No worries, Stelle. As Spoonary rightly pointed out, any one of us could have made an effort to post here. I did think of the manada a few times, but I already already have trouble keeping up with my own log, so naturally I never actually got around to posting anything here either.
Not to mention that I don't feel like my Spanish learning has been very much in the spirit of the TAC so far this year - I ended up more invested in French and Japanese than I'd predicted at the start of the year, and as a result my Spanish has been a bit neglected. I am well on track to reaching my reading goal of 12 Spanish books and have watched some TV in Spanish here and there, but that's about it.
However, I don't mean to continue this willful negligence and have, in fact, just started 2 projects to change that:
1. I started doing the MOOC Aprender of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México on Coursera. It started last Monday and lasts 4 weeks. I just completed the content of the first week and have to say that this course is nothing short of amazing (so far). The presentation is engaging and interesting without ever losing its academic depth. The content is both fascinating and delivers practical information. And the videos are interrupted every once in a while by short quizzes which test whether you understood the material that was just covered and exercises like a short IQ test, a test of your attention and other experiments that relate to the subject matter that is covered, thus aiming to deepen your understanding of the same. It's lots of fun and I'd recommend the course to all lob@s (or other forum members with a good understanding of Spanish, of course)!
2. I've decided to work through the FSI Basic Spanish course to improve my active Spanish skills. While I'm pretty happy with my receptive skills, my active are woefully behind and I'm hopeful that the FSI course might remedy that. Also, I've been interested in trying out one of these courses for some time, to be honest.
Specifically:
