WEEK 10So, it’s the end of week ten of my project to turn a lilting Irish harp into a lively Spanish guitar. This week was dedicated to measuring my progress so far. Not as a backslapping exercise, but to identify what I need to work on and whether the techniques I am using are working well, or whether they need to be changed to focus on those areas of weakness. I am, of course, happy to slap myself on the back too, if warranted.
I found two DELE A1 Spanish exams online: one a sample paper on the Institute Cervantes website and the other a past paper from May 2009 which I found here. I decided to attempt the 2009 paper to see if I have managed to get to A1 level yet. I did the listening comprehension and reading comprehension parts of the exam and was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn’t find them that difficult, especially the reading. I think I could have passed them a couple of weeks ago in fact. I don’t know where I am in terms of writing or speaking Spanish, as I need someone else to grade me on that, so next week I’m going to find someone who corrects A1 Spanish exams and will take the sample A1 exam from the Instituto Cervantes. This was the week when my tolerance of Duolingo’s cartoon language learning app frayed to the point of rupture. There are certainly things that are good about the app, but they have been increasingly outweighed by the bad and when I looked how much time I spent using the thing and how much I learnt I figured that there are faster and more enjoyable ways to learn a language. Surprisingly though, the gamification aspect of the app, which I really do not like, exerted a strange hold over me and I felt quite uneasy about the prospect of losing my streak of consecutive days gaining experience points and my place on the leaderboard. This week I tried out the Memrise app. It has a series of what are described as language courses, though really they are much more like separate phrase books, seven in all teaching a total of around three thousand words and phrases. These are taught using an audio file, sometimes with a video file, of a native speaker saying the words and then tests you in a variety of ways. The words are taught out of context, and are not combined into sentences, and each section of each lesson just teaches and tests the words in that section. The app then prompts you to review the words you have learnt using a spaced repetition system. You have to learn the words and phrases in order, and have to work through the lessons in order, completing one to unlock the next one. There also appear to be some gamification features, with points and a leaderboard, though I didn’t pay too much attention to them. The language taught is much more slangy than the other apps and courses I’ve come across, and do feel more like real spoken Spanish. There’s a pronunciation section where you listen to a word and then record yourself saying it, though app only tells you if it thinks your pronunciation was OK or not OK. A bit like trying to learn to shoot by firing a gun at a target you can’t see and then having someone tell you whether you hit it. I also checked out “immersion” section, which is a series of short, TikTok style jokey videos in Spanish, though to be honest I couldn’t see that you’d learn much from watching them, other than that some people have a lot of time on their hands. Personally, I don’t think Memrise can teach you a foreign language, as there is a lot more to it than just learning lists of vocabulary. Stringing together words you’ve learnt isn’t the same as saying grammatical sentences for one thing, and recognising words and phrases here and there in sentences that you hear doesn’t mean you’ll be able to understand them. All in all, I think it is really an enhanced form of flashcard app, which gives you words and phrases with video and audio and tests you in a variety of ways. The problem is that you can only use it to learn the words provided and in the order that they are provided. I think I’ll stick with the Anki app which works perfectly well and which allows me to learn and test myself on words and phrases that I find from all kinds of sources, like courses, books, conversations etc. I have been continuing with part II of the Pimsleur Spanish course this week and finished the Michel Thomas Spanish Advanced course, which didn’t teach any new vocabulary and really focused on teaching how to use verbs in every tense, as Michel says this is really the key to the language. I’ll have to find some way of working to retain everything I learnt on this course, and will probably start working through the review next week. This week I read Learning a Language: How I managed it, How you can too by Ian Gibbs. The author set himself the goal of studying Catalan for six months and then taking the intermediate-level exam at end, and the book is about his experience. Since Ian was already fluent in Spanish, a language quite similar to Catalan, and had lived in the Catalan city of Barcelona, it’s not clear how his experience would compare to that of someone learning a language from scratch in a country where it is not spoken. That said, the exam he took appears to have been around CEFR level B1, which is good going in six months in any language. The first part of the book sets out his twenty laws of language learning and a description of different approaches and resources that are available. It is clear from the bibliography at the back of the book that the author read a number of other language learning books, many of the same ones I’ve read in fact. What is less clear is the extent to which his laws are drawn from his research or from personal experience, or both, as he gives very little information about his experiences of using the rules, approaches and resources he mentions, and only ever directly refers using a small number of them. I did find this part of book was a useful summary though, and if I hadn’t read any other books on language learning would have found it very helpful, but I would have to have got some sense of what the author found actually worked well and what didn’t. The remainder of the book, more than half of it, is about applying the principles he had written about in a previous book to language learning. These are predominantly about setting a measurable goal, breaking the goal into manageable tasks and then doing something to work towards these sub-goals every day. It also had sections on creating good habits and triggering those habits and on maintaining motivation. The main thing I took from reading this part of the book was the emphasis on the fact that doing a small amount every day adds up to a lot in the long run. All in all I thought the book was OK, mainly for the summary at the beginning, but there are better books out there. This week I watched one Spanish movie: Durante la tormenta (Mirage) from 2018 and continued with the second season of Spanish TV show La Casa de papel (Money Heist). The movie is another written by Oriol Paula, who wrote Contratiempo and El Cuerpo, both of which I loved. This was pretty good if you could get past a rather silly premise which was strongly of the Denis Quaid movie Frequency. Well that’s about it. Week ten of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 1510 words in Spanish. I learnt 210 new words this week, which comes to 30 per day. One small step towards flavouring my life with rasgueados, and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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