Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Ask specific questions about your target languages. Beginner questions welcome!
fenchel
White Belt
Posts: 10
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2022 8:45 pm
Languages: German (N)
English (B2-C1?)
Spanish (probably B2)
x 22

Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Postby fenchel » Tue Jan 11, 2022 8:38 pm

Hello together,

after reading silently on the forum for a long time, I finally registered myself. My question is, what is a good way to continue with Spanish and if there is any good advanced material.
I completed quiet a lot of courses in Spanish and finished:
A tutor who performs DELE exams told me, that I'd pass a B2 easily, a C1 maybe, but probably not. Due to Covid I don't want to take the test at the moment.

My problem is, that I don't really know how to continue. Is there good advanced material (book, audio...) to iron the grammar mistakes? Would it make sense, to do the FSI Spanish again? Or is the only reasonable path forward to just embrace more native material?
4 x

User avatar
iguanamon
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2352
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 11:14 am
Location: Virgin Islands
Languages: Speaks: English (Native); Spanish (C2); Portuguese (C2); Haitian Creole (C1); Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol (C1); Lesser Antilles French Creole (B2)
Studies: Catalan
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=797
x 14187

Re: Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Postby iguanamon » Tue Jan 11, 2022 11:02 pm

First, welcome to the forum, fenchel! My advice is multifaceted. Rather than going back over FSI, try Gramática de uso del español C1-C2. You may or may not want to do the B2 book.

Also, it's a good idea to read a lot of books in Spanish. Listen/watch a few native or dubbed series, podcasts. Write often. Speak as often as you can. Read widely, not just subjects in which you are interested.

If this is your first self-learned language, congratulations! Self-learning a language is different from how most Europeans learn English. You have to provide your own materials and work through them without guidance for the most part. Still there are ways to provide your own guidance to some extent. Popular dubbed international series will often have websites devoted to them in TL where nuances of episodes are discussed in detail. Some have forums, dedicated fan sites, and a popular Twitter/Facebook presence.

At this stage of your learning, improving your skills is about using Spanish as often as you can. I hope you will discover great books and media to share with us here on the forum. ¡Suerte con tus estudios!
5 x

User avatar
luke
Brown Belt
Posts: 1243
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2015 9:09 pm
Languages: English (N). Spanish (intermediate), Esperanto (B1), French (intermediate but rusting)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16948
x 3631

Re: Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Postby luke » Tue Jan 11, 2022 11:27 pm

fenchel wrote:I don't really know how to continue. Is there good advanced material (book, audio...) to iron the grammar mistakes? Would it make sense, to do the FSI Spanish again? Or is the only reasonable path forward to just embrace more native material?

First off, congratulations and welcome aboard! I looked at those Anki decks and your other activities and you've accomplished a tremendous amount.

You gave yourself answers in the final part of your post.

Can you or your tutor narrow down your "grammar mistakes" to a list of items? If so, a targetted run at certain FSI drills or parts of the course may be very helpful. There's a post called "Hard Core FSI". You can find if you do a "subject search" here. It tells how one can use Audacity to make the FSI drills have about 1/2 of the "think time" (basically, very little "think time"). If you were to run the parts of the course that you or your tutor thinks you need help with, you'll likely become of a C+ speaker, if you're not already there.

BTW, you might do those first run at those targeted drills without truncating the silence. Once you think, "Oh, I do these right pretty much every time", then you might try the "truncate silence" trick on them.

And native materials? Of course.
3 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

Kraut
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2599
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:37 pm
Languages: German (N)
French (C)
English (C)
Spanish (A2)
Lithuanian
x 3204

Re: Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Postby Kraut » Wed Jan 12, 2022 12:39 am

With a B2 level you could do a contrastive study of certain chapters German vs Spanish
http://www.hispanoteca.eu/index.htm
http://www.hispanoteca.eu/Gram%C3%A1tic ... Format.htm
-
RTVE Internacional can be accessed for free via the Astra satellite
https://www.rtve.es/television/tve-inte ... /?idpais=3

LA AVENTURA DEL SABER, a daily cultural variety programme, not too specialised and entertaining,
old episodes with subtitles in the RTVE archive


Una mamá española en Alemania
https://www.amazon.de/Una-mam%C3%A1-esp ... B00BZC66GE
Last edited by Kraut on Thu Jan 13, 2022 2:47 am, edited 2 times in total.
2 x

BeaP
Green Belt
Posts: 405
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:18 am
Languages: Hungarian (N), English, German, Spanish, French, Italian
x 1990

Re: Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Postby BeaP » Wed Jan 12, 2022 3:27 pm

Herzlich willkommen!

You can have a look at the DELE B2 and C1 exams on the Instituto Cervantes site. If you do the models at home, they help you to see more clearly your strong and weak points. https://examenes.cervantes.es/es/dele/preparar-prueba

This is a good general article on resources: https://www.spanishwithvicente.com/aprender-espanol/libros-para-aprender-espanol/

In my opinion C de C1 (Difusión) is the best textbook for C1, for B2 Bitácora (Difusión as well). They are aimed for classroom use, but if you have the solutions it's not so hard to work with them. You can find the solutions either in the accompanying teacher's manual or as a registered premium user of their online campus: https://campus.difusion.com
You can see the samples of the textbooks here: https://www.difusion.com
There's an option for each textbook to buy it with a year's premium membership, but if you don't insists on having a physical book you can buy only the membership from the campus, and then for 27 Euros you'll have a year's access to all their textbooks in a digital format. Some of them are interactive, so you solve the exercises, and the system corrects them for you. There's also a lot of supplementary material on the platform, I highly recommend it.

I had the membership and the textbooks in print, but I gained my knowledge mostly through native media. It's surely been more pleasant this way, but it was really time-consuming, and I ended up having huge gaps in my grammar knowledge. If I had been able to study thoroughly these materials, I could have saved a lot of time. I think a combination of textbooks and native materials is the best option in most cases, on higher levels less textbook, more native media. I mostly watched Netflix and HBO, but the best platforms for Spanish language TV series are Movistar and Atresplayer. Some series I liked are:
Spain - Paquita Salas, Aquí no hay quien viva, Arde Madrid, El día de mañana, Foody Love, La casa de papel (season 1-2), Gran Hotel, Mar de plástico, Vis a Vis, El Internado, El tiempo entre costuras
LatAm - Epitafios, El jardín de bronce, La casa de las Flores, Oscuro deseo

I've read some popular fiction, but if it's from Spain, it can be very trashy to the point of irritating, so watch out. If you check the logs, you can find a lot of recommendations for novels.

I'm subscribed to the El País online, and I can really recommend their articles as well. You can read something like 10 articles for free each month, so you can see whether you like it before paying them anything.
7 x

User avatar
zenmonkey
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2528
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 7:21 pm
Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=859
x 7030
Contact:

Re: Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Jan 12, 2022 3:32 pm

TSS42 wrote:You don't need any more than 1-2 courses. You have done way more already. I only ever took one single course for my strongest language, which is German, and the course was Michel Thomas.

Only consume native materials going forward. Get a VPN and watch RTVE, read Spanish books and newspapers. You're wasting your time with courses.


Basically agree, use courses to prep for specific exams but otherwise just start working with native material.
3 x
I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar

fenchel
White Belt
Posts: 10
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2022 8:45 pm
Languages: German (N)
English (B2-C1?)
Spanish (probably B2)
x 22

Re: Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Postby fenchel » Wed Jan 12, 2022 6:08 pm

Thank you for the kind words and the recommendations :) Yes, Spanish is my first language that I learned studying by myself from zero. I learned English mostly by immersion (games) after 7 or 8 years in School that were, well, rather slow, but did provide the fundamentals.

I will work through Gramática de uso del Español, to review the grammar and drill problematic parts with the FSI (hard mode). Afterwards, I will continue reading/listening to native material and probably take the output challenge. I guess everything else will come with time, being able to understand native material really is the fun part :)
5 x

User avatar
MorkTheFiddle
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2113
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 8:59 pm
Location: North Texas USA
Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
x 4823

Re: Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Wed Jan 12, 2022 6:37 pm

Advice in this matter is way over my head, but I am bookmarking this thread for my own purposes. Lots of good advice here. Thanks.
1 x
Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Postby Cavesa » Thu Jan 13, 2022 1:13 pm

Welcome to the forum Fenchel! And congratulations, you've achieved a lot in Spanish and got to a solid level.

As to learning from now: First of all, I would like to second the recommendation of Gramatica de uso or similar books of high quality. They really make a huge difference for improving the active skills and helping you make fewer and fewer mistakes.

As to the native media: it works, but it requires a lot of them. Many learners get the right idea like "yeah, I should watch a movie" and then give up after ten minutes. Nope. You will see some improvement after a few hours, then after a season of a show, then after a hundred hours, then you will "worsen" again right as you start something new (because you need to adapt and are leaving the comfort zone with a new set of actors), and so on. So, don't give up and have fun for hundreds of hours, it will work. And for thousands of bookpages.

As to embracing more of the material: based on my observation so far (comprehension C1/C2 in four foreign languages so far), I'd recommend bracing yourself for something like 300-500 hours of tv shows/movies and 10000 pages of books. But of course you'll slowly improve after that as well, these are very good goals that should get you to the results already well beyond most learners or teachers' expectations.

Also, combine native stuff by natives with stuff for natives made by high quality translators. Some of it might be easier at first and a stepping stone, but a lot of it will also help you cover gaps that the natives don't produce (for example I, as a scifi lover, of course I consume also translations as there are fewer things in the genre in Spanish, most recently the Travelers. But there are great originals too! Just fewer), and it will also help you merge the time you want to spend watching something hyped from the US but not want to waste time on English. My second tv series in Spanish was the Game of Thrones, no regrets (it was the awesome first season, the last one would be a disappointment in any langauge). The only problem are bad dubbings, bad translations, but you will get a sense for what feels weird soon and improve it as you go, so that you can efficiently discard such material.

Practicing actively is important, true. But in my experience, there is a vast difference between doing a lot of all discussed without having the active practice opportunites, and the people who do nothing and just take lack of active practice opportunities for an excuse. So, even if you focus on grammar + input for some time, it will affect your active skills too.

Enjoy! And glad to have you in our community, your success is very inspiring!
5 x

User avatar
reineke
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3570
Joined: Wed Jan 06, 2016 7:34 pm
Languages: Fox (C4)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=6979
x 6554

Re: Advanced spanish material / how to continue

Postby reineke » Thu Jan 13, 2022 3:57 pm

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =19&t=2897

Try the dialang diagnostic test and the active and passive Leipzig vocabulary tests.
1 x


Return to “Practical Questions and Advice”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests