Not all those who wander are lost

[sfuqua]

I'm also wathcing random Spanish language teleserye (is that the right word? It is in the Philippines). Maybe I'll try to get something organized.
For some reason, my general comprehension of TV Spanish is better than it ever way before. I've noticed this before, sometimes it seems tthat my listening comprehension of a language gets better when I take a break from it. It's just an impression, of course, I have not data to back it up. Maybe I forget how well I could understand.

Now, I'm getting back to my story.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Doing these reading and audio-lingual drills are making my brain "ring" with Spanish. Several hours a day with an L2 will do that. I fall asleep with Spanish echoing in my head. I wake up with Spanish in my head and roll over and start reading.

Have you seen this topic?
DIN hypothesis

[sfuqua]

I remember reading that paper a few years ago, Jeff. I forgot about it. I suppose that is what is happening. Maybe some people can learn languages up to a high level by just studying, but it seems to me that most mortals need to spend time using a language in order to get to high levels with the language.

Well, after 76 pages on my reboot of Spanish reading, my reading is spinning up quickly. In case somebody reads this who is just at the point of starting extensive reading, one thing I noticed was that, in the early stages, I read faster by slowing down. I think it is similar to what happens when you are learning a new piece on an instrument. One teacher I had used to say, "slow down until you can play it perfectly, and only increase the speed when you can do it effortlessly." One of the things I had to relearn in restarting Spanish was how slowly I had to read. Now that it is getting easier, I find myself speeding up.

Slow down to speed up. One of the things I've been noticing is that I can somehow understand sentences, even if I couldn't tell you the meaning of all the words in the sentence. You probably do this when reading in your native language; plenty of research shows that you don't read every single word when reading at full speed in your native language. I think that when you start to do this in your L2, your ability goes way up to cruise through partially known words.

I suspect that this leads to good activity for rapid language learning.

[sfuqua]

I got carried away yesterday and read 25 pages of an Alan Furst novel, and I decided to count it, so I changed the label on my bars to 20000 pages and I also included the 7000 pages from my first bout of extensive reading. I watched 7 hours of "Ingobernable" on Netflix. My understanding is imperfect, but actually pretty good. "Ingobernable" has plenty of sex and violence, and it has Kate Del Castillo, and my wife and I will probably finish the two seasons there are on Netflix. The president of Mexico's desk has a lot of interesting things done on it. I doubt if the president of the United States's desk has seen anything like that since the 90s. (I sort of doubt that the actual desk of the actual president of Mexico has such an interesting time either). In Ingobernable, my wife watches with the subtitles and I try to keep my eyes off them. We miss our Filipino teleserye. I mean, nobody has had amnesia in one of our shows since Corona virus shut down production in the Philippines. FSI has been going smoothly. In a way it is too easy. I'm going to add shadowing Assimil Spanish to my "speaking mix". I think that my Spanish accent was never better than when I shadowed my way through _Spanish with Ease_ years ago. My students at school kept complimenting my pronunciation, although I think that part of what they found interesting was my "Spanish accent"

I was talking with one of my students just before the lockdown, and I mentioned the different accents in Spanish, and it was amusing to learn that he hadn't really ever noticed a Castilian accent. When I mentioned it, he waited a second and said finally, "You're right, people from Spain do talk differently." I guess he wasn't paying attention, and there aren't that many Spanish characters in the shows he watches.
Perceptions of native speakers is always interesting. Another one of my students is one of those lucky, bilingual from birth kids. Her mother is from Ecuador, and the kids notice her accent in Spanish. We are a very Mexico Spanish part of the United States.

One other thing I noticed from "Ingobernable" is that a certain swear word, very popular in Mexico has entered into my inner Spanish dialog.

I'm pretty happy with how things are going. I will be spending more time online teaching starting tomorrow.

[sfuqua]

I've actually gotten very busy with my online teaching. It's weird, but I actually interact with many students more online than I do when they are sitting in a big class. It's fun.

I've decided to try something that is probably sort of silly, but which worked great 40 years ago when I was learning Samoan. I did massive studies of vocabulary lists made from words in reading passages that I read aloud. I had an explosive growth in my Samoan at that time, but, of course there were many other things going on in my life that might have led to rapid language growth.

Anyway, Iḿ trying to shove 75 to 100 new words into my brain everyday, and then reading the part of the book where these words were found at least 3 times. It seems to set off the "din in the head" I talked about earlier. I suspect that this won't work as well as just reading, but I always wanted to try this, and it kinds of fits in well with online support of students...

[sfuqua]

Well, I'm off to the races on the Super Challenge. Why not? It's more or less what I'm doing.
I'm going to declare victory on my experiment with massive vocabulary learning. 100 cards a day is brutal, and as I expected, I've hit the wall... I don't know how I did it at 23. Probably because I was a fanatical young man, desperate to communicate, and I was very excited, because I realized that I could actually learn an L2. I'm definitely at my best condition for TV comprehension of Spanish at this moment. Of course this isn't really scientific support for the idea that massive vocabulary drilling and reading aloud have a dramatic effect on comprehension and fluency. At the same time I was doing this, I watched 90 episodes of Mexican teleseries.

I think reading and listening will be easier, and more fun.

Oh, some advice about _Wheel of Time_. After many books in the series, the author wrote a prequel. While it takes place at an earlier time in the chronology than the other books, I think it probably serves better as a flashback rather than a prequel. Online guides to the series usually suggest that it be read later in the sequence, out of chronological order. When I started the book, I had a lot of trouble with comprehension. There are magical systems that I didn't understand. There was a long sections of descriptions of different nationalities that I was unfamiliar with. The author uses a lot of decriptive language which adds it's own difficulty. I could just plow along, but I think I'm going to just go to the original first book in the series and start there... I'll get back to the prequel later. I'm going to start off the superchallenge using Wheel of Time in Spanish. It has 11_000 pages in the book, but the pages could be counted as over 19_000 "superchallenge pages". A better way to think about it is to think of it as almost five million words.

[sfuqua]

I'm suffering from big wanderlust, not between languages, but between books. For what ever reason _Wheel of time_ seems to have a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary. In general, translated books are usually a bit dumbed down from the original language; they're supposed to be easier, but easier or not, I really have to lean on the dictionary, and that makes things slow.
I've started a couple of other series, and I like both of them, off the top of my head, better than I like _Wheel_ . Wheel is work, and I'm lazy.
The big _Malazn_ by Steven Erikson series is not at all what I usually read, but when I sat down with the English version, I read 40 pages at the first sitting. I guess i like it. I started it in Spanish, and it seems to flow more easily than _Wheel_. This is another huge series, that will take years to finish probably. I'm pretty good at not finishing things, though. Another, shorter series I looked at is the _Broken Earth_ series by Jemisin. I have started it; the Spanish translation seems easiest of the three big series I've found, but it also locks me into wanting to read it the best. I don't know what's going on really, yet. A planet with monster plate tectonics? A mother whose child has been murdered? Beings who eat rock? It sounds like a ride, I'm off. I plan to roam between these series as the challenge goes.
Just to prove that I can maintain complete inconsistancy, even while staying faithful to Spanish, I found a horrible little gem on my hard drive called _Huesos en el desierto_. It is a well written true crime book that I can read almost as fast as I read English. I don't want to read it in some ways; it deals with rape and murder of young women in and around Juárez, Mexico by some sort of monsterous serial killer or group of serial killers. It's a fast read, but not really fun.

[sfuqua]

Oh, I seem to feel insecure if I'm not using an anki deck, so I put a bunch of sentences from the three series I mentioned above into a deck with translation, and I started it, doing about 20 sentences a day. It goes fast. At one point with Spanish, I worked through a few thousand sentences from Gabriel García Márquez, and it had a real good effect on my reading. I'll play with this deck for a while, and see if it has any effect...

[sfuqua]

I'm not sure what happened, but my Spanish reading exploded today. I'm still very sensitive to genre, and my attempts to read fantasy in volved a lot of sputtering, backfiring, and stalling in neutral. This afternoon _Broken Earth_ just fell into place and I started roaring through pages. It is a strange book, somewhere between sci-fi and fantasy. I can't wait to read in the morning...

[sfuqua]

It was another good day reading. I read 23 pages, and I'm running at about 110 words a minute. If you're saying, thatś not so fast, I agree, but it's fast enough to forget that I am reading Spanish. I think my progress will be fast from here, especially if I don't have to do anything but enjoy reading. I am super busy today and tomorrow; it is the beginning of sex ed for the teenagers in my classes and trying to figure out how to do this online, with minimal embarrassment, is a little challenging. Luckily I work with good people, and I think we've got it figured out. Once we get the course running, it will be a smooth run through to summer. Heaven knows what next year will bring. COVID cases in my area remain stubbornly high, and one of the main hotspots in the Bay Area is an easy walk from my front door. My family is fine.

Learning a language to a high level is a fascitnating thing. It really does seem that I am reading Spanish recognizing tenses and the like, without any conscious thought about it. I know that native speakers experience their language that way. But why did I enjoy pounding through declensions and conjugations with Irish and Old English. I suppose there is more than one way to enjoy a language. Oh, I dumped my anki deck of Spanish sentences, and am just working on a little deck with Spanish verb forms in it.

I had a bad temptation toward Old English a couple of days ago. I even got out my Kingmoor ring replica and put it on my finger for a couple of hours, but I bravely put it back. I hope I don't have to fight in a shield wall before I finish my Spanish Super Challenge...
Of course there is Icelandic too...