rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
rpg
Orange Belt
Posts: 153
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 2:21 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (B2), French (B2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8368
x 466

Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Mon Mar 22, 2021 10:55 pm

Even though I just said I'm going to continue with Lingoda, I get pretty frustrated with some of the teachers.

If we're on a slide for a new vocabulary word, please stop asking me what the word means, for the love of God. How the hell should I know? You tell me!

When we have new words, please pronounce them at least one time for me! How am I supposed to pronounce this word correctly if I never hear you say it! You're the native speaker here! This is the entire reason I'm paying you!

Stop extending the exercises on the slides with more complicated versions. It's a friggin A1 class. If I'm learning the word for bandage, don't ask me when I need to use a bandage. I don't know! The curriculum knows I don't know! There's a reason the lesson materials don't ask this stuff!

Stop asking me for synonyms of the vocabulary words. I don't know. Don't ask me how to turn the noun you gave me into an adjective. I. Don't. Know.

You're not friggin Socrates. Your job is not to spend the whole class asking me questions about things I don't know trying to get me to speak as much as possible. I am, again, an *A1* student. I am in this class to listen to *you*. I can't say shit right now. I don't *want* to say things right now outside of a very limited range of things that are within my grasp. "I have a dog"? Ok. "The dog jumped into the pool"? No way José.

Whatever. I can try to avoid the teachers who do this. But it just makes me mad and makes me want to quit this godforsaken platform altogether.
7 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

User avatar
Pikaia
Yellow Belt
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Sep 18, 2015 9:23 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (a bit), French (a bit less)
x 165

Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German, Mandarin

Postby Pikaia » Thu Mar 25, 2021 5:03 pm

Oh my goodness, I was reading your blog to learn more about Lingoda, but your rant about the ridiculous things teachers ask is cracking me up, so I had to reply. My personal favorite example of this is the time when the instructor of a beginner level group Spanish class wanted us to take turns guessing the pronunciation of words in an indigenous language, specifically the names of people and places in a folk legend. Um, nope. That’s not what I’m here for. And my classmates? They were stumbling over words like habitación, so “Iztaccíhuatl” and “Citlaltepetl” were definitely out of reach. Maybe the teacher was amusing himself? Maybe I have no sense of humor?
3 x

rpg
Orange Belt
Posts: 153
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 2:21 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (B2), French (B2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8368
x 466

Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Thu Mar 25, 2021 6:28 pm

Pikaia wrote:Oh my goodness, I was reading your blog to learn more about Lingoda, but your rant about the ridiculous things teachers ask is cracking me up, so I had to reply. My personal favorite example of this is the time when the instructor of a beginner level group Spanish class wanted us to take turns guessing the pronunciation of words in an indigenous language, specifically the names of people and places in a folk legend. Um, nope. That’s not what I’m here for. And my classmates? They were stumbling over words like habitación, so “Iztaccíhuatl” and “Citlaltepetl” were definitely out of reach. Maybe the teacher was amusing himself? Maybe I have no sense of humor?


Hah! I actually felt a little bad about posting that since it was pretty indecorous. I was in a pretty bad class when I wrote that. The idea of beginner Spanish students trying to muddle through those names is cracking me up!

Let me know if I can help with anything you want to know about Lingoda that I can help with, by the way. As far as I know not many others on the forum have spent much time taking classes there. It's also worth noting that they have a 25% off sale that ends tomorrow.
2 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
Orange Belt
Posts: 153
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 2:21 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (B2), French (B2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8368
x 466

Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Mon Mar 29, 2021 1:30 am

Ok, time for this week's summary update.

German is rolling along smoothly with another week's classes down. Started watching a compilation of all the A1 Nicos Weg videos too just to have something else level-appropriate. It's only an hour and a half though.

Spanish is going swimmingly--I finally caught up to where I'm supposed to be for the film half of the Super Challenge, thanks to another 4 episodes of Vis a vis (this show is amazing so far, btw, though I can't watch more than one episode a day because of how intense it is) and one of El ministerio del tiempo. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I'm not ready to put on the breaks just yet because I'm in the middle of all this good content. I think simply finishing Vis a vis and El ministerio del tiempo might be enough by themselves to complete the challenge, actually... In other Spanish news I sailed past 1000 flashcards this week. My flashcards aren't giving me 100% mastery of the words they contain (of course) and I've noticed that a few times I've had words fly by me that were in a flashcard and I had to look them up again before I realized, or it took me quite a few seconds to remember what they meant. That's okay, I don't mind. I see everything as reinforcing everything else and big picture I know my Spanish vocabulary has been growing a lot.

French is also going ok. I watched Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite and L'Atalante (the latter a rewatch). Unfortunately all my remaining blu-rays don't work with my player so while I wait for a region-free player to arrive I'll need to focus on Netflix--speaking of which, I watched only one episode of H this week. I'm going to try to watch another today and hopefully a bunch more this week.

But actually the big update for French is that I've finally managed to get myself reading; I finished Le Petit Nicolas and have purchased another one in the series to start reading next. The stories go by pretty quickly so I'm hoping to get through all the books over the next couple months. It feels like cheating to log these as full pages since the books have some illustrations and I think the pages are a little smaller than normal (if I recall from seeing them in Paris; I'm reading on my Kindle now). Still I'm going to do it anyway because I can't find the word count easily and count that as 153 pages.
3 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
Orange Belt
Posts: 153
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 2:21 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (B2), French (B2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8368
x 466

Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Mon Apr 05, 2021 1:00 am

I updated my log title to remove Mandarin given how long it's been since I've spent any time on it and how I don't have any immediate plans to change that. It pains my soul a little bit to admit it, but I only have so many hours a day and making progress in three languages at once is hard enough as it is.

In general I didn't do as much language work this week as I've been busier with work (or busier stressing out about work, at the very least).

In German I have finished another week of classes. These were surprisingly easy and I think at one point the classroom materials even tried claim "und" and "oder" as vocabulary words. I think these classes must have originally been designed for earlier on in the A1 curriculum but I'm not really sure. I'm almost done with the sprint; I only have a week and a half of classes left. I'll save more detailed thoughts about it until after it's over.

In Spanish I watched only one episode of TV this week, one of Vis a vis. I only have one episode left in season 1. On the reading front I'm still making slow progress in Corazón tan blanco but it hasn't been much of a focus, only a few pages a day on average. My Anki deck continues to grow at a steady pace and is now just under 1200 cards.

In French I read a bit over half of my next Petit Nicolas book (Les Récrés du Petit Nicolas). I think I'll try to finish this one and start the next one before next week's update. On the film side, I watched 5 episodes of H, finishing season 1, and since my region-free player arrived I watched another Alain Resnais film: L'année dernière à Marienbad.

With 9 months remaining in the Super Challenge (around 39 weeks), every week I need to:

  • watch 1.7 hours of Spanish
  • watch 3.3 hours of French
  • read around 125 pages in each language.

so I will judge my progress with these in mind. Ideally I surpass them to bring down the needed amount in future weeks. Even though I've for the most part given up hope on accomplishing the reading part, 125 pages / week isn't impossible, but it is far higher volume than I've been doing. Maybe if I can finish the film part early I can use the extra time to attack the reading more aggressively. Or maybe not. For now I'll continue my Petit Nicolas and approach it one book at a time.
5 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
Orange Belt
Posts: 153
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 2:21 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (B2), French (B2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8368
x 466

Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Mon Apr 12, 2021 4:07 am

I'll try to be brief because I'm busy and have been busy with work these past days:

In German I finished my last full week of the sprint. Only three more classes!

In French I finished Les récrés du Petit Nicolas and started the next one (Les vacances du Petit Nicolas). On the film front, I watched the first two episodes of season 2 of H, another episode of Au service de la France, and Jacques Tati's first film Jour de fête (a little lackluster tbh).

I tried pulling back on Spanish this week and yet I still ended up watching two episodes of Vis a vis (the last of S1 and the first of S2) because I've been enjoying it so much. I'm also nearly caught up in Corazón tan blanco to where I was the last time I tried reading it.
3 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
Orange Belt
Posts: 153
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 2:21 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (B2), French (B2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8368
x 466

Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:53 am

I was in such a hurry on Sunday that I forgot to mention something on Sunday: I discovered last week that I can actually understand a very fair amount of spoken Italian. I experimented putting on a Luca video in Italian just for fun and could generally understand a lot of what was being said (though obviously a fair bit went by me too). The only study of Italian I've ever done was around 7 weeks or so of Assimil a couple years ago, but I think the handful of function words I still remember from that (stuff like anche) combined with (more importantly) my Spanish+French knowledge are enough to give me a surprising amount of passive comprehension.

A related thought I've been having recently is that the work I'm doing on my Spanish vocab may be expanding my Romance vocabulary in general. Learning less common vocabulary now is expanding my knowledge of general Romance words/roots, as opposed to say starting a new Romance language where the early words would often be cognate to words I already know (expanding my knowledge of that particular language but not necessarily helping other languages). I learned recently the rather specific Spanish verb auscultar (to listen to somebody's chest/body, probably with a stethoscope; apparently we have the English word "auscultate" which is surely much rarer). Anyway, I was reading my Petit Nicolas stories last week and lo and behold in a story about doctor exams there's the French verb ausculter. Language transfer in action.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that I've tentatively signed up for a college Spanish course for this summer. It's not for another three months so there's still a lot of time to withdraw, but I'd been eyeing it and I wanted to get my name down before it filled up. The course is an intro to literary study type course that's required for all students (including native speakers) before they take upper division Spanish literature courses, so it's more of a course that uses Spanish rather than one that teaches it. It's the next course after four semesters of language courses or after a 5 on AP Spanish, which isn't that high of a level, so I think my Spanish level should be more than sufficient.

I signed up for a few reasons: one, I may in the future want to take some of those upper-division literature courses if it works out, and I'm more generally interested in learning formally about Spanish language literature; two, I want to get some practice using Spanish in an academic environment, and to get some writing practice (the class involves writing a few short papers); and three, I'm addicted to structured learning opportunities like this and find it much easier to sign up for a course that requires me to spend 100h on Spanish than to actually carve out those hours one at a time.

Which brings me to the time commitment commitment: it's 4d x 2h for six weeks. It's online this summer (good--very convenient for me) but it's during my work day (bad). But the timing is around lunchtime, so I'm hoping I can just block out a 2h "do not schedule" block without causing too much controversy. It doesn't conflict with any important standing meetings, which is good--not sure I could get away with missing our biweekly team meetings for six weeks, for example. Beyond the lecture time I'm guessing I'd need to spend 10h a week or so, maybe less--since I think my Spanish level is probably higher than the average non-native taking this course, I'm not too worried about the workload, since I imagine it'll be easier for me. Anyway, we'll see how work is going and if I need to withdraw.
5 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
Orange Belt
Posts: 153
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 2:21 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (B2), French (B2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8368
x 466

Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Mon Apr 19, 2021 7:17 am

The past few days have been a little troublesome at home for some personal reasons. The effects on my language learning have been mixed: I've done a very poor job of keeping up with my Spanish flashcards this week / adding new ones (hopefully I can work down the backlog tonight and tomorrow), and I haven't read much either, but somehow I've still watched a lot of content.

Oh yes, and in German I finished the Lingoda Super Sprint. I'm expecting to get my money back but it'll be another month or so before I get official word one way or the other. Overall it was a fairly good experience. There were times when I got frustrated (see above) or bored in my classes and other times when I was very pleased. I started from absolute 0 and I think the classes at the very beginning were the best--they were really challenging and the sense of progress I felt even over the first couple weeks was enormous. As time went on I think my level started diverging a bit from some of the other participants (I'll be charitable and say it's because they didn't have a Germanic native language like I do, nor as much general language learning experience) and that could be frustrating at times. Overall however I do think that I accomplished the goal of reaching A1 in German over the last three months.

What next? I'm going to branch out a little bit. I'm trying Lingoda private classes now at the A2 level and we'll see how those go. I'm also starting with Chatterbug. I want to compare the two more directly and see which one I like more for my level. Finally I might try to work the Dino lernt Deutsch readers into my routine in one way or another though I haven't figured out the best way how yet.

In Spanish I mentioned that I've fallen behind on my flashcards. The immediate challenge will be to simply catch back up and to repair the habit. I did nonetheless watch two episodes of Vis a vis, which actually brings me 1h ahead of schedule for the film portion of the SC.

In French I've been making a more conscious effort to watch things and the stats bear that out this week. I watched three films (Bresson's L'argent, Tati's Les Vacances de M. Hulot [a re-watch], and Melville's Le samouraï). I'm not sure this was amazing language practice, frankly, since the Tati film had very little dialogue and the Melville one opened with 10m of silence (maybe I should rewatch Rififi for that 45m completely silent heist portion...). The two episodes of H I watched may have been worth more for language learning than the three films combined...
4 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
Orange Belt
Posts: 153
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 2:21 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (B2), French (B2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8368
x 466

Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Mon Apr 26, 2021 7:38 am

Well, it hasn't been a great week for language learning... I've been busy with some personal stuff at the start of the week and busy stressing out about work stuff the rest of the time.

In German I've done 5 Lingoda classes this week, and I have 6 booked this week (every day except one, when I have something else going on). I'm actually not sure yet if these 1:1 classes are really that markedly better than the group classes, though the seed of doubt may also have been planted by watching a recent panel with one of the Lingoda founders where he claimed that that's what they found. We'll see. I think I do get more speaking practice this way but it may be debatable how valuable that really is for me right now.

In French I have done almost nothing. No reading and only one measly episode of H. Really need to ramp this up for next week.

In Spanish I watched two more episodes of Vis a vis (can't keep me away from this show...). My Anki backlog was growing uncomfortably earlier in the week so I've been slowly bringing it back down to 0 the last couple days. I don't want to clear everything out in one long session or I'm going to be creating some uncomfortable review patterns, so I'm trying to smooth it out over some days and I'll hopefully get it back to normal within the next day or two.

Beyond that, I've been flirting with the idea of going back to Mandarin somehow (except I'm already trying to make progress in three languages and so clearly don't have time...).

The other thing I've been thinking about is how in the past I've taken a few months off work to go do intensive language classes (20-30h/w). At the time I thought this was supercharging my learning, since at 100h/month you can make a lot of progress fairly quickly. Now I'm less certain that this is so special, at least on the scale of a few months at a time. I took something like 225 or 250h of Spanish classes when I was in Latin America a few years ago. If I had just taken 1h/day of class from home, however, it would have taken me around 8 months or so for the same. That's not so unreasonable. Okay, I spent a lot of time on Spanish during that period outside of the classes, so it would have been more than just that. But even still, I think my progress would have been achievable from home.

With study for longer durations I suppose the difference becomes clearer. A full year of full-time intensive study for a difficult language, like I now dream of doing some day, would take several years part-time to match. As we talk about these long time periods, though, we also raise some questions of, well, "why?" Don't I have other things I want to do in my life? Good questions indeed, and why I'm taking my 1h/day German now instead of galavanting around Germany.

Anyway, I don't want to get ahead of myself too much... time to get back to focusing on making progress every week while holding down my job, and being satisfied with that for now.
5 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
Orange Belt
Posts: 153
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 2:21 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (B2), French (B2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8368
x 466

Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Tue May 04, 2021 1:11 am

Work has been going poorly and with it my language learning efforts; I have little to report for last week except that I took another six German classes on Lingoda and that I watched one more episode of H. I think I'm going to quit that show if I can get some better stuff to watch instead, because the sexist and racist material is getting to be too much for me.

Frankly I expect the next two weeks will be poor as well for language learning, though hopefully I can still get more done than last week.
1 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests