Jmar257's Language Log (ES, FR, DE) - Super Challenge, Assimil, and more

[jmar257]

So, I finally got around to starting this. I'll try to update this at least once a week and use it to get some practice writing in the languages I'm studying, although sometimes I'll probably just want to post in English (and this intro post is going to be entirely in English). I have studied languages on and off for years, making not enough progress, but the past year or so I've really buckled down and have made a good bit of progress and enjoyed it more than I ever have before. I tend to stick to one course at a time for a given language, while also doing flashcards/reading/listening on the side.

Anyway, some history:

Spanish
I've gone through Michel Thomas' courses, Language Transfer, Assimil With Ease and Using, and I'm currently going through FSI Spanish Basic. I'm on lesson 51, and primarily chose this to tighten up some grammar and practice drilling/speaking automaticity. In addition I've been reading a good bit and watching some TV on the side, but I'm very ADD with TV so I tend to read more (in English as well). I'm currently signed up for a full Super Challenge for Spanish, and will post updates on that eventually. As expected, I'm ahead with reading and behind on films I've had an iTalki lesson in Spanish a few months ago, which went better than I expected (on my part), but have slacked doing it since. I need to rectify this and hope starting a log will get me to quit being lazy in that regard.

Currently reading: En La Mira
Currently Watching: Club de Cuervos

French
Similar to Spanish, I've gone through MT, LT (which was subpar for French), Assimil's With Ease, Using, and Business French. Once I finish FSI Spanish Basic, I'll be doing French Phonology and French Basic, while continuing the extensive reading I've recently started (well...it's on Kindle, so not completely extensive. I've been exporting notes to Anki for review as well, which was more of a pain not having a Kindle reader but my Python knowledge came in handy). Not currently reading or watching anything, once I finish En La Mira I'll be starting a French book on Kindle. I'm about 200 pages from the end so it'll be relatively soon, my Spanish reading speed (at least for thriller novels) has gotten pretty okay by my own standard.

Latin
I bought Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata (and Wheelock's, but haven't touched that much) at the beginning of quarantine, and was very excited to start...that fizzled out a month or so ago, and every time I think of working on it I think that my time is better spent on Spanish. I think part of that is being close to the end of FSI...whenever I get close to the end of a book/course, I kind of get focused on finishing it to get it off my plate. I think I'm on the beginning of Chapter 9 on LLPSI...we'll see where this goes. It was never supposed to be serious study, so I don't feel too bad.

German
Not actively studying, I keep telling myself I'll pick it up once I get far on FSI French. In the past I've done MT, dabbled with LT, and maybe ~30 Assimil Lessons. I have both With Ease and Without Toil for these, and will use both, as well as the advanced level with a French base. Then FSI, or maybe that'll be between the two levels. We'll see, this probably won't get started any time soon (I'm wary of starting too many things at once, even with the extra time on hand right now). I went to Germany in January (Stuttgart, it was a lot of fun, especially the car museums) and was surprised how much I could still decipher written German, turns out dabbling + some knowledge of cognates/sound changes is pretty helpful. That said, if you're going to Stuttgart...brush up on your German. Since it was a quick trip I was hoping I could get by on my little German and English (I hate being this guy, but didn't have much lead time here), but the level of English there wasn't great. That said, the city is great, and I recommend it.

That's all for now...as you can see, I like to deviate and digress and can get a bit wordy, so expect that. It's my log, and I'll be posting what I please . I've been keeping stats on reading/watching (prior to the Super Challenge as well), so I'll be posting those at times just because it's of interest to me. One user (can't remember who--sorry) dubbed reading 1.2MM words a "Proust", I recently surpassed that with Spanish (had a while ago probably, but in terms of what I've been tracking with books). I think with French I have 3-400,000 words read...I really need to get that over a million for a start.

Edit: I welcome any corrections in non-English posts in this log.

[jmar257]

Not too much for the first update...

No he hecho mucho la semana pasada para español. He cumplido lección 51 de FSI Spanish Basic y he leído un poco de En La Mira, pero en realidad he jugado muchos videojuegos durante la semana. Mi madre y padrastro me han visitado este fin de semana pasada, y esto era divertido. En vez de empezando con lección 52 de FSI estoy escribiendo esto, pero al menos estoy practicando, ¿no? Quizás la próxima actualización contendrá más.

Je n'ai fait rien en français...il y a encore 200 pages restante en mon livre espagnol.

[jmar257]

Acabo de ver los últimos tres episodios de la tercia temporada de Club de Cuervos. Me he gustado mucho más las primeras dos temporadas, pero ésta está bien. He leído también unas 50 páginas de mi libro, me falta 140 más. Entonces empezaré un libro francés. Y estoy a punto de cumplir la 52a lección de FSI Spanish Basic. Es muy aburrido, pero hay sólo un poco más...

Eso es todo por esta actualización. Por favor corríjame, estoy un poco borracho

[Dagane]

Welcome!

Acabo de ver los últimos tres episodios de la tercera temporada de Club de Cuervos. Me han gustado mucho más las primeras dos temporadas, pero ésta está bien. He leído también unas 50 páginas de mi libro, me faltan 140 más. Entonces empezaré un libro francés (But you may mean "en francés", even though the book may at the same time be by a French writer). Y estoy a punto de terminar la 52a lección de FSI Spanish Basic. Es muy aburrido, pero queda sólo un poco más...

Eso es todo por esta actualización (bien pero suena raro. Mejor "todo por ahora"). Por favor corríjanme, estoy un poco borracho 

[jmar257]

¡Muchas gracias, Dagane! En cuanto al libro, quise decir en francés, no estará de un autor francés. Esta mañana he terminado el curso de FSI y también he terminado leer el libro En La Mira. Más tarde comparto estadísticas de lectura que he estado compilando.

What's next?
My plan was to jump to a French book, most likely a translation of a Jack Reacher novel. That said, I'm not really feeling a thriller/mystery type book...and I don't have many French books on my to-read list. But I think I'm gonna take a short break--I'm currently reading three English language books (one on real estate investing, Screech's translation of Montaigne's Essays, and David Goggin's book as a light, before bed read). I need to get through some of those, and I'm also between FSI courses. I'll be starting up French Phonology soon, followed by French Basic, but I want a break from that. I am, however, tempted by Pablo Escobar. Mi Padre, Una historia de España, and Ficciones. Or maybe I'll try to find a French book that piques my interest. Edit: I also may use this short break to resume Lingua Latina...we'll see

I miss traveling and the idea randomly occurred to me to learn serviceable Esperanto to use Pasporta Servo...we'll see. I've toyed around with it before but that passion/interest that would carry me along to fluency was never there.

[DaveAgain]

My plan was to jump to a French book, most likely a translation of a Jack Reacher novel. That said, I'm not really feeling a thriller/mystery type book...and I don't have many French books on my to-read list. But I think I'm gonna take a short break--

Or maybe I'll try to find a French book that piques my interest.

I thought the book club novel looked pretty good: l'amie prodigieuse.

[jmar257]

My plan was to jump to a French book, most likely a translation of a Jack Reacher novel. That said, I'm not really feeling a thriller/mystery type book...and I don't have many French books on my to-read list. But I think I'm gonna take a short break--

Or maybe I'll try to find a French book that piques my interest.

I thought the book club novel looked pretty good: l'amie prodigieuse.

Thanks for the recommendation, doesn't look like something that piques my interest though. Decided to go with a Reacher book translated to French, but I may start something else in the meantime--not really feeling fiction at the moment.

Anyway, stats:

SC Overview.PNG (13.1 KiB) Viewed 2100 times

French SC.PNG (7.12 KiB) Viewed 2101 times

Spanish SC.PNG (6.78 KiB) Viewed 2101 times

This is from a Super Challenge tracker someone shared a couple months back. You can see I've chosen to do a full Spanish challenge and half a French challenge. I've read 948 Spanish pages (En La Mira), putting me at 119% of where I need to be in terms of staying on track, and I'm just under 1/5 done with the challenge. In terms of watching (a lot of which is podcasts, some of which is Club de Cuervos) I'm way behind, at 33% of where I need to be. Fully expected, I like reading and do it a lot, but I don't even watch much TV in English. As for podcasts, I'm not listening to as many since I'm working from home, and those I do are English (so I can multitask while listening) most of the time. That said, some long drives recently have let me listen and pay full attention (well, minus what I need to drive) to Spanish/French podcasts. For French, I'm similarly just ahead of where I need to be with reading (106%), and I just started a new French book (61 Heures). Listening is surprisingly doing better than Spanish, but I did make an effort to listen to more French podcasts while driving recently (didn't realize it was that lopsided--remember Spanish also has a few hours of TV). As far as French TV, I've watched none, but I have a list of shows to check out (and a bigger list for Spanish), I'm just not sure I'm ready for TV yet. After another book or two I might dip my toe in, but I also don't start too many TV shows at once. We'll see.

Here's my own stats, from before the SC:

Spanish Reading.PNG (18.19 KiB) Viewed 2100 times

LingQ words is exact, from their little widget on the side. Everything else has page counts from Amazon/Goodreads, with words equal to pages * 250, and everything non-LingQ for Spanish has been physical books minus A First Spanish Reader (which I actually read years ago). Sentences = words / 15; I recall seeing a thread about 1MM sentences and was interested in seeing how I stacked up, although obviously this is far from exact (and people were debating words per sentence). I also have a number to the right of that which includes Anki cards (vast majority of which are sentences, a lot of which from Assimil). I'm a huge fan of extensive reading, and think it has been crucial to whatever level of language I'm currently at (which allows me to at least read some hard copy books without recourse to a dictionary). I've noticed several jumps in reading ability throughout this, and getting close to a million words (in reality more, there's plenty I've read not on this) seemed to be another breakthrough. I can't say I have super specific goals on this, it's just interesting to see how I feel as I go through the different milestones. I also have about 30 hours of TV listed, which includes a lot of Club de Cuervos and some La Casa de Papel.

French Reading.PNG (13.35 KiB) Viewed 2101 times

Here's French...not as interesting, but I feel like my reading level is above where Spanish was at the same word count (granted I have one extra Assimil behind me in French, for what that's worth: Business French). LingQ includes those books in italics (no, they're not double counted at the bottom) and various articles/blogposts, just as in Spanish above.

Edit: Image order was messed up

Edit 2: The French book is being read on my iPad via the Kindle app, with plans to make unknown words into Anki cards. I did this with my last French book, highlighting the words, not realizing that when extracting them I couldn't 1) bring definitions/translation 2) bring the entire sentence. In retrospect I'm not sure why I thought I'd be able to do that, but whatever. I had to write a Python script to scrape the html export file and look up the words in Larousse. This time I'm highlighting entire sentences, and will find a suitable translation API (ideally free) to use. I may just delete the old deck...I don't like cards that are one word (although I do like the French definitions). I feel like this will help me going forward, as with Spanish there were plenty of words that I kept reading but could not hold onto. I've already had some in French I think would be like that, except I've been seeing them in Anki and they've stuck.

[jmar257]

À ce moment je lis 61 Heures, un roman de Lee Child. J'ai franchi récemment 400k mots lu en français, et je me sens meilleur quand lisant en français. Je vais commencer avec FSI French Phonology bientôt, mais probablement après ce fin de semaine prochain.

I was a hair above 400k words read in French when starting this book, and I'm a hair under 425k now, but I feel like I've experienced another "bump" in reading comprehension and fluidity. Both in vocab and grammar. I call them "bumps" because it feels like a sudden increase (or at least I notice it suddenly) in reading comprehension and fluidity, and they seemingly occur randomly. Part of this log is to track when they occur. Of course, this isn't scientific, I'm just curious. Not all bumps are the same and I'm not totally sure how to describe them, I'll just start reading one day and notice it's easier than was it e.g. last week. Part of it is regularly reading French again because I hadn't really touched it in a month or so while reading a Spanish book and finishing Spanish FSI basic, but I'm having a better time reading this book than I was finishing the last book, so that's not totally it.

I'm probably going to start on FSI French Phonology next week, seeing as it's apparently about 8 hours of audio. I'll do that and take another mini-break before FSI French Basic, which seems to be shorter than the Spanish course but still pretty long. Has anyone here completed (or mostly completed) both? How do they compare? I hope to be more consistent with it than I was with Spanish Basic (which ended up taking me almost a year), because after I finish that I'm probably jumping into Assimil German with Ease, which has been calling my name. I also need to hop back on the iTalki train, I did one lesson and haven't touched it since (for a few schedule reasons), but I really enjoyed it. And I need to start actually using these languages beyond just reading. If we weren't in Coronaworld at the moment I'd love to find a language meetup near me...


Edit: I know this is a newer log, and I mainly write for myself (to keep myself consistent and also to have a log to look back on at interesting points in my learning journey), but of the people who check this out, is there anything you'd like to see/specific questions you'd like answered? I enjoy going back and reading logs of people doing courses/techniques I'm thinking about embarking on, and I'm about to dive into two FSI courses (both for French) while continuing extensive reading. Is anyone on the fence about those or curious or something and wants to plant some questions I can be on the lookout to answer as I go through? Might as well try to make this log useful for others if I can.

[jmar257]

FR: Je n'ai trop fait récemment, seulement j'ai lit mon livre de Jack Reacher et écouté des podcasts (en français et espagnol) pendant faisant un voyage en voiture. Je suis à 50 % avec le livre, et je lis meilleur qu'avant. Aujourd'hui j'ai commencé aussi le cours de FSI French Phonology et j'ai complété la première leçon. Je dois écrire plus en des langues étrangères sur ce log, j'ai besoin de la pratique.

ES: El libro próximo es probablemente Pablo Escobar: Mi Padre. Necesito un descanso de la ficción y este libro me interesa. Debida a la precia de la versión física, he comprado la versión de Kindle. Como por el libro francés, haré los flashcards con frases con palabras desconocidas que les encuentro en el libro. También este libro es solo ~400 o 450 páginas, que es menos que los libros traducidos que he leído recientemente. Será bien no leer casi mil páginas para terminar con un libro

EN: Please correct the above if (where) I made mistakes. The Spanish was actually not too hard to write compared to the French, despite me not touching Spanish much recently. The summary is that I haven't done a ton lately other than read some in French and a little bit of listening to podcasts on a road trip. My next book will be a book about Pablo Escobar written by his son, I actually don't know if the original language was Spanish or English but I bought the Spanish version on Kindle. In other news, I'm still reading Montaigne's Essays and I'm going to start a book on Genghis Khan, since I don't know a ton about him/his empire and people tried to cancel him on Twitter a week or so ago I've been playing too many video games (largely in English) and not doing much language work lately, but I'm going to switch gears back here soon.

[DaveAgain]

I'm going to start a book on Genghis Khan, since I don't know a ton about him/his empire and people tried to cancel him on Twitter a week or so ago

There's a nice novelization of Ghengis Khan's life by Conn Iggulden, in his Conqueror series.

EDIT
Wikipedia's Ghengis Khan page mentioned a French novel that looks interesting too: le loup mongol.