Bex wrote:Brun Ugle wrote:FSI does have tú, but not vosotros as it’s for Latin American Spanish.
Good to know, thanks.
Brun Ugle wrote:I did both the Programmatic and the Basic courses twice through
BOTH OF THEM AND TWICE!!!
OK so you've convinced me to try it. I still want to complete the SC so I'm just gonna commit to working through the Basic course Volume 1 and see how it goes, I think 15 lessons is enough to see if I want to continue with it and it seems a lot less daunting if I commit to just 1 volume at a time.
Since you are an FSI master, do you have any top tips on how to use the FSI Basic course materials?
As far as I recall, it’s pretty self-explanatory. I think the first two lessons of Basic were pronunciation exercises and a little different from the rest. The rest of the lessons had a dialogue, which I went through as directed — listen and repeat, then participation, if I’m remembering correctly. I didn’t bother memorizing them. I read any explanations in the pdf, and did the drills as directed. There are different kinds of drills. Substitution drills: they give you a sentence, then a word that you have to plug into the sentence modifying the rest as necessary. Tense drills: they give you a sentence in one tense and you have to change it to some other tense. Number drills: they might give you a sentence in 1st person singular and you have to change it to 1st person plural, or vice versa. Translation drills: they give the English, you translate to Spanish. In the fourth volume (possibly even the third, I’m not sure of my memory), they started including only the Spanish translation on the recording for the translation drills, so you needed to look at the pdf for the English prompt for those, but in the earlier volumes, the English was recorded too. So, except for the translation drills in the later chapters, it is possible to do all the drills without looking at the pdf. I used to sometimes do FSI drills while walking. So, technically, I’ve done some chapters more than twice. Twice at home, plus additional times while walking.
My suggestion is just to follow the directions for each drill. Try to get the answer right without pausing. There is enough time. And have fun. FSI is loads of fun.