rpg learns Spanish, French, German

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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Sun Apr 26, 2020 9:20 pm

Another Sunday, another update due. This one is quite long and filled with a lot of musing, so I put the rambling below the break.

This week for French on Chatterbug I did another 15 live lessons for (with self-study) 14.5 hours total on the platform. Despite barely doing any self-study, I progressed to lesson 4.8.2, so that's another 5 units. Looks like I'll be finishing the last French self-study unit this week! Including the still-locked lessons, looks like I have around 120 live lesson exercises in unit 4 that I haven't done yet, though their tracking is a little messed up so it's probably closer to 100. I've been averaging a mere 4 exercises per lesson, so that's maybe 25 live lessons worth of material, which means at my current pace I'm going to run out next week (!). Yowzers-- might be time to start thinking about what's next for my French...

On LingQ in French, I've continued reading Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon (this title's a mouthful...). I just finished the fourth chapter (on LingQ, the middle of the 10th lesson), so I'm about a third of the way through. I've found reading on LingQ simultaneously enjoyable and frustrating, but it does seem to get me reading, at least.

Speaking of LingQ, I neglected my Spanish reading the whole week until today, when I decided to continue with Don Quixote. I'm in the middle of chapter 7 and I'll be finishing it before bed tonight. It's an enjoyable read, there's no questioning that.

Oh yeah, did you know there's a third language in this log title? I finally did something with Mandarin this week-- I got off my butt and started working on my Skritter queue, which is down to a mere 74 items to review at the moment. Because I nuked my account in December or so, this unfortunately doesn't tell the whole picture; I still have to add almost the entirety of the second Integrated Chinese book, and it's now been long enough (at this point, a good 8+ months) since I last really studied these words that I expect it's going to be a fair bit of work, although less than it was initially of course. Still, progress is progress.




I've been thinking a lot this week about what I want my language study to look like in the coming months. There are several competing ideas:
  • The Super Challenge starts this week (!), and I'll be entering with both French and Spanish. The challenge is around 87 weeks long, so I'll need to read roughly 57 pages a week in each of French and Spanish and to watch around 100 minutes of film in each per week.
  • I'm currently in, well, France, and given that a big initial motivation for this trip (pandemic aside) was to learn French, it would seem silly not to study French while I'm here.
  • I currently have an unlimited subscription to Chatterbug that I won't be able to reactivate if I cancel, and I'm getting an awful lot of mileage out of it right now, and given that German would be the next language I'd want to add anyway it seems to make sense to start learning German with Chatterbug. On the flip side this is also partially just a question of saving a bit of money-- I could always replicate what I'm doing now by subscribing to their "ultimate" plan and adding on individual lessons. I've been doing 60-something lessons a month right now so that would be an extra 400+ euro a month in cost, which now that I write it is a bit significant.
  • I could take a college summer semester course...

Because of the coronavirus, there are a lot of summer language courses being hosted online this summer, including the ASU Critical Languages Institute programs and the Indiana Language Workshop, two programs I've daydreamed about in the past while knowing that I'd probably never do them (uprooting my life to go live in Indiana or in Arizona for a summer?). The options between those two are enough to make any language lover salivate.

Then there's also the option of trying to take second-year Mandarin through the same program I did last summer, which is also appealing-- I had originally been planning to work on Mandarin this summer (in Beijing), after all, and I'm clearly not motivated to make much progress on my own without any structure, and my level is still so unpleasantly low that it's not very easy to maintain. Completing second-year Mandarin would move me a little bit further on the very long path to Chinese proficiency, and it would also unlock a lot more intensive study options in China (which generally require 2 years of college Chinese as a minimum level).

On the flipside... all of these summer semester courses are intensive (as I saw last summer!) and that means they'd cut into time for other things. The CLI Albanian program, to pick a random example, runs (assuming the times on their site are accurate) from 5:30pm to 9:40pm Paris time, Monday through Friday. Another of my goals for here in Paris was to explore the Paris restaurant scene (with my girlfriend, who also likes dining), and since the coronavirus has cut into that a lot, we were hoping that when restaurants open back up (hopefully around mid-June, from the rumors/speculation so far) we could make up for lost time. People do eat late here in Paris, but 9:40 is still tough timing, since we'd have to get a reservation for some point past 10 (depending on where in the city), which wouldn't fly everywhere. The Indiana one is even worse; their programs seem like they would block off 6pm to 11pm M to F, which is probably a dealbreaker. The Chinese courses I took last summer were better in that regard; they'd have me from 6pm to 9pm, so we could still get a 9:30pm dinner or so, which is late but not unreasonably so in Paris. And it's also only Monday to Thursday, freeing up Friday night.

Besides dinner, though, these would also cut into the general pool of time available for both exploring Paris/France with my SO (who is planning on taking time off work once things open up to take advantage of it) and from other language study possibilities... programs like Indiana or CLI would have around 20h class a week and probably a similar amount or more of homework and study.

Okay, now that I write all this out, it seems pretty clear that even though these programs sound really fun and cool (I find Albanian and Hungarian both fascinating, for example, and when I've researched in the past I've found these are practically the only places to study them in the US), they'd probably disrupt my life too much and are probably a no-go. Too bad they couldn't have started with the start of the quarantine! But I also have an aversion towards starting a brand-new "exotic" language when I already have my plate full with improving my other languages, etc.

The Chinese program is still an option, though. I did these classes last summer so I should know what to expect. At the time it was pretty brutal on me, but I was working a full-time job, had a 45 minute long commute to class, and wasn't getting anywhere near enough sleep since the class was early in the mornings. Now that I'm not working, wouldn't be commuting, and wouldn't have to get up early, well, it should be a lot easier to manage. Last year there was 12 hours of class a week and I estimate I did maybe 15 hours a week or so of study and homework? Hard to remember clearly, to be honest. I know I spent over an hour a day on Skritter (that it tracked-- in real time it was probably longer than this), and that that was also the bulk of the work I did. Maybe we can round it up to 30 hours a week in total between the two. Plenty doable right now, but is it doable while also making tangible progress on French and while not feeling like I'm wasting my opportunity in Paris? Maybe it is. The virus situation adds a lot of uncertainty too-- if things take longer to open up it becomes more attractive.

I can feel myself talking myself into this here... as a prerequisite I would need to re-learn everything from last summer, both the vocabulary and characters and the grammar. I'll keep working with Skritter this week and take things from there.
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Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Thu Apr 30, 2020 8:53 pm

An abbreviated pre-Super Challenge update:

First, inspired by a post from dicentra8 in the 6WC thread, I took the TV5Monde simulated online TCF. My results: 7 incorrect responses (77% correct) for compréhension orale, 3 incorrect responses (85% correct) for structure de la langue, and 4 incorrect responses (87% correct) for compréhension écrite. Altogether this is 66/80 and they tell me:

Votre score pour l'ensemble du test est égal à 83 % de bonnes réponses. Vous êtes du niveau d'un utilisateur indépendant (niveau B défini par le Cadre européen commun de référence) pour la compréhension orale, la compréhension écrite et la maîtrise des structures de la langue.


For oral and written comprehension, they further say "Votre niveau de compréhension écrite (orale) en français est celui d'un utilisateur indépendant (niveau B défini par le Cadre européen commun de référence)." but for the structure de la langue part they say "Votre maîtrise des structures de la langue en français est d'un niveau fin de B2 (utilisateur indépendant), début de C1 (utilisateur expérimenté)." so that's nice at least.

With that said I'm still a little annoyed at the results because I already knew I was in the doldrums of the B levels (I'm certainly better than A2 and certainly worse than C1!), so I wish they had given me something more conclusive after I spent all that time doing the test. I'm not really sure how far along I am on the B1/B2 spectrum any more. And I already knew that I was decent at grammar and reading comprehension and that my listening comprehension was weaker.

Anyway, the Super Challenge... despite that there's no thread for it, it should start in two hours, so I'm just going to act like it's organized and happening. On LingQ, I'm currently on lesson 12 of Tous les hommes..., and I'll go finish reading that lesson after I post this. I haven't ready any of Don Quixote since my last post, so I'm still at the end of Chapter 8. Finally, I uploaded Ficciones to LingQ and I read La lotería en Babilonia.

For reading materials, I'm spoiled for choice... in Spanish I plan on continuing with el Quijote part 1 and, as a break from its more archaic Spanish, on reading the rest of Ficciones (I've read a few of the stories before, so I may skip re-reading them). In French, I uploaded several ebooks to LingQ, and after I finish this book I'll choose whichever one looks the least intimidating from the LingQ stats (so far, looks like it'll be L'Amant).

For movies, well, I've been pretty frustrated trying to stream French films with French subtitles. After a lot of suffering, I've got four lined up on Netflix (mostly Truffaut) and seven feature-length films lined up on Amazon Prime Video (mostly Truffaut again). Getting those Amazon ones was a pain in the ass, I had to change my billing address for my credit card to France and to contact Amazon support to change my region, and I'm a little annoyed that after all that I've only found 7 films I want to watch (and one, Les quatre cents coups, is a rewatch), but it should be enough for now. I also have Dix pour cent on Netflix. Longer-term I think I'm going to end up buying a bunch of French DVDs/Blu-Rays to complete this challenge, along with a region unlocked player, since I really want to come out of this having seen the important films of Robert Bresson, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Tati, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Jean Renoir... basically all the Nouvelle Vague, I guess, and other landmark films that any aspiring film buff should have seen.

As for Spanish films, I haven't done too much planning, but I'll be trying to work through my backlog of TV on Netflix... I have two seasons of Gran Hotel, one and a half of El Ministerio del Tiempo, two seasons of Élite, two seasons of La casa de papel (though I loved the original so much I'm not sure if I even want to continue), some shows I dropped partway through like La casa de las flores and Las chicas del cable, and some shows I never got started with like Club de cuervos, Altamar, and Vis a vis. If I start running short after all this then I'll start thinking about it more.
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Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Sun May 03, 2020 10:50 pm

An (attempted) quick update, since I need to go to bed:

First, for the Super Challenge updates. In French I watched my first movie of the challenge, Cléo de 5 à 7, on Amazon Prime. It was pretty good! And much easier to understand than Tirez sur le pianiste, which I watched earlier this week on Netflix. The French in Cléo is relatively standard and fairly clearly-spoken, while Tirez... was generally hard to understand and filled to the brim with argot (but fortunately there were pretty accurate captions on Netflix). The subtitles on Cléo weren't exact which was a little annoying (I started ignoring them some of the time and just listening) and made me realize that even if I start buying French DVDs (which I've been considering lately) to get subtitles, they might not be exact either.

Anyway, for reading I continued with Tous les hommes... I read lessons 13 and 14 on LingQ which sum to 4040 words; using 275 words/page (the total I settled on for the challenge) it's 10.7 pages. I'll just round to the nearest integer when tracking, I think, so 11 pages.

In Spanish I haven't done any of the movie part but I did read Chapter 9 in Don Quixote and La biblioteca de Babel, for 4757 words = 17 pages.

I'm finding the Spanish reading both easier (unsurprisingly) and more enjoyable than the French reading, though it may be partly due to the book I'm reading in French which is a little dull compared to the rollicking Quixote and the incomparable Borges. The reading is definitely going to be the hardest part of this challenge and I'll need to really push myself to complete it, but that's why I signed up in the first place.

Besides that, for French I finished the entire curriculum on Chatterbug, as expected. I do still have some exercises to do in live lessons, but I'm not sure how much longer that can keep up. I reduced my number of scheduled lessons to only 11 this upcoming week, after doing 15 last week (and in the process crossing 100 total lessons on Chatterbug-- I'm at 113 now). There's still some stuff for me to do on the site but its utility is definitely decreasing for me and I may need to start thinking about German.

Finally for Chinese I actually did some real work this week: I got through my Skritter reviews a few times and added the rest of the vocabulary from lesson 11 of Integrated Chinese. I'm thinking about doing second-year Mandarin online, as I mentioned, but it would start in three weeks and I need to review a lot before then: I probably would need to go through roughly one lesson of Integrated Chinese every two days.

The plan for this week, then: read, read, read in French and Spanish, and spend some serious time every day on Chinese.
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Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

jeffers
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby jeffers » Sun May 03, 2020 11:20 pm

You inspired me to go on Netflix and look for Tirez sur la pianiste, and they don't have it in the UK! Bah! :cry:
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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Mon May 04, 2020 6:49 am

jeffers wrote:You inspired me to go on Netflix and look for Tirez sur la pianiste, and they don't have it in the UK! Bah! :cry:


Dommage! I was wondering if it would be available outside of France. In France right now loads of Truffaut films were just added to Netflix recently (only a few with subtitles, unfortunately), and I think a lot of Jacques Demy films are coming in a couple weeks too.
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Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

jeffers
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby jeffers » Mon May 04, 2020 9:30 pm

rpg wrote:
jeffers wrote:You inspired me to go on Netflix and look for Tirez sur la pianiste, and they don't have it in the UK! Bah! :cry:


Dommage! I was wondering if it would be available outside of France. In France right now loads of Truffaut films were just added to Netflix recently (only a few with subtitles, unfortunately), and I think a lot of Jacques Demy films are coming in a couple weeks too.


Now that you mention Truffaut, I realize I own it on DVD, because I bought a DVD box set of his films during the first Super Challenge! Stupid of me to forget that I own it, but in my defense I watched it a long time ago. It was one of my favourite films in the set, but sadly it doesn't have French subtitles, only English.
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French SC Books: 0 / 5000 (0/5000 pp)
French SC Films: 0 / 9000 (0/9000 mins)

rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Wed May 06, 2020 10:15 pm

Might start logging more than once a week now that the Super Challenge has started, or at least I feel like logging right now...

After a slow start I'm roughly on track with all four subparts. I created a document/spreadsheets to keep track of it all and to tell me how far ahead/behind I am. It's not as fancy as jeffers's spreadsheet but it's good enough for me.

For French reading, since Sunday I've read another 29 pages of Tous les hommes... and it's definitely picking up a little bit, though it's still not as interesting as my Spanish reading: chapter 10 of Don Quixote and three more Borges stories (Funes el memorioso, El milagro secreto, and La forma de la espada), all of which were excellent. Don Quixote is just a generally fun read (way more than I realized going in), and all the Borges stories I've read so far have been first-rate. I've been a little ashamed for a while now that I hadn't read more Borges and I'm grateful to have finally taken the plunge. After Ficciones I'm thinking about reading El Aleph (the collection); I'm finding that a book of cuentos in modern Spanish gives a good counterbalance to the long novel in archaic Spanish.

I'm not really worried about the film part since I think it's way easier (I could easily binge, say, three "films" in one day, while 150 pages of foreign language reading in one day is probably beyond my reading speed and endurance), but I did decide to do my first Spanish watching this evening. I watched season 1 of Elite at some point-- not sure when since I never logged it here, but I think not long after it came out in fall 2018. Now that there are three seasons I thought I'd revisit the show, and since I've forgotten a lot of what happened in S1 I thought I'd just restart it from the beginning (more listening practice anyway). I watched S1E1 tonight, writing down words I didn't know, and ho boy did I end up with a lot of them! I'm going to list some here since in the past this has helped me remember some words:

First some expressions:
  • y tal - and all that stuff (like you'd say at the end of a list)
  • no caerá esa breva - no such luck
  • pillar la indirecta - take the hint (fun one)

Some ways of referring to people:
  • el/la tronco/a (ES) - buddy
  • la gentuza - scum, trash (people)
  • la chusma - lowlife, riffraff (I assume this and gentuza are synonyms?)
  • el capullo (ES) - moron
  • el cotarro - the suggested translation "riotous gathering" or "riotous group" is way too stiff for what should be a colloquial word but I guess gets the meaning across as a way of referring to a rambunctious group (fun word!)
  • el/la pringado/a (ES) sucker (also adj)
  • el camello - (drug) dealer
  • el/la enchufado/a (ES) someone well-connected, also a teacher's pet or a favorite/pet/protegé in general

Some school-related vocabulary:
  • la taquilla - locker
  • el galardón - prize, award
  • el pasillo - hallway (think I used to know this one)

Some fun verbs:

  • mear to piss
  • pillar to catch (as in to catch someone doing something), catch up with
  • largar means a bunch of things but in this case it was to fire (from a job)
  • largarse to leave (irse)
  • ligar to make out/hook up
  • molar (ES) to be cool (used either like gustar-- eso me mola-- or just on its own)
  • flipar (ES) to go crazy for (eso me flipa) as well as to freak out/flip out
  • sobar (ES) colloquially means to sleep

And two last pieces of slang from Spain: chachi is an interjection meaning great/awesome, and majete is an adjective meaning nice or kind.

And people dare say that Spanish is easy-- look how much Spain-specific slang I have here alone!

That might be too many words for one post, but hey, it's my log, right? And from what I've been reading recently (trying to read SLA studies about vocabulary acquisition and reading), explicitly focusing on vocabulary may be a more effective way of learning it than extensive reading alone, so if I have the energy I may try to record vocabulary words here that I come across in the SC and want to remember (though probably not always as many as this).
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Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Tue May 12, 2020 9:59 pm

I'm overdue for an update...

First, for the super challenge. I've fallen behind a little bit (worringly!) since I had some other things to do this past weekend and the déconfinement started yesterday, but I'm trying to catch back up. For the film part, I watched an hour-long episode of Questions pour un champion (actually Questions pour un super-champion) which was fascinating. It was interesting watching a French quiz show as someone who does some amount of American quiz/trivia activities-- it's interesting how the cultural canon is so different in terms of what gets asked about. I think it'd also be a good resource to return to when I get more advanced in French, since it hits on exactly the kind of cultural background that I think is important for really reaching a high level of cultural understanding.

On reading, I'm finding the Spanish reading a lot easier to complete than the French reading. My level in Spanish remains better than my French level and at this point I'm not sure how that's going to change. I need to ratchet up the intensity of my studying somehow... anyway, I've read another 30 pages of Tous les hommes... in French, and in Spanish I've read two more Borges stories, La muerte y la brújula and El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, which I thought was one of the weaker ones I've read even though it's one of the most famous-- perhaps just because the ideas behind it have so thoroughly permeated the collective consciousness by now that it's not very revelatory.

Beyond this, well, not much to report. I did do 10 Chatterbug French lessons last week. I haven't done any this week yet; now that the déconfinement is upon us, we're getting some much-needed plumbing repairs done here in our place in Paris, and I don't want to do video lessons while that's going on.

In the Super Challenge, I'm currently 25 pages behind schedule in French, 22 behind schedule in Spanish, and 2 hours behind in Spanish. I'll be working to catch up on the French reading as my first priority, then the Spanish reading, then everything else.

Nothing (disgracefully) to report for Chinese.

Finally, let's grab some vocabulary from LingQ from the latest things I've read, sorted by importance (according to the app)...

  • la portée - grasp, reach
  • le stade - stage (or stadium)
  • la démarche - gait, process
  • la proie - victim, prey
  • lâcher - to let go, to release
  • subitement - suddenly

Cross-checking with a frequency list these are generally really common words (on this frequency list, in the 1000 or 2000 range mostly) so that's an alarming indicator of my (lack of) French vocabulary.

From a Borges story:

  • precisar - to need, to specify
  • el lecho - bed (this is used a lot in Don Quixote too)
  • el/la antepasado/a - ancestor, forefather
  • el andén - platform (like at a station)
  • centenares - hundreds

At least these words are less common than the French ones... none of them are in my 5000 word frequency dictionary.
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French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Fri Jul 24, 2020 9:26 pm

Well, I really fell off the wagon here...

The last two months my attention turned away from language learning and towards a different hobby of mine (chess). Partly because I had lost a lot of my structure; I had ran out of material on Chatterbug and my in-person classes were of course cancelled. Partly I think I burned out a little bit. I wasn't feeling great about my French level and progress wasn't very clear any more. As we started going back outside and interacting with people I had some discouraging experiences: not understanding people, people not understanding me. Once I lost the habit of spending so much time on French (due to the plumbing work which took forever) it wasn't easy to get it back. And as things opened up my SO and I wanted to make up for some of the time we lost and explore the city (and country-- we took a few trips to other cities in France) before we left.

We came back home to the US a few days ago, which was rather bittersweet. Paris is a marvelous, vibrant city that's a joy to live in, and I'm sorry to have had to leave. I'm starting to think much more seriously about the idea of trying to relocate to Europe more permanently, but the main obstacle is the huge pay cut I'd have to take. It could be worth it, though.

My motivation for language learning increased a bit around the time of going home. I had some more successful interactions with people which I think helped my confidence, and the time off let me recharge my spirits a bit.

I brought home with me around 20-ish French DVDs or Blu-Rays (carefully selected to contain French subtitles), so once I get my hands on a region-free player I'm hoping to start making my way through them. Even though I massively crashed for the last ~2-2.5 months, I'm still hoping to complete the Super Challenge if I can, and to continue improving my French (and Spanish).
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Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby Dagane » Sat Jul 25, 2020 9:21 am

rpg wrote:definitely picking up a little bit, though it's still not as interesting as my Spanish reading: chapter 10 of Don Quixote and three more Borges stories (Funes el memorioso, El milagro secreto, and La forma de la espada), all of which were excellent. Don Quixote is just a generally fun read (way more than I realized going in), and all the Borges stories I've read so far have been first-rate.


"Ficciones" is my all-time favourite book :D and "Don Quixote" is indeed such a fun story, although it takes some time to get used to the narration because of it being so old. "El Aleph" is also top-notch, although I prefer the former.
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