[2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES]

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Spoonary
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[2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES]

Postby Spoonary » Tue Jan 01, 2019 11:54 am

Happy New Year and welcome to my new language log!

Previous log: Spoon's 2018 attempt at success [ ES | IT | EO | DE? ] + Greek FLC

I know I have said this every year since I first created a log in 2015, but I really believe that 2019 is the year that I am going to make language learning an active part of my life again.

This year I am going to focus on producing output in Spanish and Italian, in order to recuperate the fluency I once had in Spanish, as well as consolidating all of the passive knowledge I have accrued in Italian. To make sure I actually do this, I have signed up for the Output Challenge, for which I will write 25,000 words and record 25 hours of me speaking in each language over the course of the year. By my calculations, if I write 500 words per language per week and record 10 minutes of me speaking each day (possibly alternating languages), I will overcompensate for any missed or less-productive days that are sure to come up.

I am also, foolishly, planning on taking on 2 new languages this year: German and Modern Greek. I have dabbled in these two languages over the last year or so, but I wouldn’t say that I had actually studied either of them and have no way of demonstrating how much (or little in this case) I know. I am starting with German and will be attempting PM’s 365 Day Language Challenge, in order to start the year with some semblance of consistency. I haven’t decided on which resources I will use for this yet though.

I plan to add Greek to my study schedule some point later in the year, unless I become obsessed with German and forget all about it. :lol: Esperanto is also not completely forgotten; I just don’t know how much time I will have for it this year.

Well, there you have them, my best-laid plans. I really hope this year doesn’t turn out like the 3 and a half before it and will do everything I can to ensure that those plans don’t go awry.
Last edited by Spoonary on Wed Mar 13, 2019 11:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Brun Ugle
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Re: [2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES/IT/DE]

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Jan 01, 2019 2:27 pm

I hope your "getting serious" log works better than mine did last year. Good luck!
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Spoonary
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Re: [2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES/IT/DE]

Postby Spoonary » Tue Jan 01, 2019 10:32 pm

Thank you, lechuza parda. If I manage to put even half of the effort into my log that you put into yours last year (particularly at the beginning of the year) I would be happy :)

Day 1 - 1st January
In spite of having a bad hangover and spending the majority of my day at family members' houses, I would say that today has been a fairly successful start to the year.

Output Challenge
I recorded 10 minutes of me trying to speak Italian with a nerve-fuelled shaky voice and too much Spanish in my brain. In the recording, I explained the 2 language challenges I have set myself this year and straight after recording I rushed to wordreference to check the subjunctive of perdere :lol:
Here is my recording, if you want to be in on the joke: OC 1st Jan Italian Recording

German 365 Day Challenge
Day 1 Total: 45 minutes
I was going to use a beginners course like DW to crack on with German today, but it looked like it would be a bit too slow for me, and I think I have internalised a lot of the basics of the language from casually watching German learning videos on Youtube for a year or so, so I thought I'd try something a bit tougher.

I had already listened to 16 episodes of Language Transfer previously, so I thought I would just carry on with that. I really like the sentence-building method used in LT which steadily gives you more and more building blocks to make real, useful sentences. Well, I'm not sure how often I will get to use Du musst eine Suppe kochen. but still. :P

I lstened to 3 episodes of LT, totalling some 25 minutes of study, including writing notes on a scrap of paper and later condensing and copying them into a notebook. While answering the prompts provided in LT, I found that I was really having difficulty pronouncing the uvular German R sound, so I spent the next 20 minutes destroying my throat trying to copy Idahosa's video to pin down this sound. I now have a better understanding of the sound, but I think it's going to take me some time to pronounce it right.

So I haven't written anything for the OC yet, but I'm way too tired to attempt that tonight. I have to say though that I am pleased with the way today went and I still have faith that this year is going to be a special one :D
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Re: [2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES/IT/DE]

Postby Brun Ugle » Wed Jan 02, 2019 3:09 pm

I don’t have the courage to post my recordings. I don’t even listen to them myself. Something I find useful though, is to spend a few minutes listening in the language before I start recording in order to switch my brain over to the right language.

It took me a while to get the hang of the German R too. And now that I’ve gotten good at it, it sometimes creeps into my Norwegian. :oops: It doesn’t sneak into my Spanish because Spanish doesn’t have that kind of R, but in Norwegian, there are a variety of R’s depending on the dialect. So a uvular R is used in some dialects, but not around here, so I feel silly when one slips out.
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Re: [2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES/IT/DE]

Postby Spoonary » Wed Jan 02, 2019 9:37 pm

Day 2 - 2nd January

Output Challenge
Today, I recorded 10 minutes of myself speaking Spanish in between sharp intakes of breath :lol: I seriously need to get my breathing in control when I speak Spanish, because listening back to this was scary. It doesn't help that my throat and chest are still a bit rough from the cold I had, but still :?

I also tried Brun Ugle's technique of listening to some Spanish before trying to speak it, which I think was useful. In today's recording, I spoke a bit about everything and nothing, and the difference between my Spanish and Italian is pretty noticeable! OC 2nd Jan Spanish Recording

German 365 Day Challenge
Day 2: 37 minutes - Total: 82 minutes (2 day streak)
Today I listened to Track 20 of Language Transfer (7 minutes) and spent the other 30 minutes on lyricstranslate.com following the lyrics and trying to accurately sing along to a few of my favourite songs by Saltatio Mortis. I also spent some time looking through the lyrics with the help of the English translations, trying to work out why each line had been translated as it had.

I think today was another good day, minus the fact that I still haven't written anything for the Output Challenge. I put that down to being tired after my first day back at work and aim to catch up by writing 250ish words each day for the rest of the week, in order to reach my goal of 1000 words per week.
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Re: [2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES/IT/DE]

Postby Brun Ugle » Wed Jan 02, 2019 9:52 pm

Your Spanish is amazing! I hope mine will be that good someday. What is the YouTube channel you were talking about? It sounds interesting.
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Spoonary
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Re: [2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES/IT/DE]

Postby Spoonary » Wed Jan 02, 2019 10:00 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:Your Spanish is amazing! I hope mine will be that good someday. What is the YouTube channel you were talking about? It sounds interesting.

Ooh sorry, I didn't realise that I had forgotten to even say the name of the channel :lol:

It's called Vanfunfun and here's one of the videos I watched today:



Also, thank you :oops:
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Re: [2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES/IT/DE]

Postby Brun Ugle » Thu Jan 03, 2019 7:52 am

Thanks! I watched one of the shorter ones. It seems like an interesting channel, but way over-edited. Why do so many Spanish language YouTubers over-edit their videos? It drives me nuts. Seriously?! You can’t even say a whole sentence in one go, but have to edit together five different clips to get the whole sentence? Ay! I can’t watch. I have to look away and just listen to avoid getting nauseated by it. It’s also rather stressful. Everything gets so run-together so it seems like they don’t even breathe.
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Re: [2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES/IT/DE]

Postby Spoonary » Thu Jan 03, 2019 10:47 pm

Ooh, I'm sorry to hear that the videos I recommended cause you discomfort, Brun Ugle. Hopefully my breathy Spanish from yesterday didn't do the same :oops:

Today has been another successful day, but this is all proving to be quite tiring and tricky to do every day if I'm honest. My brain doesn't know what's hit it! Hopefully it will become easier as it all becomes a habit.

Day 3 - 3rd January

Output Challenge
Today, we're back to italian and I slowed things down so that I could not only breathe, but also think a bit more as I spoke, in order to focus on speaking Italian and not Spanish. The odd 'por' did slip through, but I think I did quite well today. I didn't really talk about much, apart from the disturbing turn that 'Un figlio e ho detto tutto' took :? OC 3rd Jan Italian Recording

I also wrote 614 words in Spanish about what I do for a living. I will be editing those tomorrow before posting them on here. I have decided that writing a finished piece each week, as if it was a university assignment, is much more valuable at my level than writing what I have done every day in a kind of diary format as I have done before.

German 365 Day Challenge
Day 3: 33 minutes - Total 115 minutes (3 day streak)
Today I thought I would do some reading, so I read 'Café in Berlin', the first of a series of short stories written for German learners, for 27 minutes, then finished it off with a tricky 6 minute long episode of Language Transfer in which suchen, versuchen and besuchen were thrown at me one after another in quick succession and I got a bit lost :lol: I'll probably review that tomorrow.
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Re: [2019] Spoon’s Getting Serious [ES/IT/DE]

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Jan 04, 2019 8:46 am

Your Spanish was fine. I didn’t notice anything odd about your breathing. It’s only over-edited videos that bother me anyway. I don’t understand why they take out every natural pause and run everything together or why they can’t even say an entire sentence in one take rather than splicing together clips that are only seconds long, or even shorter. That’s why I like the Easy German channel and don’t really like the Easy Spanish channel. It’s too jumpy.
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