WEEK 5Hola!
So, it’s the end of week five of my project to turn the humble potato into a hot tamale. I spent some time over the weekend planning out what resources I would use and how often, to try and stop this project from spinning out of control and taking over my life entirely. So far this seems to be working, and I may even mow the lawn this weekend. In fact, I’m very confident that I will mow the lawn this week. If I know what’s good for me. I’ve been continuing with Duolingo this week, though I’ve been spending less time than before. Each lesson is supposed to be taken five times and there are 159 lessons in total. My plan is to complete all the lessons the full number of times, and so I’ve been going over some of the older lessons that I’ve only done two or three times previously. I thought this would be pretty easy, but the lessons get harder each time you do them, moving from making sentences from a group of words provided on the screen to typing out sentences in Spanish with no clues or prompts. My error count has definitely gone up, which is frustrating, but weirdly has made me more rather than less interested in using the app. I’ve also been continuing with the Pimsleur Spanish course this week. I think I’ll probably finish the first part of the course (part I of V) next week, and may take a break to check out a few other courses before moving on to part II. Due to a foolish, and very middle-aged, injury that I inflicted on myself while doing what I like to incorrectly refer to as “running”, I am now spending twenty minutes a day using a foam roller and doing various inelegant stretches (as prescribed by my sister the physiotherapist) in an attempt to prevent my Achilles tendon from snapping the next time I try to exercise. Or walk to the shops. Or the fridge. I’ve been doing the Pimsleur course as an accompaniment to this routine, repeating Spanish sentences as I grimace and contort in a manner which I’d imagine would make compelling evidence for institutionalisation if a psychiatrist were to somehow wander in; perhaps summoned by my wife or daughter, as they frequently threaten. I finished reading Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner this week. Much like Fluent in 3 Months by Benny Lewis, the book is a reasonably comprehensive in setting out how to go about learning a foreign language, but focuses predominantly on just one aspect. For Benny Lewis, the key thing is to speak the language from day one. For Gabriel Wyner, it’s to use flashcards to memorise vocabulary and grammar. Much of the book is taken up with very detailed guidance on how to make your flashcards, and his approach is certainly elaborate, involving putting images that best represent the foreign word or phrase being learnt on one side of the card and writing the foreign word or phrase on the other, and then creating mental visual images to memorise the word or phrase. He also puts a lot of stress on using a spaced repetition system to test yourself on the flashcards you have created. I used to teach memory and studying techniques to students, and so I know a bit about the memory techniques that Wyner recommends and about spaced repetition. I’ll talk about these in more detail in a future post I think, and will also put up a separate page on the techniques I used to teach and their applicability to learning languages. You can see my full review of the book here, but for now my main observation is that Wyner’s approach seems to me to involve far to much time creating the language learning tool and preparing to learn, and not enough time actually learning, a bit like someone spending a lot of time stretching but then not actually going for that run (perhaps while listening to a Pimsleur course). As a result, I decided to put his advice into practice using a more simple approach. Wyner recommends using the Anki app for creating and testing yourself on your flashcards, so towards the end of last week I decided to download it for my iPhone. When I searched for “Anki” in the App Store, the first app that appeared on the list was “AnkiApp Flashcards” so that is the one I downloaded. I spent some time creating flashcards for the vocabulary I had already learnt and quickly realised that the thing was complete junk. It tested me on some of the cards I had created but not on others, and didn’t seem to have many settings I could use or change and the review schedule made no sense at all. I was close to just deleting the thing when some some quick googling revealed that the original app, as recommended by Wyner, is actually “AnkiMobile Flashcards”, which for some reason appears second on the list in the App Store search. It reminded me of an early Simpsons episode when Homer goes to buy a TV, Bart says the ones they are looking at are crappy knock-offs and Homer says “I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it”. The AnkiApp is a genuine Panaphonics. The real app has a version for IOS and a version for Windows so you can create or test yourself on your vocabulary on a laptop or an iPhone. There’s probably an android version too, for people who like that sort of thing. Each day I’ve been creating cards on my laptop – English word on one side, Spanish word on the other – from the list of words I’ve already learnt from the Michel Thomas and Pimsleur courses and the Duolingo app. It only takes a few minutes to create forty or fifty cards and seconds to sync them so I can test myself on the iPhone. I’ve been testing myself on a few cards at a time through the day, and this can be done almost any time or anywhere. Almost. Not while driving or, say, attending a wedding or funeral. Although the Windows version of the app is free, the iPhone IOS version costs €27.99. This is €27.99 more than the AnkiApp costs, but then it’s probably cheaper to get Sal Pacino (yes, a real actor) to star in your movie than Al, but people will definitely notice the difference. So far I’ve loved using this app, and I really wish I had known about it and used it from the very start, as it will now take time to input all the words I’ve learnt so far. Once that’s done though, I think this will be a very useful way of quickly learning, and retaining vocabulary. I decided to stop reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal for a while to see how I would get on reading a novel written originally in Spanish, and for adults. I chose La noche de la Usina by Eduardo Sacheri, partly because Sacheri also wrote La pregunta de sus ojos, which was adapted as a film I loved: El secreto de sus ojos, and partly because the novel won the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize and because it was also made into a film in 2019: La odisea de los giles (Heroic Losers). It has definitely been a lot harder to understand than the Harry Potter book, but I am making progress and enjoying it more because I do not know where the story is going. This week I watched one Spanish movie: La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In ) from 2011. It was written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, apparently one of the giants of Spanish cinema, and it is a curiously implausible yet fascinating, silly but also disturbing flick. I also started watching the Spanish TV show La Casa de papel (Money Heist). I’m loving it so far, but sadly my doting spouse isn't, so this will have to be watched during lunch breaks or at weekends on the laptop when she is ambulating the canine. Well that’s about it. Week five of fifty-two done and I reckon that I now know 672 words in Spanish. I learnt 112 new words this week, which comes to 16 per day. One small step towards being a spicy spud, and the adventure continues … |
Here are some of the resources I was using this week
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