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Amy’s Spanish Viaje | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5322 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 41 of 104 11 February 2014 at 12:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Yeah, the only way to stay sane on this journey is to keep looking back several months. If not, you'll get too frustrated by the daily up-and-down. You've really just got to let go and stop comparing to anything other than "you, 3 months ago".
French really, really helps with Spanish. When people write to you in Spanish in your log, I can usually read it, and I've never studied Spanish. Just to give you idea of what it's like, compare the two passages that I quote below, the first in Lowland Scots, and the second in English. (It's the Christmas story, because it's hard to find parallel texts in Scotts and English that aren't religious.)
The Scots text is unfamiliar, but if you read it aloud and compare it with the English text, much of it will eventually make sense. That's what Spanish feels like to me: I can't write it at all, but given time, a parallel text, and a bit of luck, I can puzzle out a lot. And this is why shouldn't compare yourself to Stelle, or to other people working on their second or third Romance language: They start with a ridiculously huge advantage, just like you would if you learned Scots.
It sounds like you have an excellent tutor. This is perfect—she speaks to you slowly, she tries to explain things in several different ways, and she types if you can't understand. And she's encouraging you to do some all-Spanish sessions. Take her up on that offer.
Honestly, there are two different skills here: 1. Understanding people when they speak directly to you, one-on-one. 2. Understanding natives when they speak to each other. Now, (2) is a wonderful skill to have, but it's hard. We're talking a thousand hours of practice, at least, for many people. Even FSI diplomats who study 9 hours a day for 6 months complain that it's hard to keep up with conversations between native speakers. And the FSI works those folks hard, to the point where even the best students want to cry sometimes. I know that when you try to listen now, it's just a blur. But don't beat yourself up over that. You're normal. As Scott Aaronson points out:
Someday you will be able to understand conversations between native speakers. You will get there. But that's one of the final stages of your trip. But there's good news, too: Mastering (1) is much, much easier than mastering (2). It sounds like you can already understand your tutor when she speaks, at least some of the time, and when you can't, she can make herself understood by rephrasing or writing things out. Stop and think about this for a minute: This means that if you run into a Spanish speaker who speaks no English, but who's willing to take some time, you can actually understand a lot. And if you work on building up your speaking just a bit more, you'll be able to respond. OK, at best, you'll sound like an unusually cosmopolitan three-year-old, but it's a start. It's actual two-way communication in Spanish, no matter how imperfect and frustrating. And it forms the basis of everything you'll learn after. Even kids struggle with new languages:
Read it, it's a great article. You're going to take some lumps. But then one day you'll say, "Hey, I just spent my entire day functioning in Spanish. I kept having to ask people to repeat themselves, and I made so many errors that I lost count. But I can survive with nothing but Spanish." If you're the sort of person who's always frustrated, you'll just upgrade to better and better classes of complaints: "I can carry on a basic conversation, but I can't defend simple abstract ideas." Then, "I can defend simple abstract ideas, but I sound like an idiot." And eventually, "I only understand 90% of most TV shows, and I only read half as fast in Spanish as I do in English, and I still suck at complicated professional conversations." You may never be able to shut that voice up (I can't, not completely, not even now), but you can at least learn to laugh at it a bit. :-) That voice is so unreasonable it's ridiculous. Keep working with your tutor. Try to mix in a little Spanish when you speak to your boyfriend. It will be hard to switch completely to Spanish (your brains will fight it), but it's often a lot easier to throw in a few sentences here and there, if he's game. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| AmyinBrooklyn Senior Member United States Joined 3841 days ago 87 posts - 122 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 42 of 104 14 February 2014 at 5:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Hi Emk - Thank you so much for stopping by. Particularly since I know you had a tough week with sick kiddos. And thank you for your patience in continuing to say the same thing to me. I know that you keep telling me to be patient and put one foot in front of the other - for some reason, I need to keep hearing it.
Seeing that Scottish and English example really drove home your point of the advantage of a related language. Thank you for that. I KNEW it, but I didn't KNOW it. And you're right - I probably will only upgrade to a better class of complaints. Ha! It's true. It's funny - I didn't expect for the most difficult part of this journey to be silencing my inner critic. And I don't think I really understood how difficult understanding natives speak together was - I had been getting so frustrated at myself for not making more progress there. And you know what? I had a great session with my tutor today. I listened to a lot of Spanish this week. Practiced a bit right before our lesson - and when it was over, I realized that nearly that entire thing was in Spanish. I made a million mistakes, of course - but it was a good one. And thank you for all think links - you always have fantastic links and I really enjoy them. (In fact, I'm going back over them now.) Thank you, thank you, thank you! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5322 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 43 of 104 14 February 2014 at 7:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
:-) For most people, the biggest obstacles to learning a language are either giving up, or beating themselves up emotionally. The actual learning bit is usually not a problem, and a lot of it happens naturally and mysteriously. It just takes longer than most people expect. And the progress is uneven, so people freak out and stress over bad days.
Yeah, understanding fast conversations between natives is at least a B2/C1 thing. You can't even get there with your current tools. The good news is that you'll be getting better tools very soon! Here's one possible way you might get there. There are other ways. 1. Keep doing what you're doing until you can survive one-on-one conversations about basic stuff, and until you can read a book and more-or-less follow what's going on. 2. Find some really interesting books in Spanish and start reading. Keep reading. :-) Feel free to skip stuff. Sheer volume counts—this is more about "locking in" the stuff you can already sort of decipher so that it becomes almost automatic, and less about looking up the stuff that makes no sense at all. 3. Keep looking around until you find a cool Spanish TV series where you can follow 40% of the dialog. (This will likely be a dubbed show.) Watch several seasons. Don't hesitate to watch the early episodes several times, with and without subs. With luck, this will get you up to 70% or 80% comprehension, but only for that show. Some shows will work much better than others, so don't hesitate to try a couple until you find an easier one. 4. Don't stop reading! The faster you can read, the better you'll be at listening. 5. Repeat the process with two or three more TV shows. You'll start out with low comprehension in each, but you'll get back up to 80% comprehension quicker and quicker. 6. Once you can get up to 80% comprehension of a new show within just a few episodes, get Spanish cable and start channel surfing. Pretty soon you'll find that native speech isn't so scary after all. This approach works because TV series tend to have a small number of characters and they repeat the same words a lot. This allows you to break listening down into a series of smaller challenges, and to "practice" while watching awesome TV with your boyfriend. Seriously, a huge chunk of my French listening skills come from watching Buffy (5 seasons), Angel (3 seasons), Ulysse 31 (several seasons, a French kid's cartoon), Avatar (3 seasons) and Game of Thrones (1 season) with my wife, and from listening to her talk to people. The rest of my listening skills come from reading sci-fi novels, half of them old favorites translated from English. Now, this is just one possible approach. But it's example of the kind of "tools" which will be added to your toolbox relatively soon. Forgive the silly metaphor, but it's sort of like one of those video games where the only way to survive the dragons on level 9 is to use the magic sword you discovered on level 8. If you just jumped straight there from level 5, you'd have to be some kind of video-game genius to tackle the dragons. Part of your frustration stems from the fact that you keep stumbling from level 5 into level 9 or 12 and you think that somehow you're supposed to be able beat these creatures right now. Plus you're on HTLAL, which is kind of a mixed blessing when it comes to your pride, because—to continue this silly metaphor—you're surrounded by people who will happily walk you through step by step and cheer for you, but you're also surrounded by people who've done a lot of stuff like this, and a few of them probably can skip straight from level 5 to level 9 and just jump across the dragons' heads or something. The rest of us need to go by levels 6, 7 and 8 and maybe get beat up by the skeleton army, but we'll have fun and we'll get there.
This is so incredibly awesome. :-) These are the victories that will help you rock your trip to Peru, and these are the stepping stones that will prepare you tackle the challenges ahead. Seriously, how cool is it that you can actually talk to somebody in Spanish for 30 to 60 minutes? Just keep stretching yourself a bit, keep working on these skills, and think about how much more awesome this trip will be now that you can actually talk to people. Even if you sound like a 3-year-old and you have to ask people to repeat themselves constantly, that's so much more fun than not being to say a word, and having to pantomime "Help, where's the bathroom!" Being able to speak at all is just so… liberating. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| AmyinBrooklyn Senior Member United States Joined 3841 days ago 87 posts - 122 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 44 of 104 17 February 2014 at 1:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Total: 16 hours 35 min.
Grand Total: 257 hour Thank you all for encouragement this week. I had been feeling really low but I just decided that it was unproductive.(I think it was also a result of not feeling well physically) I had a little pity party - and thank you for all attending, but I decided that it was time to just to work extra hard this week and to stop feeling defeated. And I put in 16 hours - which is a pretty good number for me. I decided that this was going to be my week to go back to basics. So I went through all the Michel Thomas foundation series. (I did skip around for the first couple of discs but then went through the last few pretty thoroughly - all in all, I spent about 5.5 hours working through Foundation). One thing that I noticed (and this is a no brainer) but if I spend a little time before my italki lesson listening or working on a little Spanish - my lesson is much better. I just need that little bit of time to warm up. I also spent a lot of time listening this week. I started Notes in Spanish. I’m listening to each Podcast twice - even though I don’t always understand every word, I do understand every thought - which is a victory. And I finished Destinos - I’m actually going to miss it now that it’s gone. I’m going to work my way through Extr@ en Espanol and then I suppose, I’ll need to work through some native materials. I’ve given Assimil a huge break, but my goal for this next week is to bring it back. I’ve just come so far along in it - Lesson 40-something on the active wave - to give up. And I know that so many people have found it really helpful. Another goal is to add 5 new words a day to my Anki deck - I think that’s a reasonable number. I usually either add way more than that or I skip Anki and I think I’ll get more out of it, if I’m consistent. I’m still at the point where every words I learn opens the window a crack more for me. I got so bogged down with verbs conjunctions that I wasn’t learning as many nouns or new verbs. And I still need to read Despereaux this week. I have been reading it out loud to my bf so that I can work on pronunciation so it makes for slow going with the book (about one or two chapters per day) - but I think it's worth it, in the long run. Anyway, you can all that I take your advice to heart and I'm just giving it a go, day-by-day. I have 40 more days until my trip and I think I might do some sort of 30 day challenge for myself - I don't know what that would look like but I might try to really ramp up my study and then - as I've heard you all say to many others "It's game time." emk, as usual, I read your messages to me multiple times and I take your words to heart! I didn't even think to look for Game of Thrones in Spanish. I've seen it in English twice and I've read the books so that might be a good series for me to watch in Spanish. And I appreciate your advice to read! I'm going to look for more children's book in Spanish. And I think you're right that while this site has been amazing for great ideas on how to learn - I have to keep reminding myself that I'm on my own journey and it doesn't compare to anyone's journey. Actually, it makes me feel better thinking that all the work I'm doing now might be transferable to another language (particularly since the other language that I would want to learn would be Italian). but I think even just knowing how to learn will be a huge help but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it (I also want to learn Sanskrit!) right now my eye is on the prize. I can do this! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5165 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 45 of 104 17 February 2014 at 2:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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EMK's advice is great. I think watching something you have seen in English would be very helpful. It makes it a million times easier to understand... even if you have not seen it for a long time. If you have seen Game of Thrones a few times and read the books that would be an awesome series to work through.
Also, if there is a novel you know well in English you could try listening to the Spanish audio while following along with the text. I have found that is easy if you know the story well. Also, I think it helps the listening skills more to be able to see the words as you are listening. For example, the Game of Thrones audio books are all available in Spanish. Send me a message if you would like a link. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5325 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 46 of 104 17 February 2014 at 2:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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That's why I'm glad I came across others recommending Buffy in Spanish (which hadn't
really occurred to me prior to that). That show (and its spin-off Angel) were huge favorites of mine back when they were airing. It has been so long since I saw them that I'm plenty eager to watch them again, so I may as well do so in Spanish. I had seen AJATT's recommendation on this multiple times (pick a favorite show, one you absolutely loved and know scenes from almost by heart, and rewatch it with target language audio), but I couldn't really think of one that seemed suitable so I never implemented that advice. Then I saw some forum posters here mention watching Buffy in Spanish and the light bulb finally came on. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5655 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 47 of 104 17 February 2014 at 2:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Personally i've always found cartoons much easier to follow. The language is generally pretty clear and the lack of synchronization between the mouth and the audio isn't as jarring.
emk's advice, as usual, is great! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5322 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 48 of 104 10 March 2014 at 3:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Hello! I thought I would just check in and wish you good luck during your final weeks of trip preparation. :-)
1 person has voted this message useful |
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