Just Spanish

This blog will be devoted entirely to improving my Spanish. For this first entry I'll give some background about my experience with the language.

Background. My first memories of Spanish are of my parents sending to me a short (several weeks) crash course in the language when I was pretty young, maybe seven or eight years old. I don't remember whether I liked it or not, but I do know that I never used it again until high school when I was required to take three years of a foreign language, so I probably forgot most of that early exposure, though I did retain at least the ability to trill the RR.

I grew up in Texas, so Spanish was on TV, on the radio, at soccer games, and plenty of other places, yet I was never all that interested in it and I had no friends who spoke it. Even three years of high school Spanish and my parents becoming good friends with first-generation Mexican-Americans made no dent in my lack of interest. I think mostly I just wasn't attracted to the idea of learning another language yet.

Once I got my French to a pretty decent level, I saw how much pleasure learning another language could bring, so naturally I decided to revisit my Spanish. I bought a beginner's book several months ago and worked through that while also seeking out conversation partners, which brought me to where I am now: I have probably an upper-beginner level, can read a lot of news stories, but still have trouble catching more than broad strokes in normal-speed speech and sometimes get completely lost. I can express myself but without much fluidity or confidence.

Concrete plans
1. I recently got Assimil's Perfectionnement Espagnol, which will take two months at one lesson per day.
2. I have booked a lesson for Monday with an iTalki tutor.
3. I will listen to RTVE every day.
4. I will continue seeking out conversation partners and talking with the ones I have.
5. I will read El País and El Mundo every day.

I just finished exams for the spring and have plenty of time for language studies, so I expect that by the time I have finished the Assimil book I'll see some notable improvements.

Which shows on RTVE do you like ?

I like "A hombros de gigantes." Other than that I am still just testing the waters; I haven't been listening to RTVE for very long yet. Do you have any recommendations? I like science, history, culture, occasionally some politics.

Assimil is on track so far with Lessons 1 and 2 completed.

I'm going to start reading aloud in Spanish more often. I noticed that after reading aloud for like twenty minutes (broken up throughout the day) in French yesterday, my speaking felt a lot more fluid today. I'm not sure if it was just a purely mechanical "not tripping over my own tongue from lack of active use" thing or something more than that. Or maybe it was all just a coincidence. Anyway, I'm going to make reading aloud in Spanish a regular routine and see what results.

I just signed up for the Super Challenge (100 films + 100 books before 2016) for Spanish. The films will be no problem (since we are allowed to use subtitles), but the book part is probably a bit crazy of me, since I have never completed even one book in Spanish before. Well, now to find a book that is actually easy enough that I can read it with a decent level of understanding...probably something nonfiction first, which is how I started with French.

Also to note: I have my first Spanish session with Carla scheduled for tomorrow morning.

Start with children's books or easy readers. There is a ton of them in Spanish

This was excellent! She was a good teacher (even with a bit of a cold) and I was really "on", speaking pretty fluidly and understanding with ease.

As I posted earlier, lately I have been reading aloud every day in both French and Spanish, usually at least ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening for each language. It seems to be "loosening" my tongue a bit...not giving me things to say, of course, but making them come out more fluidly when I do say them.

Day 8 of Assimil's Perfectionnement Espagnol and I am on schedule (Lesson 8).

I am using my usual technique of cyclic review -- do a lesson, leave it untouched for a week, then review it. So today I am going through Lesson 8 for the first time and Lesson 1 for the second time.

So far the lessons are not that hard but there are some sentences that fly by me the first couple times and words I don't know yet.

Still working on Assimil consistently. I missed a couple days but I pick it right back up when I falter.

While people never mistake me for a native speaker, sometimes they ask me if I have lived in a Hispanophone country or if my wife is a native Spanish speaker. I guess that means I am improving.

Those are great questions that they have asked, your Spanish must be natural and fluent I think.

I stopped Spanish a little over a year ago to study German intensively. I imagine I am about the same level as you are. I had got a fair ways into Destinos (pulling vocab for same into Anki off of Quizlet), and part ways into Spanish Without Toil. And I read semi-intensively looking up words as needed but not making notes of new words encountered. Plus I was finding Mexican soaps online and listening to them. I know a lot more words than suggested by only partly going through Destinos and SWT though.

The core of my German studies has been Anki. While it is tedious to some degree, especially in making new cards (I make thorough ones with example sentences pulled from Word Reference and dict.cc), it has absolutely propelled my learning German into high gear, and mostly until now without the necessity of studying grammar too intensively (though I always start with a basic grammar overview). If you like Anki and are willing to put in the time necessary, it can do wonders. While I am not a fan of available decks online, there is a 10K most frequent Spanish one that is fairly good. I plan to start going through it.

While people might think that Anki would just expand to suck up all one's time, I have found, that with the odd judicious break for a few days from learning 30ish new cards per day, I can keep it under an hour. As older cards become fully learned the time intervals extend further into the future, and one hour now maintains about 9500 learned or partially learned words in German, where at the beginning the same time only maintained a couple thousand. Even when you fail an older card that you are starting to forget, you can advance it faster out of site again.

Studies have shown that the lexical threshold to comfortably read a newspaper is about 15K words in English. I speculate the number is 20%+ greater in German, but possibly 20% less in Spanish. A huge benefit to concentrating on vocabulary is that then one is able to concentrate on grammar and usage more comfortably and profitably.

¡Buena suerte!

I thought I should come back and mention that I am absolutely not advocating learning vocabulary in isolation for its own sake. I have tried to pull the most common vocabulary from various courses /books which I can then review and review again to help solidify that vocabulary. Re the not so common vocabulary, say in the 3-10K range, I have pulled that from vocabulary lists freely available on the net taken from various higher level courses for B1-C1. I rely on extensive reading to help consolidate that. Plus for listening I have relied on LOTS of exposure via radio and television, both documentary/news type (easier) and soaps (easyish) and crime shows (harder past the common vocab for that genre).

Cuando aprendí francés usé Anki pero de hecho me aburrí con ello muy facilmente. Ahora sigue estudiando sin Anki y estoy feliz de la rapidez con la que voy avanzando. Quizás que si utilizara Anki, progresaría más rapidamente...no sé. De todos modos, gracias por tus consejos.

De nada. No puedo ser seguro de la utilidad de Anki excepto por mi mismo.

¿Cómo puedes jugar al Anki? En el foro, todo el mundo habla de Anki pero no lo conozco. ¿Lo puedo hacer en el ordenador o qué?

Anki es un programa de tarjetas de memoria. Específacamente, se trata de repaso espaciado: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repaso_espaciado

Puedes descargarlo por este web: http://ankisrs.net/

¡¡Muchísimas gracias!!

Lo encontré inmediatamente, fue muy facil poner en mi ordenador pero ¿dónde se puede encontrar las tarjetas? Lo siento que soy tal estúpida LOL

Generalmente tú creas las tarjetas por ti mismo pero hay también tarjetas que se pueden descargar.

Por ejemplo, cuando busques "anki spanish decks" por Google, encontrarás esta página: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/spanish