Fatih's Spanish Log

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Fatih
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Fatih's Spanish Log

Postby Fatih » Wed Nov 02, 2016 8:44 am

 Hola a todos

I’ve been a member of this forum for a while and also passed some time at the old htlal forum after I decided to learn Spanish last year. I really like reading other people’s logs and so decided to start my own.

Here it is..

I have been self studying Spanish for the last 16 months. Before that, my Spanish was something like un, dos, tres, hola, te quiero, adios and hasta la vista baby (thanks to you Arnold..)

Fist, I started with some memrise courses, then did MT, followed by;

Pimsleur I to V,

Learning Spanish Like Crazy I to III

Glossika Fluency 1 and 2

After that point, I got a kind of feeling that I’m not advancing as fast as I wish, so I decided to do more serious courses like Assimil and FSI. And I started both Assimil with Ease and FSI Platiquemos simultaneously.

Two months later, I susspended Assimil, on the lesson 55. I know people really like it and the dialogues are somehow funny but for some reason -I really can't explain it- I lost my desire to continue to it.

So I gave my full focus on Platiquemos. Now I’m on the lesson 36 and also started a review session too. I finished to review first 10 lesson so far. My plan is to do the all the lessons at least 3 times and then keep moving on whether or not I grasp it 100% or not, also do the review lessons simultaneously. According to my records, I've spend 670 hours on studying Spanish so far. It’s huge I guess.

Some time ago I also decided to do some reading and started Harry Potter y la piadra filosofal but at that time it seemed to me impossible to read. Well, two weeks ago I decided to give it an another shot. Even now I get seasick when I try to read it, but it seems I can handle it this time. I've read 48% of it so far on my kindle.

Also, last night I started to watch the famous telenovela, la reina del sur. To be honest it was neighter easy nor fun watching it without subtitles but I’m going to force myself to sit and watch it to the end.

Thats all so far and I hope to update it soon.
Last edited by Fatih on Wed Nov 02, 2016 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fatih's Spanish Log

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Wed Nov 02, 2016 10:29 am

Wow, you've done a lot of work! I don't really have anything to add, just stick to your material and keep reading books. You might want to add audiobooks to the mix - I've found it very useful.
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Re: Fatih's Spanish Log

Postby James29 » Wed Nov 02, 2016 11:53 am

Great work. It looks like you are well on your way to success. I did most of the things you have done and are doing. I agree completely with doing each FSI lesson three times and then just moving on. That is exactly what I did. You might want to wait a bit on the telenovelas. They are hard to understand and you might not get as much out of them as you would with spending more time with books or some other resource. What matters most is that you are enjoying it. I look forward to following your log.
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Fatih
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Re: Fatih's Spanish Log

Postby Fatih » Wed Nov 02, 2016 12:55 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:Wow, you've done a lot of work! I don't really have anything to add, just stick to your material and keep reading books. You might want to add audiobooks to the mix - I've found it very useful.


Thanks for the suggestion jeff! I've actually tried to use audiobooks to spice my studies a bit. I tried harry potter but I guess my brain can not process Spanish as fast as the the narrator reads, so I really got lost. Maybe I can give it another shot or try my luck with the easy readers audiobooks.
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Fatih
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Re: Fatih's Spanish Log

Postby Fatih » Wed Nov 02, 2016 1:11 pm

James29 wrote:Great work. It looks like you are well on your way to success. I did most of the things you have done and are doing. I agree completely with doing each FSI lesson three times and then just moving on. That is exactly what I did. You might want to wait a bit on the telenovelas. They are hard to understand and you might not get as much out of them as you would with spending more time with books or some other resource. What matters most is that you are enjoying it. I look forward to following your log.


I've read your log twice or third times I guess. Your success is really motivating and inspiring. I also want to follow more or less the same path as you did before. Thanks for the suggestion. I want to push myself a little bit more for watching telenovelas. To be honest, I'm not a heavy reader even in my native language or english, so watching telenovelas -instead of reading- is really tempting me.
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Re: Fatih's Spanish Log

Postby NoManches » Wed Nov 02, 2016 1:44 pm

Fatih wrote:
jeff_lindqvist wrote:Wow, you've done a lot of work! I don't really have anything to add, just stick to your material and keep reading books. You might want to add audiobooks to the mix - I've found it very useful.


Thanks for the suggestion jeff! I've actually tried to use audiobooks to spice my studies a bit. I tried harry potter but I guess my brain can not process Spanish as fast as the the narrator reads, so I really got lost. Maybe I can give it another shot or try my luck with the easy readers audiobooks.


For a book I highly recommend "Cajas de Cartón", which is also available in audio book form. There are the other books in the series, I believe Cajas de Cartón is the first and the only one with an audio book. It may be a bit easier than Harry Potter (ream a sample before buying though).

As for telenovelas....they can be very tough. By any chance have you see the American show "Breaking Bad"? If so there is a virtually identical show filmed in Colombia called Metástasis. If you are familiar with the American version you could watch this show and your comprehension would be so much higher.

It seems like you are doing everything right. Keep up the hard work!
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Re: Fatih's Spanish Log

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Wed Nov 02, 2016 10:00 pm

Fatih wrote:Thanks for the suggestion jeff! I've actually tried to use audiobooks to spice my studies a bit. I tried harry potter but I guess my brain can not process Spanish as fast as the the narrator reads, so I really got lost. Maybe I can give it another shot or try my luck with the easy readers audiobooks.


Actually I was thinking of the Listening-Reading method (there are many threads about it on the forum), which basically means using a book+audiobook at the same time. The Listening-Reading experiments log has a number of posts/quotes (from the original source HTLAL). You don't have to do it as intensively as the original "instructions" suggest (10 hours a day?) - use the discussions as inspiration. Good luck! (and have fun)
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Re: Fatih's Spanish Log

Postby James29 » Wed Nov 02, 2016 11:14 pm

NoManches wrote:
Fatih wrote:
jeff_lindqvist wrote:Wow, you've done a lot of work! I don't really have anything to add, just stick to your material and keep reading books. You might want to add audiobooks to the mix - I've found it very useful.


Thanks for the suggestion jeff! I've actually tried to use audiobooks to spice my studies a bit. I tried harry potter but I guess my brain can not process Spanish as fast as the the narrator reads, so I really got lost. Maybe I can give it another shot or try my luck with the easy readers audiobooks.


For a book I highly recommend "Cajas de Cartón", which is also available in audio book form. There are the other books in the series, I believe Cajas de Cartón is the first and the only one with an audio book. It may be a bit easier than Harry Potter (ream a sample before buying though).

As for telenovelas....they can be very tough. By any chance have you see the American show "Breaking Bad"? If so there is a virtually identical show filmed in Colombia called Metástasis. If you are familiar with the American version you could watch this show and your comprehension would be so much higher.

It seems like you are doing everything right. Keep up the hard work!


This is very good advice. Cajas de Carton was the first book I read in Spanish. Great book. Very easy.

Some telenovelas are easier than others. I found Reina del Sur fairly difficult. The typical Telemundo telenovleas are pretty easy.

I can relate to not being a big reader. I rarely read fiction before studying Spanish. I have now read FAR more novels in Spanish than English. I kind of like it now.
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Fatih
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Re: Fatih's Spanish Log

Postby Fatih » Sat Nov 05, 2016 2:54 pm

Last week was very productive for my spanish studies. I finished Platiquemos unit 37 and reviewed units 11,12 and 13.
I somehow advanced on Harry Potter and now I'm on the 65%. I hope it'll finish before end of the next week. But I'm sure that I'm not going to continue with the 2nd book. I may be use Cajas de Carton as NoManches kindly suggested or just read Hunger Games which is an another easily accesible book for me.

Watching la reina del sur is still a burden for me. I watched 2 more episodes but really have difficult times with it. I'm now considering to change it seriously.

Last week I also started to review glossika using c files. I've already finished first thousand sentences. Using c files is really easy and fast. This even made me think making similar audio files with using my other sources on hand.
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Fatih
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Re: Fatih's Spanish Log

Postby Fatih » Mon Nov 07, 2016 1:03 pm

I had lots of free time for the last couple of weeks and this increased my speed of study. Yesterday I finished a short graded reader (lola lago) which was very easy and also started parallel reading first book of Hunger Games. I found parallel reading is a pretty fun way of study. I've already finished a chapter. Also did review 450 Glossika level 2 senteneces and it also seems useful. Also watched one more episode of la reina del sur. Still difficult to understand. I have 30-40% comprehension at most. Noting much happened on the FSI side, I just did once unit 38. I found this unit relatively easy and I guess 3 times will be enough to keep going.
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