them if they were still available to re-activate my other languages even though I think they do tend to overdo some patterns. I lost the will to live with the number of "preferir = to rather do something" sentences.
Other resources tinkered with over the same period:
Speechling: Very like the new Glossika, probably better, has an app and can be used for free. I haven't persisted with it as there is no Peninsular Spanish option.
Linqvist: Tried it for a bit until the "everything for free" option ran out at the end of the year (IIRC). Didn't bother paying for it after that.
Clozemaster: I tried very hard to like this and a number of people rave about it but I didn't get on with it. For one thing, I didn't feel like I was learning anything, for another, the TTS Peninsular Spanish voice is beyond annoying:
https://www.reddit.com/r/clozemaster/co ... is_really/
As I could see light at the end of the Glossika tunnel over Christmas, I decided to begin taking a look at my Listening Comprehension. A holiday to Mexico last summer had highlighted that while face-to-face interactions in Spanish were ok, general listening to Mexican TV and conversations around me were not. I've used Yabla a lot in the past so I re-subscribed to that. The problem was I struggled to find anything I wanted to listen to. I enjoyed "Los Años Maravillosos" - the Colombian version of "The Wonder Years" but that was a grand total of about 30 minutes divided into a few short clips. Other than that, I barely watched anything on it.
So I decided to take another look at Spanish language TV - I could access some Mexican telenovelas via VPN but the performance was poor. However, RTVE proved a goldmine. The last time I watched anything on there was Season 1 of Águila Roja - if you don't know it, it's a somewhat cheesy Zorro-style drama. This time there was lots of stuff to choose from. Also about this time, I began noticing posts on Reddit give recommendations for programs on Netflix.
I used to subscribe to Netflix but as we were also Amazon Prime customers when Amazon's Prime Video service was launched we got it initially for nothing so I cancelled. Amazon Prime Video is cr*p for foreign language TV so I hadn't considered Netflix. My old account had long since been deleted so I signed up for the free period to see if some of the stuff was also available on Netflix UK - nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Result: Tons of stuff to watch. The base price was not much more than Yabla (which I wasn't using anyway) so I cancelled that and decided to continue with Netflix.
What else?
I saw Kwiziq mentioned here and decided to take a look. I explored the site, liked what I saw, did the placement test and got placed C1 and signed up. Initially, it wasn't clear to me what to do next as there didn't appear to be any C1 material. I emailed them and was told to follow the Kwizbot recommended B2 material which I proceeded to do.
However, very shortly after I suffered an attack of OCD as I kept seeing the 0% values against the other levels in my Kwiziq Dashboard as well as a very empty brain map. In the end, I ended up doing every single topic on the site including the not so obvious C1 stuff (of which there isn't a great deal). It cost me a total of 1 months' subscription but I feel it was valuable as a grammar refresher. I may well re-subscribe once they get enough new C1 content to make it worth my while.
I wonder how their business model will play out. They can't add content forever and I think they will need to add other activities to keep their subscribers on board. One thing it lacks is any SRS aspect once you've got to 100% on a topic. Your test history on that topic shows the degree of difficulty you had in getting to 100% and appropriately spaced retests is maybe something they should be looking at.
Next up: what I'm currently doing.
My languages have largely atrophied over the years - work has been busy but family commitments have played the major part over the last decade. Since the autumn of last year, there's been a change and that together with some embryonic plans to move to Spain in the next couple of years have provided the opportunity and motive to refocus on Spanish - in particular, Peninsular Spanish.
So this first post is more of a recap than anything.
The biggest initial problem seemed to me to be resources. I have a large number of Spanish learning materials collected over the years all of which I surveyed with little enthusiasm - been there - done that - and of course there would be nothing new available anyway would there? That proved to a wrong assumption!
First thing I came across that piqued my interest and that I hadn't seen before was Glossika. I read a lot of the reviews and after a bit of an online struggle, I managed to find a list of the recommended schedules some of which were targetted at people doing a language "re-activation". My timing seemed pretty bad as Glossika was about to ditch its old product base in favour of a shiny new one. I tried the new one; it has a number of drawbacks the major one being it was too expensive. So I purchased the "old" Peninsular Spanish at a discount. I've always worked on the basis of one primary resource with everything else fitting round that so as the re-activation schedules don't allow for much else it was Glossika, Glossika Glossika with a bit of other stuff as well.
Glossika, as delivered, proved a bit of a frustration. I loved the premise - language patterns delivered in an easy to assimilate format and spaced repetition built-in. What I didn't like were the errors... and there seemed to be lots... and this I gather was Peninsular Spanish second time around with all material re-recorded. So I stopped using it as delivered before Christmas and ended up putting the entirety of the "fixed" sentences into Anki using Awesome TTS to generated audio male-based audio (changing endings where needed in the sentences as well of course). The early sentences I suspended as I'd already done them so I worked through the rest and finished in January.
My overall impression is that I would have purchased additional old-style courses from them if they were still available to re-activate my other languages even though I think they do tend to overdo some patterns. I lost the will to live with the number of "preferir = to rather do something" sentences.
Other resources tinkered with over the same period:
Speechling: Very like the new Glossika, probably better, has an app and can be used for free. I haven't persisted with it as there is no Peninsular Spanish option.
Linqvist: Tried it for a bit until the "everything for free" option ran out at the end of the year (IIRC). Didn't bother paying for it after that.
Clozemaster: I tried very hard to like this and a number of people rave about it but I didn't get on with it. For one thing, I didn't feel like I was learning anything, for another, the TTS Peninsular Spanish voice is beyond annoying:
https://www.reddit.com/r/clozemaster/co ... is_really/
As I could see light at the end of the Glossika tunnel over Christmas, I decided to begin taking a look at my Listening Comprehension. A holiday to Mexico last summer had highlighted that while face-to-face interactions in Spanish were ok, general listening to Mexican TV and conversations around me were not. I've used Yabla a lot in the past so I re-subscribed to that. The problem was I struggled to find anything I wanted to listen to. I enjoyed "Los Años Maravillosos" - the Colombian version of "The Wonder Years" but that was a grand total of about 30 minutes divided into a few short clips. Other than that, I barely watched anything on it.
So I decided to take another look at Spanish language TV - I could access some Mexican telenovelas via VPN but the performance was poor. However, RTVE proved a goldmine. The last time I watched anything on there was Season 1 of Águila Roja - if you don't know it, it's a somewhat cheesy Zorro-style drama. This time there was lots of stuff to choose from. Also about this time, I began noticing posts on Reddit give recommendations for programs on Netflix.
I used to subscribe to Netflix but as we were also Amazon Prime customers when Amazon's Prime Video service was launched we got it initially for nothing so I cancelled. Amazon Prime Video is cr*p for foreign language TV so I hadn't considered Netflix. My old account had long since been deleted so I signed up for the free period to see if some of the stuff was also available on Netflix UK - nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Result: Tons of stuff to watch. The base price was not much more than Yabla (which I wasn't using anyway) so I cancelled that and decided to continue with Netflix.
What else?
I saw Kwiziq mentioned here and decided to take a look. I explored the site, liked what I saw, did the placement test and got placed C1 and signed up. Initially, it wasn't clear to me what to do next as there didn't appear to be any C1 material. I emailed them and was told to follow the Kwizbot recommended B2 material which I proceeded to do.
However, very shortly after I suffered an attack of OCD as I kept seeing the 0% values against the other levels in my Kwiziq Dashboard as well as a very empty brain map. In the end, I ended up doing every single topic on the site including the not so obvious C1 stuff (of which there isn't a great deal). It cost me a total of 1 months' subscription but I feel it was valuable as a grammar refresher. I may well re-subscribe once they get enough new C1 content to make it worth my while.
I wonder how their business model will play out. They can't add content forever and I think they will need to add other activities to keep their subscribers on board. One thing it lacks is any SRS aspect once you've got to 100% on a topic. Your test history on that topic shows the degree of difficulty you had in getting to 100% and appropriately spaced retests is maybe something they should be looking at.
Next up: what I'm currently doing.