How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread (Aug 2)
This is your reminder to learn something if you're not already!
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Had a good session today with Shin Kanzen Master's listening book. I'll try not to gush too much about this book series--again--but it's incredible how much confidence the listening book is giving me. Makes me wonder if someone ever did a listening training book or video series specifically targeting upper beginner/lower intermediate students, because that's often where self-taught students step out of the classroom (and those students tend to let their listening slip). Things like building the audio automaticity channel, key words and phrases to focus on that show up more in conversation than in print, and learning what speaking registers to seek out when finding content. For example, you want to be hearing everyday Japanese, not just anime; and definitely not only audiobooks.
If someone ever did do something like that, I could have used it a couple years ago. Tobira was kinda trash on the listening front, if I'm being entirely honest.
Anyway, SKM's grammar book is kicking my ass more than ever--it's a lot at once--but I can't imagine a better way of doing it. Haven't settled into the reading comprehension book yet. Didn't have a good first impression of it. If I do keep falling behind and need to adjust my study plan, it's probably going to be the first thing to get cut.
Haven't been keeping up too well this week. But I did return to Marina, a novel in Spanish, after finishing up some English books. This time I'll finish reading it.
Thanks for the reminder. I'd like to learn Spanish too. Seems you're already ahead in learning it. Do you have any recomendations for someone starting that journey?
Spanish is so commonly learned by English speakers that the hard part is filtering any content. Most language finding anything to learn from is hard, but for Spanish there is more learn spanish options than you have time for. So pick something that seems to work for you. While some programs are better than others, a program you stick with any do every day is better than a program that you can never bring youself to use.
Good question. That might be one that's better posed to the overall community for more answers, but I'll give it a shot.
I learned largely in classroom settings. So if you're still in school or see classes available, I'd recommend taking those.
It really kinda 'click'ed for me when a teacher suggested thinking throughout the day 'how could I say that in Spanish?'. So like, I'd say a sentence then translate it in my head. (This will annoy your English-speaking friends if you do it out loud.) Or read a sign then repeat what it says in Spanish. Tranlating isn't usually best practice when learning a new language, but Eng and Esp are so close it works ok a lot of time. Journaling is probably the better way, going straight from thought to target language without stopping at English, but that takes time to reach.
Not to say traditional approaches are everything. Even in advanced college classes, we never read a single Spanish-language book as part of the curriculum. I feel like behind the basics, those classes toward the end should have looked a bit more like the English literature and writing classes I took in high school, just in a different language.
If I were going to start today tho, as a self-guided learner, I'd say start with a focus on dreaming.com/spanish Work through the superbeginner/beginner stages there, then start studying grammar from whichever beginner textbook. Put vocab you come across into Anki, but don't go crazy. Once you get more comfortable, eventually use learnnatively.com to find books to read and shows to watch. (Reading is not so far off - Spanish shares a massive amount of cognates with English due to shared Greek and Latin roots. If you know your word stems, you know a lot of any romance language.)
Travel is great if you can, being in that situation really kicks your brain into realizing 'this language is important'. But not required for learning.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'll check out the resources you pointed out.