It was a wonderful week for Spanish and I didn't study very much.
I did anki Spanish, or course, two courses at the "with ease" level, and two courses at the "using" level, and I'm getting far enough along that it is not completely trivial.
Why do I say it was a great week for Spanish? Well I've always been suspicious of people who claim that they learned a lot from reading or listening to things they don't understand. "It just comes to you." "One day you wake up and it is easy." Well, I've never really had that experience. For me it seems that listening or reading things that I don't understand leads me nowhere. I keep trying to do it, because it would be nice if it was true that I am going to just discover how much I have learned automatically, but for me, I need
comprehensible input, and I need it at i+1 (Krashen) to learn. Hu and Nation (2000)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234651421_Unknown_Vocabulary_Density_and_Reading_Comprehension operationalized what i+1 is, one of the few times that Krashen's brilliant but vague suggestions have had some concrete suggestions connected to them.
My problem is that I keep trying to listen to and read stuff that is too hard for me. I want to be one of the "cool kids" when I'm not even cool yet.
Oh, I can L-R García-Márquez and know what is going on, or I can watch La Reina del Sur, and understand much of it, but neither is a completely comfortable.
Then, I sort of randomly turned on Telemundo. And I realized that I can understand virtually everything. That is until they get to a telenovela, where my comprehension drops off to half baked again. But I spent hours a day listening and watching comprehensible input. My Spanish seems to be waking up and dancing with joy. I'm thinking of subscribing to the Latin channels from my cable company so I can get some channels from down in Central and South America.
In a similar vein, I'm reading El Pais as my main reading source these days. I need a good Latin American newspaper that is online. Any suggestions?
Oh why did I ever think I needed to go to Old English and Norse to find something strange. Latin America and Spain are at least as weird as Iceland (I mean weird in a good way.
)
OK, so now I am just going to get more comprehensible input and start chattering in Spanish? I don't think so. Reading the thread about people learning languages fast in the US military
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?p=197433#p197433 reminded me that hard work is needed to really move one's language. I'm going to thoroughly do FSI Spanish and Platiquemos.
The suggestions on the courses suggest that these courses are supposed to take between 10 hours (FSI) to 6-8 hours (Platiquemos) per unit. I did the first 45 lessons of FSI before, but that was almost 10 years ago. I need to do the whole thing. FSI specifically talks about "overlearning" or continuing to practice even after one has reached "mastery". Overlearning has been shown to greatly improve performance in the short term (the first few days), but it has much less positive effect after that. I think that FSI finds it useful because of the fast pace at which they move through the courses, the learner never has time to forget anything.
One effect of overlearning is that, once the material is familiar, the rest of the practice becomes very easy. Some people may find this stage boring.
With the slower pace I will use to get through FSI/Platiquemos I will need to do some explicit review, so here is my plan.
Go through Platiquemos, doing each drill five times. After considering many, many review schedules, I decided to do a second wave through the material using FSI doing each file five times, after I get about half thru with Platiquemos... This means that I will be repeating each unit ten times. I may change the review schedule if I think of something better. I'm going to get my news from El Pais, and any other good Spanish newspaper I can find online.
I would swear that mostly just watching television that I can (mostly) understand has had a bigger immediate impact on my Spanish than anything I have done for a while.