Karen's Spanish learning journey

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klvik
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Re: Karen's Spanish learning journey

Postby klvik » Sat Mar 18, 2017 11:25 pm

Obtaining the audio from Tatoeba was a painful process - no need for anyone else to be subjected to it.

I just shared the deck "Tatoeba Spanish sentences with audio". It contains 1286 sentences from Totoeba.org, tagged with the verb tenses used in the sentence. If you notice any errors, please let me know so that I can update my database. I'm sure there are plenty of annotation errors- it is very easy to hit the wrong checkbox while annotating. Each sentence has a sentence ID number (visible via 'browse' or 'edit') which would be the best way to identify the sentence with the error.

Eventually I will share my entire sentence database (or at least those sentences for which I have the appropriate permissions). In the meantime, enjoy!
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2020 Output Challenge speaking: 66 / 3000

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klvik
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Re: Karen's Spanish learning journey

Postby klvik » Sat Mar 18, 2017 11:28 pm

Tomás wrote:
klvik wrote:For intensive listening, I use Anki to study Subs2SRS decks and decks with sentences (with audio) extracted from FSI, Tatoeba, podcasts and other sources. My goal for the Subs2SRS decks is accurate listening comprehension. Hitting the replay button multiple times until I can hear each word accurately does not bother me, even though I find rewinding a video to re-watch a scene irritating. I use the sentence decks to test the accuracy of my listening comprehension. My cards are set up so that I hear the audio play once and then I need to transcribe the sentence.


I have been wondering how to get Tatoeba into Anki. Would you share your workflow? Or could you share the deck itself? Thanks!


I forget to quote your message when I wrote my last post. Oops. I just shared a deck for you.
Last edited by klvik on Sat Apr 08, 2017 3:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Tomás
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Re: Karen's Spanish learning journey

Postby Tomás » Mon Mar 20, 2017 2:08 am

klvik wrote:Obtaining the audio from Tatoeba was a painful process - no need for anyone else to be subjected to it.

I just shared the deck "Tatoeba Spanish sentences with audio". It contains 1286 sentences from Totoeba.org, tagged with the verb tenses used in the sentence. If you notice any errors, please let me know so that I can update my database. I'm sure there are plenty of annotation errors- it is very easy to hit the wrong checkbox while annotating. Each sentence has a sentence ID number (visible via 'browse' or 'edit') which would be the best way to identify the sentence with the error.

Eventually I will share my entire sentence database (or at least those sentences for which I have the appropriate permissions). In the meantime, enjoy!


Thanks very much! That is a fabulous resource. I have been considering making that for a year but was overwhelmed by the challenge of pulling the audio out of tatoeba. Much obliged for your generosity!

Now by downloading your deck and exporting as a csv file, one could make an open source Glossika-style audio sentences product with SRS intervals, possibly using the Gradint program:

http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/ssb22/gradint/
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klvik
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Re: Karen's Spanish learning journey

Postby klvik » Sat Apr 08, 2017 3:59 am

Since I started the super challenge I have been restricting my reading to young adult novels with the idea of increasing my reading speed before I take off the young adult book training wheels. I recently finished reading two young adult fantasy novels by Laura Gallego Garcia (Alas de Fuego and Alas Negras), was starting to feel as if I were reading at a reasonable pace and wanted to read a few more young adult novels so that I could enjoy the feeling of reading Spanish at slightly faster than a snail's pace. I had a copy of El Cuaderno de Maya by Isabel Allende waiting to be read so I checked the reviews at Goodreads, saw that it was tagged as young adult literature and started reading. It didn't take me long to realize that this is not a young adult novel - it is a novel with a young protagonist with a number of fairly disturbing life experiences. I'm only 30% finished with the book but I'm enjoying it a lot and am pleased to report that the vocabulary is not that much more difficult than the other books I have been reading. I wasn't planning to take the training wheels off, but they came off anyway and now I'm riding the big girl bike.

I just finished watching the Argentine TV series Estocolmo on Netflix (recommendation from James29) using the audio description feature . The series is pretty good, but very confusing. The first four episodes were easy for me to follow but the number of plot twists picked up by episode five and it became much more difficult to follow until I decided to just go with the flow and not worry about understanding who were the good guys and who were the evil bastards. The audio description feature was fantastic and extremely easy to understand, though. I have now moved on to El marginal, an Argentine prison drama on Netflix, and was relieved to discover that it has a more linear plot.
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NoManches
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Re: Karen's Spanish learning journey

Postby NoManches » Sun Apr 16, 2017 4:45 pm

Karen, I've enjoyed reading your log and wish I could say that I was as far along with the Super Challenge as you are. Maybe if I spent more time watching Spanish films and less time on this forum I'd be able to accomplish my goals :D

I'm very curious to see how you think the Super challenge has helped you. Have you seen a noticeable difference between now and the time you began the challenge? Have you seen a spike in listening comprehension? I imagine that the reading you have done has helped your listening skills.

Keep up the great work! I look forward to your next post and hope that I can finish this challenge and turn it into a "double" like you have. 8-)
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klvik
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Re: Karen's Spanish learning journey

Postby klvik » Sat Apr 22, 2017 7:25 pm

NoManches wrote:Karen, I've enjoyed reading your log and wish I could say that I was as far along with the Super Challenge as you are. Maybe if I spent more time watching Spanish films and less time on this forum I'd be able to accomplish my goals :D

I'm very curious to see how you think the Super challenge has helped you. Have you seen a noticeable difference between now and the time you began the challenge? Have you seen a spike in listening comprehension? I imagine that the reading you have done has helped your listening skills.

Keep up the great work! I look forward to your next post and hope that I can finish this challenge and turn it into a "double" like you have. 8-)


Thank you for your kind words, NoManches. I also enjoying reading your posts.

The Super Challenge definitely has helped both my listening comprehension and reading. I haven't noticed any spikes in listening comprehension, rather slow but steady incremental improvement. Some of the things that I have noticed include:

    1. The speed at which my brain processes Spanish has increased a lot resulting in improved ability to 'keep up' with dialogs. More and more words are moving from the 'understood with a delay' category into the 'understood in real time'. At the beginning of the Super Challenge, a lot of my comprehension came after a brief delay, but I really don't notice the delay much right now.
    2. I pick up very little new vocabulary from watching shows and movies. I find reading much more effective, for me, for vocabulary acquisition. I don't know if this will change as I become more advanced.
    3. Television shows/movies in which the characters speak in a more educated register are much easier for me to understand. For example, Estocolmo (Argentine Spanish, Netflix), despite its convoluted plot, was easier to understand than El Marginal (Argentine prison drama, Netflix) due to the prison jargon and extensive slang in El Marginal.

    4. Since September, I have also been adding small doses of intensive listening to my routine (Subs2SRS and sentence transcription). The time expended on these intensive listening activities is small compared to the TV show/movie watching but I feel that it has had a disproportionate impact, as if it is acting as a catalyst for extensive listening. Keep in mind that I watch the shows straight though without backing up to replay something that I missed. Replaying the difficult bits probably would serve the same function as my intensive activities.
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NoManches
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Re: Karen's Spanish learning journey

Postby NoManches » Sun Apr 23, 2017 5:03 pm

Thank you for your input. I can definitely relate with you with a lot of things you mentioned. I am interested in trying Subs2SRS but my computer broke and it will be a long time before I feel the need to get a new one. I have anki on my backup laptop but it is not powerful enough to do anything other than Netflix and basic web browsing. I'll have to give subs2SRS a try someday, I like the idea of an intensive approach in that manner.

Best of luck!
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klvik
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Re: Karen's Spanish learning journey

Postby klvik » Sat May 13, 2017 3:45 pm

As I have mentioned previously, I am finding a combination of extensive and intensive listening to be most effective for improving my Spanish listening comprehension. However, I hadn't really approached reading in Spanish in the same way until the past few weeks. Recently there has been a number of people on the forum discussing Learning With Texts (LWT) and it's use as a tool for intensive reading. These discussions, especially a detailed post by Blaurebell (I should post a link to the post here, but I am too lazy to go searching for it right now), were my motivation to try LWT. Once I had installed the correct version of EasyPHP, the installation of LWT went smoothly. (Note: follow the installation instructions exactly. The newer PHP is not better, at least for this application).

I picked the novel El Codigo Da Vinci as my first real LWT project for two primary reasons: 1) I have a copy of the audiobook so that I can incorporate some listening practice with the new vocabulary 2) I read the book in English many years ago, so I am hoping it will not be as frustrating to read the book very slowly- I vaguely remember the storyline and some of the details.

My initial impression of LWT is very positive. I am using Wordreference as my only dictionary. I had SpanishDict as a secondary dictionary for awhile until that site starting redirecting my browser to suspicious ads. I'm not going to put up with that nonsense :evil: so I decided that if I can't find a word in Wordreference it is a word that I don't need to know right now. The vocabulary test function as works well, although it would have been better if I had started off with a slower pace. Due to a "shiny new toy" response, initially I was adding too many "unknown" terms per day which resulted in a week of overly long test sessions. I have been fairly strict in which words I classify as known. I am adding words to the learning queue even if I understand the meaning of a word through context or because it is a cognate. Further down the road I may relax a bit in this regard, but right now I am shooting for "intensively intensive".

All and all, I am pleased with this tool. I don't know if I have the fortitude to read 5000 pages intensively, as does Blaurebell, but I'll see how things go.
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DaveBee
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Re: Karen's Spanish learning journey

Postby DaveBee » Sat May 13, 2017 5:19 pm

NoManches wrote:I am interested in trying Subs2SRS but my computer broke and it will be a long time before I feel the need to get a new one. I have anki on my backup laptop but it is not powerful enough to do anything other than Netflix and basic web browsing. I'll have to give subs2SRS a try someday, I like the idea of an intensive approach in that manner.

Best of luck!
If you install the VLC media player, you could use that. It lets you bookmark places in a video file, then set repeat loops running between two bookmarks.

Alternatively I think DVDs often come with a 'play movie', or 'play scene/chapter' option.
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Re: Karen's Spanish learning journey

Postby blaurebell » Sat May 13, 2017 7:56 pm

klvik wrote:Due to a "shiny new toy" response, initially I was adding too many "unknown" terms per day which resulted in a week of overly long test sessions.


I actually don't use the test function at all, I just read! Words repeat, so the ones that are frequent and important will appear more often, usually in new forms, tenses and so on. You will end up remembering without effort just from typing in the dictionary definition for all these forms. There is really no need to remember every word you come across and the important ones will stick automatically. And the ones that don't appear very often are probably also not important enough to spend much effort on them!

5000 pages of intensive reading is indeed quite excessive, but I really found it a fantastic basis for French. I really have a pretty solid literary vocabulary now and enjoy reading in French a lot. It kinda happened by accident too, I just chose a long series and the story carried me along. With French it was Harry Potter and with Russian it's now David Eddings' Belgariad Saga. If I want to know what happens next, I have to keep reading, so it really helps to use page turners. Besides, I find the statistics motivating too!
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