WEEK 14So, it’s the end of week fourteen of my project to turn an insipid coddle into a spicy caparrones. Between work, gym and learning Spanish I’ve managed to fall behind on writing my weekly report on my progress, so apologies to my avid readers (both of you). I have a couple of work projects nearing completion at the moment, but will try to find more time to write each day, even if I have to do a little less learning the language.
This week I finished part II of the Pimsleur Spanish course. I’m not learning much new vocabulary or grammar from the course at this point, but I still find it useful for working on my accent and my ability to put together sentences in Spanish. I still make plenty of mistakes, so I will continue on with part III I think. This week I also finished working through the exercises in Basic Spanish: A Grammar and Workbook. I’m not sure how much I’ve learned from doing these to be honest, so rather than go onto the advanced book by the same authors I decided to start on Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Spanish Grammar by Gilda Nissenberg which describes itself as having more than 3,500 lively exercises. I’m not sure how many I’ll get through between now and next April, but I’m prepared to be enlivened by the ones I do try. This week I also tried out the Mondly language learning app. I downloaded the free version of the app which allows you to choose from one of three levels (beginner, intermediate or advanced). You are then presented with various categories – family, countries and languages, romance, seasons and weather etc – but when you click on any of them you are given an ad asking you to subscribed to the premium version. You can’t dismiss this ad, so you either subscribed, or close the app and reopen it. It seems that the only thing that isn’t locked out of the free version is a daily lesson, so I tried it on the intermediate level. It essentially conjugated the verb leer (to read) in the present tense, asking repeated versions in each person (I read, you read, he reads, she reads etc) which were either entered by multiple choice or typed. I then changed my profile setting to advanced and tried another daily lesson (the next day) and it tested me on conjugating the verb ver (to see) in the present tense. Not what I’d call intermediate or advanced. Or interesting. This definitely didn’t make we want to shell out for the premium version, so I deleted it and will try something else next week. I’ve been continuing with working through five minutes of the TV show Gran Hotel each day – first without subtitles and then with subtitles in Spanish – and with this small amount I feel I am making progress. I’ve gone from hardly being able to pick out more than the odd word to getting the gist of most of the scenes when not using the subtitles, though I do still miss some pretty important plot points. Of course, I’m also listening to Spanish podcasts in the gym (Notes in Spanish and Vino para principiantes), so it’s hard to tease out which is leading to the most or fastest progress, but since I’m enjoying them I’ll stick with both for now. The Hoy Hablamos podcast has started to sound very slow at this point so I have dropped it. I’ve also started listening to previous listening comprehension exams for the Irish Leaving Certificate exam. This is supposed to be at B1 level, though I suspect the listening comprehension of the component might be a little below that. For now I’m just listening to the recordings in the car and trying to take in as much as I can, but I will try the exam questions next week or the week after and see how I get on. This week I read The 9 Unbreakable Laws of Language Learning: A Quick and Easy Guide to Developing a Successful Language-Learning Mind-Set by Benjamin J Lawson. The author claims that it is not an instructional book but is more focused on having a strong mental approach to language learning, but in fact it contains a wealth of useful advice on language learning and is one of the better books that I have read so far. His advice on learning grammar in particular was very good. His key recommendation was to learn grammatical points by memorising sentences that demonstrate those points, without worrying to much about whether you understand the rules underlying them, rather than trying to learn the rules and then apply them to real sentences. Once you’ve internalised the rules in this way, you can go back and figure out the reasoning behind them. His advice on other parts of language learning was also good, as were the sections on motivation. Definitely a book I’d recommend. I’ve been continuing to read La noche de la usina and Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. I’ve definitely noticed some real progress in the last few weeks and I am using the dictionary relatively little for La noche de la usina and not at all for the Harry Potter book. I couldn’t produce an accurate, word-for-word translation and I’m sure I am missing some subtleties, but I am getting the main story easily enough. The problem is that I’m not enjoying La noche de la usina all that much. It’s a bit of a grind to get through a page and I don’t want to do any more. I want to read a book written for a Spanish audience rather than just ones that are translated from English, so I might pick a Spanish children’s book that I can also read without a dictionary and give it a go next week. My film this week was La caja 507 (Box 507) from 2002. You expect a certain number of coincidences with a thriller/mystery movie, but there were just too many in this one I think. That and the fact that the death at the beginning of the film, which was really central to the whole plot, was never really explained meant that what might have otherwise been a fairly neat thriller fell a bit flat. Watchable, but not great. Well that’s about it. Week fourteen of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 2,350 words in Spanish. I learnt 210 new words this week, which comes to 30 per day. One small step towards wielding a cazuela like a pro and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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