Amanda's 2019 Log: Spanish, Ancient Greek, and French

[philomath]

Hello! I’ve decided to begin a new log for 2019. (My old one is here.) This year there will be a lot of changes in my life: I’ll be graduating from university, moving into my own apartment, and starting a full-time job. However, I hope to find the time to really improve my Spanish. Right now, I think I’m at a B1/B2 level and I would like to reach high B2 (though I’d prefer C1 of course!). If I had to pick a main goal for 2019 it would be to improve my confidence speaking Spanish. But really, I want to improve in listening, reading, and writing as well.

I’m going to divide the year into two parts: January-May (~20 weeks) and June-December (~30 weeks). During the first five months I’ll be busy with university, so I want to set lower goals:
Listening: 40 hours (100+ by the end of the year)
Speaking: 15 hours (50+ by the end of the year)
Reading: 400 pages (1,600+ by the end of the year)
Writing: 15,000 words (50,000+ by the end of the year)

I’m going to make goals for the second part of the year later on, but here are some things I want to accomplish:
- I think I’d like to start studying for the DELE and take it sometime in 2020. It would be nice to finally get a formal assessment of my Spanish!
- Once I finish school and start working, I would like to take another crack at learning Mandarin. I’m sticking these links here for me to look at when I’m trying to develop a study plan: How to learn Mandarin and The "multi-track" approach to language learning.

[philomath]

Happy New Year! I hope to start the year off right by being productive this week.

Goals for Week 1 (January 1-6):
[ ] Listening: 2 hours
[ ] Speaking: 45 min*
[ ] Reading: 20 pages
[ ] Writing: 750 words**

*I'm going to record myself speaking for the Output Challenge! It'll be nice to look back on these recordings at the end of the year and see how much I've improved.
**Right now, I don't have a specific goal for learning vocab, though I plan to keep making cloze deletion cards in Anki whenever I encounter a word that I really want to remember.

This week is my last "free" week before I start classes again. I think it's really important that I develop some sort of Spanish routine so that I keep making progress this semester. It's hard to develop a new routine all at once though, so I'm going to start off small and try to commit to doing some sort of output-related work for at least 10 minutes every night. (Hopefully it'll end up being more than that.) This can involve: speaking, writing, reviewing iTalki corrections that I've received, and maybe studying words or phrases that I had trouble with. I'll aim to do this before dinner every night, but it might end up being after. Once this has become a routine, I'll try to develop a reading routine in the morning.

[philomath]

I didn't plan on posting here until the end of the week, but I have a lot of updates! So I'm writing a post today, and I'll also write one on Sunday to report this week's progress and next week's goals. (That's when I'll update the progress bars in my signature, too.)

The Output Challenge and pronunciation problems
I've already done 19 minutes of self-talk for the Output Challenge. At first it was hard to get used to recording myself, but I think I've gotten over it. However, I feel like I need to keep improving my pronunciation. I'm not as concerned with how I pronounce individual phonemes, but I think my intonation is all wrong, and that's probably the worst kind of pronunciation error to make, because unusual intonation is really distracting (and sometimes misleading). I did a Pimsleur Spanish lesson today and my intonation seemed fine, but it was Pimsleur Spanish I so the sentences were very simple. I'll try repeating sentences from TV shows or something.

Meanwhile, my weekly speaking and writing goals are harder to complete than I expected. I can do self-talk for 10 minutes at a time, but not every day because I think I'd get sick of it. And when I write by hand, I can write around 100 words before I get sick of writing. It's closer to 250 words when I type, but still: I can't meet my weekly writing goal in one sitting, or even two.

Perhaps a good writing routine would be to alternate between speaking and writing in the evenings, aiming for around 10 minutes of speaking per session and 250 words of writing. Of course, I'd easily meet my weekly speaking goal if I did one iTalki lesson per week (and recorded it, according to the rules of the Output Challenge). But I don't plan on going back to iTalki lessons right now, even though I was looking at tutors today and saw one who specializes in pronunciation. That could be really helpful.

Listening improvement
I think my listening skills have really improved lately. I've been listening to the audiobook for Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal and enjoying it a lot. I think I'm around 3.5 hours in right now, and I find it pretty easy to understand (maybe just because I know the story so well). It's so easy to hear each word being said that I have the chance to reflect on whatever interesting phrases come up. Sometimes I make a mental note to myself to use a certain phrase in my speaking or writing practice.

In addition to listening to the Harry Potter audiobook, I recently watched all of Made in Mexico on Netflix, even watching some of the episodes two or three times. Maybe I need to look for more reality TV in Spanish, because I really enjoyed it! I watched it without subtitles, but sometimes I re-watched parts with subtitles when I couldn't understand what they were saying. I learned a lot of Mexican slang that way. Since then I've been watching bits and pieces of other Spanish movies and shows, but I haven't found anything to stick with yet. Tonight I started watching Elite, and I couldn't believe how well I seemed to understand everything! I'm so glad that my listening practice seems to be paying off.

[Update: Upon watching more of Elite, I do not understand as much I thought. Vocabulary seems to be the biggest problem.]

Language wanderlust
Meanwhile, I'm experiencing some language wanderlust. Even though I decided I'll start studying Mandarin again later this year, I keep thinking about starting French or Italian. They both appeal to me because of travel opportunities, and despite my family telling me that "everyone in France speaks English anyway" (which isn't necessarily true), speaking English takes away part of the fun of traveling for me! Also, I've heard great things about the book My Brilliant Friend, and I would love to read it in the original Italian (L'amica geniale). The other day I was wondering how difficult it would be to read the book given that I have studied Spanish, Latin, and briefly dabbled in Italian. I don't have time for this project right now but it's very tempting. Maybe I'll just watch the TV show.

[philomath]

Goals for Week 1 (January 1-6):
[X] Listening: 2 hours
[X] Speaking: 45 min*
[X] Reading: 20 pages
[X] Writing: 750 words**

Yes, I accomplished all of my goals for the week! The totals for the week are:
- Listening: 2 hours 15 min
- Speaking: 45 min
- Reading: 28 pages
- Writing: 966 words

I'm really happy with my progress! It's not often that I achieve all of my Spanish goals for a week. Next week's goals will be the same.

Goals for Week 2 (January 7-13):
[ ] Listening: 2 hours
[ ] Speaking: 45 min*
[ ] Reading: 20 pages
[ ] Writing: 750 words

I know I wrote in my last post that I've been doing better at listening comprehension. Well, maybe I am, but it's still really hard for me to understand shows like La casa de papel and Elite, where the actors are from Spain and use a lot of slang. On Friday I downloaded all of the Spanish subtitles for Elite, and I think I may go through them and make flashcards for the most common words that I don't know. I might even write a program in Python to sort the words by frequency, since I've been trying to learn Python recently. Though I don't know how much time I'll have.

Wish me luck with classes! My first day is tomorrow. Three of my classes are related to my degree (chemical engineering), but the fourth one will be a linguistics class. This is my last semester of university and I'm kind of ready for the whole thing to be over, but at the same time I really enjoy that first-day-of-school feeling.

[Cèid Donn]

Wish me luck with classes! My first day is tomorrow. Three of my classes are related to my degree (chemical engineering), but the fourth one will be a linguistics class. This is my last semester of university and I'm kind of ready for the whole thing to be over, but at the same time I really enjoy that first-day-of-school feeling.

¡Te deseo buena suerte y mucho éxito con tus clases! I personally don't miss classes. I'm the Queen of Academic Burnout and even after over a decade I still have not recovered. But I wish you the best!

[mikonai]

Ooo, you're taking a linguistics class? I'd love to hear about how you like it. Part of my job is teaching linguistics so I'm always interested to hear about whether people enjoy the ling classes they take, and whether they feel they get anything valuable or interesting out of it.

Oh, and good luck with the other classes and your Spanish studies too

[philomath]

Well, since beginning classes I've barely done any Spanish.

Goals for Week 2 (January 7-13):
[ ] Listening: 2 hours
[ ] Speaking: 45 min
[ ] Reading: 20 pages
[ ] Writing: 750 words

Results:
- Listening: 15 minutes
- Speaking: 6 minutes
- Reading: 0 pages
- Writing: 0 pages

Clearly I need some sort of schedule. This week I'll really try to practice speaking or writing for at least 15 minutes after dinner each night. Last week I mentioned that I wanted to write a program in Python to sort through the Spanish subtitles for Elite and pull out interesting vocab words, but I don't think I'll have time. During the semester I always feel so guilty when I do anything except study for my courses. That makes it hard to keep learning Spanish, but I know I should give myself some free time for hobbies! I can't do school 24/7.

I'm going to give myself the same goals for this upcoming week, as well as a few other ones:

Goals for Week 3 (January 14-20):
Main goals
[ ] Listening: 2 hours
[ ] Speaking: 45 min
[ ] Reading: 20 pages
[ ] Writing: 750 words

Other goals
[ ] Look at iTalki corrections from last week.
[ ] Start keeping a list somewhere of interesting speaking/writing topics.

Ooo, you're taking a linguistics class? I'd love to hear about how you like it. Part of my job is teaching linguistics so I'm always interested to hear about whether people enjoy the ling classes they take, and whether they feel they get anything valuable or interesting out of it.

Yes, this is the second linguistics class I've taken! I took the intro course four years ago and I loved it. We covered all of the basics like phonology, morphology, and syntax, and we also had a lot of interesting discussions about different dialects of English, language acquisition, etc. I thought the class discussions were so interesting. In the linguistics course I'm taking this semester, we're each supposed to pick a language that we've never studied before and research it throughout the semester. I picked Somali because it has a pitch accent (or possibly tones?) and agglutination. Since we've only had one week of classes we haven't done much, but I'm excited!

[Chmury]

Yes, this is the second linguistics class I've taken! I took the intro course four years ago and I loved it. We covered all of the basics like phonology, morphology, and syntax, and we also had a lot of interesting discussions about different dialects of English, language acquisition, etc. I thought the class discussions were so interesting. In the linguistics course I'm taking this semester, we're each supposed to pick a language that we've never studied before and research it throughout the semester. I picked Somali because it has a pitch accent (or possibly tones?) and agglutination. Since we've only had one week of classes we haven't done much, but I'm excited!

Hice también un par de asignaturas lingüísticas cuando estudiaba en la universidad y eran las que más me gustaron. También en uno de los deberes que nos dieron tuve que elegir una lengua que no conocí y decidí en Quechua y tuve que traducir unos audios de algunos de los sonidos únicos de Quechua y representarlos en letra fonética. Fue un buen reto y me gustó mucho. También recuerdo lo buenas que eran las discusiones en la clase de lingüística social. Estar rodeado como aquí, por una clase de gente que se chifla por los idiomas siempre es genialísimo.

¿Tal vez al final del semestre nos podrías contar un poco sobre lo que hayas aprendido del somalí? ¡Mucha suerte en tu último semestre universitario Philomath! ¡Y espero que aún puedas encontrar huequecillos y momentitos para tu castellano durante el semestre!

[mikonai]

Yes, this is the second linguistics class I've taken! I took the intro course four years ago and I loved it. We covered all of the basics like phonology, morphology, and syntax, and we also had a lot of interesting discussions about different dialects of English, language acquisition, etc. I thought the class discussions were so interesting. In the linguistics course I'm taking this semester, we're each supposed to pick a language that we've never studied before and research it throughout the semester. I picked Somali because it has a pitch accent (or possibly tones?) and agglutination. Since we've only had one week of classes we haven't done much, but I'm excited!

That sounds awesome! In my undergrad one of my favorite classes was something like that. I really enjoyed digging through books and papers to find example sentences that would tell me how the language worked. I hope you enjoy it!

[philomath]

I managed to do slightly more this week, but still did not come close to accomplishing my goals.

Goals for Week 3 (January 14-20):
Main goals
[ ] Listening: 2 hours
[ ] Speaking: 45 min
[ ] Reading: 20 pages
[ ] Writing: 750 words

Other goals
[X] Look at iTalki corrections from last week.
[ ] Start keeping a list somewhere of interesting speaking/writing topics.

Results:
- Listening: 30 minutes
- Speaking: 15 minutes
- Reading: 0 pages
- Writing: 121 words

I'm disappointed in myself, but I was very flustered/stressed about all of my schoolwork this week. My final project for my degree involves competing in a national design competition, and it's a lot of work. The project is pretty interesting, but it does take much of my time away from studying Spanish and other activities.

Still, I can set aside 30-45 minutes a day to study Spanish, can't I? This is a rough schedule that I've made for the upcoming week:

Monday, Wednesday, Friday:
- Speaking: 10 minutes
- Reading: 15 minutes

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday:
- Listening: 20 minutes
- Speaking: 5 minutes
- Writing: 15 minutes

Sunday:
- Listening: 60 minutes

My actual goals are the same as before:

Goals for Week 4 (January 21-27):
Main goals
[ ] Listening: 2 hours
[ ] Speaking: 45 min
[ ] Reading: 20 pages
[ ] Writing: 750 words

Other goals
[ ] Look at iTalki corrections from two weeks ago.
[ ] Start keeping a list somewhere of interesting speaking/writing topics.