Day 32-37: Fun in Costa Rica (or how I bought a bus ticket in español) ...

Ugh, I really need to be more diligent in keeping this thing up to date. So, after departing my week of hell in California, I landed in Costa Rica, and promptly got screwed by immigration (and my own stupidity). Sort have been a running theme of this trip. After a couple days of fighting, I'm in the unfortunate situation of being forced to leave the country and re-enter to extend the number of days (something I'll be taking of over the weekend).

That being said, it hasn't been all negative. While I admit I didn't make much progress in my Spanish during my week of isolation in California, the same can't be said for being in Costa Rica. I decided to attend a local language school (Costa Rica Language Academy), and have been using more Spanish day-to-day.

One thing I've noticed being back in a Spanish-speaking country is there is a distinct difference in being able to speak Spanish, and truly having a conversation. One thing I began to notice in my last classes with Audri is that sometimes things can get repeative, and it can be difficult to work things I've learned independently into fluid conversation.

For instance, in the Dominican Republic, I struggled greatly to buy things in shop because my Spanish was shaky. This is also true in Costa Rica, but less so; I managed to actually buy a bus ticket round trip to Nicaragua entirely in Spanish (with much repetition and very slowly, but it was entirely in Spanish!

I have an unfortunate tendency to want to always speak English when doing something official, and its something I need to get past. Today, I managed to break through a barrier because I managed to get my travel arrangements mostly sorted.

Which brings me to my big news; assuming everything goes well, on Monday, I'll be doing a homestay program for two weeks (followed by a week stateside for the holidays, then hopefully returning to Costa Rica until Christmas week). This will really give me a chance to integrate with Costa Ricans, and really force me to use Spanish in every aspect of my life. I'll be continuing this with 1:1 2-hour a week tutoring and really trying to get back on track with hitting my goal.

I've made good progress, there's no doubting that, but California really disrupted me, and the last week of madness really hasn't helped to say the least. We're coming up on the half-way mark, and part of me thinks I need to reevaluate my progress and where my end goal will be, but no matter what, this has been an adventure, and I have no regrets.

Day 26-31: Up down, left right. Just really coming apart ...

I've made it no secret that the last few days from my update have been rocky to say the least. Between a bad trip to San Diego, combined with a long and exhausting conference, I've completely bounced out of my groove. I didn't even realize a month had passed until it had. Furthermore, I find myself standing on a cross-roads.

As it stands, I *really* just need a place to get settled and then resume work on my Spanish. I've got two radically different paths available, one that will help me in my language learning mission, and one that might help me settled for a longer period of time.

Right now, I need to deal with a personal issue that's been eating at me for awhile, while hopefully continuing with Spanish at least on a maintence level on the intermin. I'll post more tonight, but I wanted to make sure you guys knew I wasn't dead.

Day 23-25: Ugh ...

Got completely killed going to San Diego; I enjoyed time with my family, but the living situation made anything but the bare minimium of Spanish virtually impossible. I did a little duolingo to keep myself focused, and even had a bief chat in Spanish on the street, but it was essentially a total bust.

One thing that did help was working to do translation of articles on Duo's immersion page. I read through the Spanish wikipedia article on the Pan-American Highway (even thouhg the importer kinda butchered it). With myself being at LinaroConnect on Monday, I'm really not sure how I'm going to get back into a routine, but I'll just take it one day at a time.

Day 22: Object Pronouns Are My Bitch!

Sometimes, every once in awhile, you just need to sleep on a problem to make it go away. Such as my mental block with object pronouns. For the past several days, I've been stuck with object pronouns on both memrise (I'd memorize the sentence, but not actually understand it), and on Duolingo.

Today, I'm proud to report I got through it! I'm still a bit shaky, but at some point, it truly clicked how object pronouns go before what they're describing (i.e. te veré; I will see you), and was able to get through the Object Pronoun lessons on Duoling without too much difficulty. Now the only major thing left to open in this section is Verbs: Past, which I feel I will have a good understanding of due to practicing on memrise, and focusing on these with my language partners and tutors.

In addition, I managed a full hour of lang-ex today; normally, I'm struggling to do 30-30, but I managed to get through it. Scheduling my language partners has helped, though its still really shakey, and my disrupted sleep patterns aren't helping any. While I've made excellent progress thus far, I still feel rather short of where I *want* to be.

This combined with tomorrow being yet another travel day (thus unlikely to have any conversations in Spanish), does put a bit of damper on today. Ah well, its always a myth that you will have the perfect study environment.

Day 21: Zip, nada, nothing ..

Hate to admit this one, but there was no Spanish here (I rolled what I did past midnight into Monday). Seriously getting beat up by my sleep disorder. I saw a doctor and got a new script which might help. Will see how things go tomorrow ...

Day 19/20: Ugh ... I hate my sleep disorder

These two days were essentially washes; Saturday was almost a complete no-spanish day because I was traveling, which really through me through a loop and set my sleep disorder into a tiff and well, you can guess how Sunday went.

It wasn't a complete wash, I did have a conversation in Spanish with the cab driver for awhile as we went to Santo Domingo airport, and I did talk for half-an-hour with a langex partner on Skype, which helped, combined with the fact that I forced myself to finish my memrise basic spanish deck. I'll water it for a day or two, then add a new Spanish deck in addition.

Day 18: Conversing with confidence

Sometimes you just need a day of nothing to get through. While unfortunately this day comes wedged between another day which will be "nothing", I had several conversatins with more ease. I'm still lacking in the vocab front, but I had an interesting conversation with Audri on some historical events (though I did need some help from Spanish Wikipedia to get through some of the finer points of the conversation).

I also had brief conversations on the street with locals. I will say, with the fact that I'm heading back to New York tomorrow, I will miss this place and the people in it. I look forward to returning with a mastery of the Spanish language.

Day 17: Slamming into the wall

Ugh, today was just bad. I ended up canceling with Audri, and the little Spanish I did on my own was slow and difficult. My friends call this the wall, the point where you just start to burn out. I forced myself to continue on memrise, and on duo, but it was just painful all around. I did however make some appointments on my calendar to chat with my langex partners. Perhaps tomorrow will be better.

Day 16: I must/I should/I can

Those lessons on memrise are really paying off, I feel my vocabulary expanding, and I managed to work it into some conversations, such as I must do something, I should do something etc.

That being said, I feel like I'm slowing down, Spanish isn't coming as easily when I talk and I find myself more and more frustated. I know this is normal, but looking at other people on the +1 challenge, I feel like I'm not pulling my weight. This is further frustrated by the that talking with language exchange people has been hit or miss to say the least; part of this is because I have difficulty with a regular schedule, but I don't know for sure. I do know I'm going to have to be clever about this though ...

Day 15: Day Off

I need to deal with some things, so today was just a single conversation, and a few brief chats. It was an off-day, but I'll make it up tomorrow. I did have another lesson, but it was slow and painful :-/

Day 14: Nailing it ...

Got to say, I'm progressing. Talking with Macro, I'm pretty solid A2, with my weakness being vocabulary, but as long as I'm in control of a conversation, I can generally manage. My biggest problem at this point is I struggle a lot with conversations with native speakers. I'm not sure why I have so much difficult; some people, I'm just fine with, and others, I barely can manage a sentence together.

I know I'm not the most social person in general, something I am working hard to change that but I'm not sure why I have so much difficulty with native speakers. At least in language courses, I feel like I'm more open ...

Something to think upon. I think I might need to set myself a new goal of doing X hours of language exchange ontop of normal 1:1. The problem then becomes one more of timezones. Still, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Day 13: On FIRE!

All and all, this went pretty well. I did great with Auri, and reconnected with an old language partner from my first attempt at Spanish who said that I'm understandable (even if my grammar is broken), and at least my accent is managable.

Didn't make TOO much progress on memrise or duolingo, but I just didn't feel like doing to much on those fronts. I'll make it up tomorrow.

Day 12: The bad and ugly

You always have bad days. I've already had them on this, and there was no reason to expect that I wouldn't have more have more. As far as Friday went, my language learning was mostly a bust; I didn't manage to have any conversations, and what little practice I did manage basically was: meh.

I did some lessons in Duolingo, and that was about it. I do have additional lessons coming up for Saturday, so I'll redeem myself both by blowing away Auri, and getting with more of my langex partners and try and make up this day.

Day 11: More menos than más ...

Another day which I struggled; I didn't even have much in terms of Spanish conversations today; just a brief 30 minute one where I felt like an idiot for the vast majority of the damn thing. So it goes.

Frustratingly, while with Brain's help, I *have* found a fair number of language partners, they're all in awkward timezones to my sleep habits, so if I don't speak right first thing in the morning, it doesn't happen. I need to get myself into better habits in this regard. I do count lessons I do with tutors (which are entirely in Spanish) as speaking for a day, which helps, but I seriously need to buckle down on doing this.

I suppose the optimistic bit of me will go on how my sleep issues for the moment seem to be resolved (though time will tell for sure on that). I have a lesson with Auri tomorrow, so I can get a decent feeling on how far I've progressed.

In other news, I kicked Determinators ass on Duolingo, and now have a fairly good grasp on the difference between 'esto', 'este', 'ese', and 'eso'; the mental trick I used is that esto/este have a t in that, and "I should remember this fact". As for o/e for singular/plural, I just remember it, no trick onthat one.

I suppose the last thing is I still need to record that damn Spanish speaking video, but I find it rather unappealing.

Deep sigh. Oh well, I knew what I was getting into, no sense complaing about it now.

Day 10: Memrising my vocabulary

I'm not sure of the first time I heard of memrise, but I found it linked off a website posted in the add1challenge group, and I finally have found a SRS that I can actually tolerate. I've been running through the Spanish intro course, and already managed to add "me gustaría" and a few other handy bits to my vocabulary. I'll definiately be using this as I continue.

On the duolingo front, I managed to hit a brick-wall, and got stuck on the Determinators lesson; struggling with "esto", "eso", "ese", and "este", which are similar enough that they seem interchangable. I know they're not, but it still drives me a bit crazy.

In other news, I drafted up a script for my next YouTube video but I've yet to actually film it; I *really* dislike posting videos to YouTube I find, but as its part of the challenge, I'll probably manage it tomorrow or Friday. I had another couple of good conversations, so all and all, this was generally a win-win.

Furthermore, I *really* need to figure out the best way to study past/future tense conjucations. I know I've complained about that before (I think), but my original plan of reaching the Duo lessons on it take too long, and this is my biggest blocker. I hate to study some grammar website, but I'm not sure what best to do.

Finally, I need to get more Spanish media into my life, and not just reading; my audio comprehension for Spanish is poor to say the least, and often require people to write things. Its good to know I still have 8/9ths of this challenge left though.

Day 9: Into Fire ...

You have good days, you have bad days.

I'm pretty sure I've said this before on this blog, but as of late, its more true than anything. I find myself actually understanding Spanish, or at least, less confused when doing reading or practicing with a language partner on Skype. Yesterday, you could say I was on cloud 9, and I even had an excellent conversation with my teacher mostly in Spanish as we went through a script that will form my next video update (my Spanish isn't good enough to do a freeform update as of yet :-)).

I managed both 30 minutes with a language partner, and an hour in 1:1 tutoring, and I really feel I can get behind this. My pronunciation of words in Spanish is far better than it was just a few days ago, and I'm getting to the point that I can sometimes understand words from context (though this is very hit or miss to say the least).

All and all, I keep soldiering on.

In other news, I might be returning to the United States this weekend due to personal issues I have to resolve. It shouldn't affect my challenge (though I might miss a day due to the flights and general travel fatigue), but its just something to keep in mind.

I also started experimenting with Memrise to replace anki for my vocabulary and learning needs, but its too soon to really form much of an opinion on it.

Day 8: Yo hablo español

Well, after this weekend being an almost bust, I like to think I redeemed myself of nearly two hours of spoken Spanish, with one being face to face unexpectedly in a comedor (think public cafeteria) a block away from my apartment. I ended up sitting next to a young woman name Jean, and I managed to converse with her for awhile

It was slow, it was painful, but it was real, and it wasn't like I was checking a dictionary for words I didn't know, and there was some English involved (she wasn't fluent, but she knew some words that I didn't know in Spanish so it helped), but it was a conversation. I suspect thats going to be my favorite memory when I look back on Santo Domingo.

With some help from Brain Kwong on the +1 challenge, I managed to meet 3 new LangEx partners today, and managed half an hour in Spanish with the first one, and 45 minutes with the other. I'm still recovering from having an inverted sleep cycle, so I was definitely not on my A game, but I managed to sink my teeth in and get through it, though I would be lying if I wasn't revealed when we switched to English at the end of speaking Spanish.

Still, this is a victory, and I will keep pushing on. Once again, vocab is still my biggest headache, and I'm struggling to figure out how best to attack it. I have given Anki another spin, and find that I just struggle to get behind it. I think solving this problem will be my objective for tomorrow.

At this point, I'm just going to relax and winddown.

Day 6/7: Sleeping on the Edge

Ugh, so this was a fun weekend. As you can guess, I'm grouping days which means I had more disruptive sleep, but I've managed to get through a few lessons and some more practice. Not crazy study like I was doing before, but still progress. My last lesson on Sunday, I was so fried, I barely could manage any Spanish, so Macro and I worked on pronunciation, and spelling things in Spanish phonetically.

I realize this is probably something I could work on my own, but I find I struggle to tell if I'm doing anything correctly and I appreciated the help. As Monday is rolling around, I need to write something up in Spanish for the video update, though TBH, I have no idea what I'm going to talk about.

I am however starting to get the hang of future and past tense conjugations, and while I still have awhile to go before I will feel confident in it, progress is progress. My next goal is to write a script up and then record it in Spanish, which I'll hopefully do sometime today.

Day 5 & 6: Más y menos y mi español

I'm grouping these together since Day 5 was essentially a bust; I sleep through most of it due to my sleep disorder, so I'm just grouping it with 6 for sanity.

Today was perhaps one of my most productive days in Spanish. Last night, I picked up Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal's ebook from the Pottermore shop, then imported it into Calibre. Calibre is an application for managing ebooks, but the important bit is it can convert ebooks to various formats, including a raw text file. I then imported the first chapter into 8 documents in Learning With Texts, then have been going through bit by bit.

Generally I've been sitting down, doing a single pass where I add new words to the database, then go through word by word and read it. This is probably one of the hardest things I've done in Spanish, and its incredibly time consuming (it can take hours just to read 500 words). I also go the additional step to pronounce each word out load, and compare with TTS (I can't practice in langex at night due to the noise). I then finished off the first part of my day with a lesson in Spanish.

While my tutor is good, I felt myself stressed, and struggled to understand or manage anything in this. I'm not sure if its due to the teacher, or the fact that it as the end of day; due to italki's insistance that everything MUST be booked 24 hours in advance combined with an unpredictable. Still, I can't call it a waste as a I got some great links to some great Spanish music (I suspect I will be buying many of Mägo de Oz MP3s from Amazon or similar), and will be using that to help practice listening with other audio sources.

My second lesson of the day with a new teacher was much better, mostly I suspect since I took a nap after the first one. I was able to hold a conversation in Spanish with relatively little difficulty, and I only needed to look up words a couple of times. I felt relaxed and relatively confident. I've identified though that my biggest issue at the moment beside vocabulary is my ability to comprehend spoken words; I have a couple ideas on how to work on this more specifically, but its something I need to keep in mind.

All and all, things were good, and I even ran through the LWT Anki deck (despite my rants on Anki, I'm unaware of a better SRS app for Linux/Android). I need to figure out better ways of creating/handling mini-goals, but for now, I'm happy with my progress in Spanish, and I'm going to sign off and relax for the night.

Ciao!

Day 4: Why learning a language is like dieting ...

As the forth day of my challenge winds down, "poco a poca" remains the mantra of the day. I managed to get through my lesson with Auri, although I found myself struggling with even the most basic sentences. I managed the words out, and towards the end, even managed some past-tense conjucations, but it was a struggle all the way; some days I'm on fire, and others ...

Well on others, I feel like I would have been better off never getting out of bed :-/

Which brings me to the point of this post, or "Why learning a language is like dieting". At least for Americans, you always hear about people being on a diet, or trying to loose weight.  The problem is the temptation to overeat and not restrict ones calories (the only known method to ACTUALLY loose weight) is difficult, and for most people, unappealing. I can relate, though I'm happy to say I for one have been on one, and have lost 40 lbs/18kg since New Years! (hey look, a New Years resolution that got kept!.

Being I turn this blog to "How to loose 90 pounds in 90 days" or something silly like that, I had a realization. Loosing that much weight was a constant battle and struggle to keep eating better, and to try and get exercise whenever I could. Some weeks, and the scale would show a noticeable loss, and others, it stubbornly refused to move.

I was discussing this with Auri, and she has noted that since we started doing lessons, my Spanish has improved, and I generally tend to use concepts I learn on Duolingo (more on that in a moment), in conversations I have with her. I struggle, I sputter, and I swear, but in the end, I get through it. Just like my battles on the scale, dealing with days where I struggle are part of the deal. There's nothing you can do about it, so you accept it and push on.

When it comes to learning a language, the same concept applies. I know I'm not perfect, and I know I'm not Benny (even though he's served as my inspiration for this madness). I've cheated back into English sometimes when both in lessons and during language exchange, but my Spanish seems to be generally understandable, even if I have to slowly pronounce words with a lot of r's (repetir, you are my worst enemy)

This brings me to my second point. I've met people on italki for language exchange who never want to speak a word of English, who were suffering from the same problem. I told my struggling English student that I will speak very slowly and clearly for her (putting spaces between all my words as well), that I would not mock or laugh at her, and help correct her mistakes, and she need not worry as I was getting good Spanish practice with her. And what do you know, I got a few words of English out her. I suspect it would have been more, but a ill-timed internet outage disrupted my language speaking for the night (I try not to keep my roommate up with late night Skype calls; the walls here are paper-thin).

My biggest hurdle is I've really not connected to anyone locally. I've talked with a few Domincans on Couchsurfing, and even traded some SMSes, but I've just not made a connection locally. I find I struggle considerably more face to face over Skype; perhaps because locals speak faster than people I practice with (who know they're with someone who is a solid A1 (perhaps lower A2) speaker).

I'm not sure how best to approach this hurdle, though I realize that often when I traveled, I'd end up in a tourist bubble with relatively little interaction with locals, so perhaps this is just another skill I need to cultivate like any other. At the very least though, I've managed to go into both comedors and comadoras and successfully order food, as well as get through an entire exchange in shops in how much something costs and paying costs exactly.

From where I'm sitting, I still need to get better at conjugation; I've more or less got all the present tense ones down (though since most of my LangEx buddies are from Latin-America, Vosotros and its endings I seem to only know on a conceptial level vs. any actual practice on it). I've asked that my next lessons help go over both past and future tenses in the near future.

My other big weakness is vocabulary. For the moment, I've used Anki for mini-missions, but I find I rather dislike it; the application itself is exceedingly annoying to do cards in multiple directions, and I dislike its concept of study hours, and its rather IMHO, low defaults for deck sizes. I'm aware I can change it, but it has warnings against doing it, and I find that I just can't get behind it. I don't disagree with the concept of spaced repetition systems, but Anki's design frustrates me. I *wish* Genius(+) was available for Linux and Android, as from what I've seen of it, it seems nicer than Anki. (Paging Brian, Paging Brian ...)

However, what kills Anki for me is, in my humble opinion, the lack of usable decks. I know I'm going to get a lot of flack for this, but I find most of the decks for Spanish are generally useless, and tend to lack often lack context or even genders of nouns. In addition, you end up with a lot of repetition since if the deck includes conjugations (some do, some don't), then you end up with a TON of cards for the same word, which may or may not be inter-spaced in anything resembling a sane order.

If I created my own decks, this would be less of an issue, but creating a deck is time consuming, difficult, and due to how Anki handles thing, IMHO, generally unpleasent. I want to practice a word in both directions; English to Spanish and via versus; the best way to do this in Anki is to create a "second" card, but this creates duplicates in the deck, which then have to be handled specially, and clutters crud up. Furthermore, Anki doesn't seem to properly shuffle decks once a second card type is added; I have to manually click "Reposition", then "Shuffle Card Order". I haven't opened a bug since I haven't ruled out user stupidity on this one, but it seems a glaring oversight.

Thus, for the time being, I've been using Duolingo as essentially my soul source of vocabulary. Now, Duo has some issues, on its own, its essentially route memorization, which is inefficient at best, and it requires precise translations, which means valid (if not 1:1 accurate) translations get tossed, and cause you to loose hearts. However, since it includes both a quick-access dictionary by hilighting words, and always uses them in a sentence, AND hilights the conjucation (-emos, -e, -es, -en, -o, etc), I find it superior to other methods of trying vocabulary.

Not to say its perfect either, but at least for the moment, I find it a superior way to learn vocabulary. From a friend who learned Spanish a few months before me, she has told me that completion of the skill tree would give someone roughly a "B1-like vocabulary", which while not perfect, is still a pretty good place to be (I believe the complete Spanish course gives about 1500 words). I know I'm going to need to look into the vocab issue sooner rather than later, since there are some words that come up a lot when I talk with people which I haven't encountered (yet) in Duo, and my random scattershot approach to learning won't work here. I've setup Learning with Texts on my laptop, and I like it, but you can end up with a lot of odd words in your dictionary, which isn't useful when you're just getting started with a language. Perhaps with its export to Anki feature, I can use it to build better decks, and perhaps enlarge existing ones, but you end up with a lot of riftraft in your decks which I dislike (which then compounded by how Anki handles "number of cards per day").

Ugh, I didn't mean to turn this into an Anki rant, so let me try and make things a bit more happy. This evening, I went with my flatmate (I live in a shared apartment) to the church next door where they were doing a concert, and listened to people sing for at least an hour interspaced with several minor speechs. I adapt I didn't understand much, but I could pick individual words that I did know out of the dialog, so talk about your minor victors :-).

I do need to pick new mini-goals, and I'll probably do that later tonight/tomorrow morning. Until then, its been an interested day in the land of language learning ...

Day 3: Más y menos

You have your good days, and you have your bad days. For me, today was both good and bad, dealing with personal issues that I won't document here. One thing I have learned though is you need to have a positive attitude, and going into a session with a tutor after having a fight is not a great way to go :-/.

It reminds me that language learning is a lot like dieting. Its not slow steady progress, but filled with bumps and various hiccups along the way. After I managed to get back to a happy "baseline" so to speak, I practiced for an hour on Duolingo, as none of my language partners were online, and managed to clear the Time & Dates lesson, which went well with my goal of learning all the days and months.

I find I struggle to pick mini-goals though, then follow through, and I find that I haven't found a premade Anki deck that is worth using; I've made my own mini-decks for my goals, but the process is tedious and frustrating. I need to look if there is a better way at handing it ...

Day 2: In #add1challenge, and more practice

So I got added to the #add1challenge group,a dn am watching other people and their adventures in language learning. Its good to know I'm not the only one who is working on their target language. I had another chat with Victor and while we didn't keep it 100% Spanish, I at least made more progress in talking it. My biggest thing is I keep falling back to English, and I need to be more strict on that.

I've progressed on both my mini-goals of learning numbers and common household items, so I'm going to have to come up with some new ones tonight and/or tomorrow. I've also decided that I want to be able to finish the Duolingo skill tree by the end of the challenge; I find its a good way to learn words and practice, even though it works mostly by route memorization.

Day 1: 1.5 hours of Spanish abuse

So once again, I abuse my brain speaking more and more Spanish. I've been doing some work in my challenge in the last week as sort of a build up for this week. I've been forging ahead on Duolingo, which I find is a great way to learn vocabulary, and a great way for grammar (though I do wish it explained some of the rules a bit better).

In the last week, I've found a few language partners, and have continued to forge ahead in my Spanish studies, to the point that I can generally hold brief, focused conversations. My biggest limiation at this point is vocabulary, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to build up. Already though, my Spanish is showing resultings, as I can generally go to a store, understand how much I need to pay for something, and properly pay it, as well as have relatively few issues when I eat lunch in a comador, or one of the places in downtown Santo Domingo.

Take Two, Day -1: Cleaning the slate ...

So, for those who have been following along, this is my second attempt at a challenge, in which I said I'd both praise and run Windows 8. Well, I'm following through, here's the YouTube video with the praise, and acting as a down-payment.


If you say you're going to do something, you sure as hell should follow through. As soon as I can realistically do so, I'll post a follow up with my laptop running Windows 8 (or 8.1 if its been released by then).

Anyway, as we're in our last day before I ramp into language learning, I met another tutor on italki, and had an almost non-stop conversation in Spanish for 30 minutes; I did have to look up words, and I made mistakes, but there was no doubt that I was actually speaking Spanish. We discussed my challenge, and my teacher was supportive in saying he'd help me through it, though he's only available on weekends; that's fine though as weekends are the best day IMHO to study :-).

He also said that at least based on my conversational skills I'm a solid A1, which is pretty good considering a week ago, I would have struggled to put any sentences together. Furthermore, that night, I went out to the little deli on the corner, and managed to order a tuna and cheese sandwich, and a coke completely in Spanish, ask how much it cost, and then said good bye with no difficulty.

Yay for ones small victories :-)

Take Two, Day -2: Joining the +1 Language Project ...

First off, I'd like to announce that I'm joining the +1 language challenge, here's my YouTube video ...

Now some may wonder what happened to my previous attempts. The answer is I hid them; I didn't want to look back and constantly remember that I failed time and time again

But Michael, that's just a cop-out ...

No, its not! I was a smoker for many years before quitting in January of this year, even though I failed time and time again, I never gave up. Just like quitting smoking, sometimes you just need to step up to the plate and try, try again. Some may disagree with me, but I'm still standing here, saying I'm still trying, and still learning.

Anyway, since my previous attempt, I removed myself from Oregon, and after a brief period back home in New York, set off again, finding myself in Santo Domingo, and I realized that if I'm going to do this, then I need to be serious about it, and be in a place where there will be few distractions. So I found an apartment, agreed to a one month lease, and setup camp.

I've been here now for a few days, met a few people, and simply worked towards meet partners to talk in Spanish both in real life and in Skype, and reaching out through couchsurfing, italki, and the Language Mixer. I've also located a few language tutors to help me keep track. I'm determined to succeed, and with the change in environment, I'm certain I'm going to see this through ...

Taking a step back ...

Over the weekend, I realized that I think I might have jumped into the challenge a tad hastily. Please note that I'm not conceeding defeat, but having a realization that I didn't fully realize all the affects this would have on my life.

While I still fully believe its possible to learn a language in 90 days (or less!), there is a major sacrifice in doing so; specifically one may find that the hours spent study are isolating, and to be frank, lonely. One may make new friends through language exchange (I have), but becoming a recluse who studies Spanish for hours on end at a computer is considerably more difficult than most would belief.

Perhaps I was studying too hard; I dunno, but I haven't found the right balance between studying, social life, and work, and this has just been compounded by the fact that my work requires to get me on the road, and other personal issues that have been plaguing me.


I will not go into details on this message, but I need to find a way to approach studying Spanish that doesn't take away from my life in Oregon. In four months, I'm heading south along the Pan-American Highway, and part of me wonders if I would simply be better off waiting until I finish leaving this life behind, and start on my next one before taking this challenge.

As of right now, I'm already being chaft on the amount of preperation I'm working on for said Pan-American trip, such as replacing my truck with one that is likely to survive the drive, settling things with my roommate and long-time friends in Oregon, and so forth.

I didn't come to decision to postpone my challenge easily, and I'm not going to pull the final trigger on doing so until the end of the week (if at the end of this coming week, I'm going to reset to day 1).

Day 7: When you finally start moving forward again ...

The past few days have been up and down to say the least. Between sleep and real life issues, my progress in Spanish simply wasn't really going too far; hell even on Duolingo, I had failed to progress in any topic I unlocked.

However, it sometimes just takes just one really good day to keep moving. Today I managed to get through my outstanding LWT texts, and run through the ~200 words I had added through its database, knowing about half of what I added. While my retention for vocabulary still requires some work, that's not bad.

Furthermore, I've managed more progress on Duolingo, and find I have a greater mastery of Spanish grammar, even managing to conjugate several times correctly without having to think about it. This led up to almost two hours of written Spanish conversations with Sarah.

Now I note, I'm not magically fluent, and I was running to SpanishDict and Google Translate to look up individual vocabulary fairly constantly, but I never managled myself so badly that I was always understandable. I truly feel there is a light at the end of the tunnel here on learning Spanish ...

I suppose you'll get to judge soon, which brings me to my next topic ...

As week one comes to a close, I remember that I promised a YouTube video for today, but due to various circumstances, I'm going to push it back one day as it may be a more interesting treat for you showing me having an actual conversation.

Day 6: Slow slow progress ...

Life been making my progress slow and painful. While I had a brief conversation yesterday, I managed to do no speaking of the el español today, which is quite frustating. Furthermore, I find myself struggling a lot more than I did when I first started.

I don't know if its because due to the fatigue I've had over the last two days (my sleep at best had been poor), or other factors involved. Tomorrow is the end of the first week, and at the point where I need to make a video update. I get the feeling I'm going to be cramming tomorrow to successfully string together a sentence, and hopefully not look too much like an idiot on camera :-/

Day 5: Learning with Texts

So it turns out I did get some things done today. Physically I feel still like someone left me out to dry, and I've had days where I'm more mentally stable, but it was really up and down again. I attempted to have a conversation with Sarah and it wasn't very productive.

That being said, I did setup Learning with Texts, and slowly began articles, starting with the WIkipedia article on Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and some news articles from RTVE. Furthermore, LWT gives a good interface for creating new words (aka Terms) in its database which I did multiple times on the short call with Sarah when I had to look up a word.

Let us see where we are in two days when my next video update goes up.

Day 4.5: Game called on account of insomina ...

So, I was hoping this won't be a factor (or at least not a big one), but due to the upheaval of a day I had yesterday, I haven't been able to sleep since, as my body decides that day is night and via verus.

I'm effectively a walking zombie, barely functioning, so I'm not counting today, and Day 5 will happen whenever I successfully have eight or more hours of sleep.

Day 4: That Lovely Sound When Nothing Happens ...

Today has been rough to say the least. Between a long, and tiring day, and a few personal events that left me rather emotional (and will not dive into on this blog), I did force myself to do some more Spanish, both on Duolingo, and with a new language partner.

I've noticed immediately I was struggling considerably, even with the most basic words (a rather notable instance is I mentally blocked on "español", a rather grating thing since "No español" was something I said a LOT in previous trips through Spanish speaking countries). I think a large thing about being able to speak is emotional state; when I spoke with my partner tonight, I was recovering from the emotional roller coaster that was today. Just as booze can make it easier to speak, personal issues don't.

That being said, I'm not calling today a loss by any stretch of the imagination. While I didn't make much progress on the skill tree, what Spanish I could manage WAS understandable by a native speaker whom I never had a voice conversation with before, and on three occasions, I paused to look up a word, and managed to pronouce it correctly on the first go. I think that's rather excellent for four days of progress.

That's a victory, no matter how you slice it. In addition, with discussions with some my language partners, I realized I need to redefine how I am going to do things.

One of the first things I do when I meet a new language partner is I point them to this blog, and the videos on YouTube, explaining my motivation and my insanity. Late yesterday, Sarah mentioned my mini-goals I listed on Day 1; I had completely forgotten about them.

In hindsight, it isn't very surprising. At the best of times, I'm an organized mess. For instance, in Ubuntu, one of the things we did was have whiteboard with work items for a blueprint. The blueprint would have the overarching goal, with work items (in theory) being how to accomplish it step by step.

Almost every time I wrote a blueprint and work items, I'd rewrite the work items on a near-daily basis, changing the waypoints towards success, but making steady progress towards my goal. It's who I am, and I'm not going to succeed unless I take into account how I work into this. I think its a part of why I find Duolingo so attractive; its organized into a nice skill tree, which I can just follow the prompts, but I just can do it at my leasure.

In a lot of ways, this is both a good and bad thing. For good, I can be extremely flexible in my work, and get around just about any problem issue that may come up. The downsides of course have always been obvious is that I can always miss the obvious.

I've been making a point to try and use the vocabulary and grammar it gives me in every call I have. For instance, Mi/Su/etc. started appearing in my conversations the moment I finished the Possessives lesson.

Duolingo itself may be flawed in several ways, but its excellent for someone like me who has issues staying on a specific track, and needs a framework to bounce around in, but the freedom to get to their goals via one of multiple different tracks.

As such, I need to redefine my goals as I go. Mentally, I'm thinking of them more as benchmarks, to see where I am and what to improve on. That is to say at the end of the week, when I look at this blog post, I can see if I've achieved them, and on some level, they'll be in the back of my mind pushing me onwards.

I'm reminded of a quotation I once read (quite possibly on Benny's blog). Paraphrased, it goes something like this:

When driving at night, all you can see is the end of your headlights. You are never sure where you are or where you been, but you can drive the entire way home like that.

Its a philosophy that I'm going to take to heart with language learning. I may not know where I am, I may not be sure where I was, but I'm damn sure I'm making progress towards fluent Spanish.

In light of this, from now on, when I look up a work during a conversation, I'm going to build an Anki deck out of it. I hope by doing so I can generate an excellent list of flashcards to expand my vocabulary.
So Day 4 comes to an end, 86 days remain ...

Day 3: More Duolingo, More Conversation

Ugh, I'm exhausted, so this will be a quick update.


I've gotten to the point of possessives in Duolingo, and managed to use them in some of my conversations in Spanish, both written and spoken. I find I'm using SpanishDict and wordreference a lot to look up words as I'm speaking, but I am speaking, at least an hour or so a day.

Today a large part of it was describing the emparedado I ate in Subway, and going through the various ingredients of said tasty delight, followed by discussion metrication in the United States. Tomorrow, I suspect I'm only going to manage a little Spanish, but I knew there were days were I was going to be tied up at work fully, and took that into account.

Still, only 87 days remain ...

Day 2: New trials, new friends ...

So here's my unexpected video update for Day 2 :

 So, after signing off last night, I found I'd received a message on the FI3M forums, from a woman called Sarah offering to join me in language exchange. She isn't a native Spanish speaker, but I'm willing to accept any and all help in this insane mission of mine.

Here's the first bit of conversation that we had in Skype:

Sarah: hola!
Sarah: estoy bien, gracias
Sarah: y tu?
me: bien. Yo enseña espanol a dulingo
Sarah: si, uso duolingo tambien
me: (I suspect I butchered that; the fact that I managed the first two sentences kinda suprises me :-))
Sarah: si, me gusta duolingo porque aprendo muchas palabras nuevas y practico verbos que aprende ya
Sarah: and
Sarah: all of it was good except for ensena
Sarah: ensenar is to teach
me: d'oh
me: I learned it by doing anki on my phrasebook, and not the actual definition. I was feeling route memorization of phrases *might* backfire
me: (I kinda intend to make an anki deck with works and pictures, and no english, but not quite there yet)

First off, meeting a language partner is not a scary thing, and as Benny always says, there are plenty of people who are willing to talk to you in Spanish and at least when starting out, a native speaker isn't a necessity; in many ways, working with Sarah was easier, as she could understand the mistakes I was making, and help me to correct them. A large part of this comes down to how I think we learn languages; with English, from an infant, we learned from watching our parents and our environment, and making sounds that mimic it until we can eventually start forming sentences, but we don't really think about how those sentences come together.

With both my partners, we had an extended conversation in English to break the ice before doing some work in Spanish, and even as we continued in Spanish. 

For example, I bring/I brought. When I was in elementary school, I remember my teacher giving an entire lecture on why "brang" wasn't a word, and the correct one to use was brought. We don't ever think about tenses in our native language; we just use the right one.

While I'll still continue working with native language speakers, working with Sarah (and other people who learned Spanish as a second language, even if they aren't fully fluent in it) was an excellent experience, and one that is considerably less nerve wracking and required *much* less nerve to get going.

During this language exchange, Sarah had watched my last video, and noted that my pronunciation was rather horrible, and thus a large part of the time we talked was working on helping making various vowel sounds, and a bit on rolling the rs.

I'm already beginning to see some progress and results; the conversation and what I wrote was stuff I managed without looking anything up, and I find myself following the rhythm and flow of Spanish more, even if I'm struggling in other places. I'm going to start looking for a Spanish grammar book in the near future

While I like to criticize Duolingo, I've found that its lessons, and timed practice are really good at at least getting basics down. I do find in some ways its rather pedantic, but I'm far better off using it for basic study then not. I've managed to get through Basics 1/2, Phrases, and Food. Each has been a challenge, and I'm sure I'm going to forget stuff, but I can only solder on and try and make the most of it.

Day 1: It begins ...

So after an entire week of building up to this, we've officially started the 90 day challenge. In some ways, I feel like I've signed my own death warrant, but as the saying goes, once you hit bottom, you've got nothing to do but go up, and I intend to survive this challenge!

As today is Friday (and also Day 1), I uploaded a video on my channel that goes into some detail on my

Working with a language partner was mentally stressful, and tiring. I tried to begin with what little Spanish I knew, and ran into a wall as I struggled to understand replies, and even form ideas. I went into what I did today, how I'm an engineer for a living, if I'm good at math, etc. It was mostly small talk, but small talk done in a mix of Spanish, English, and Spaniglish (Enspanish?). As you can even see when I recount phrases in my video, I would pause, or "um" for a second as I force myself through each bit. I had my partner write much of what he was saying in chat, and I proceeded to sound it out, and say it. I'm going to take those conversation pieces and add those to my phrase deck so I can tried and build up from some of the concepts and ideas we started with.

Neither one of us have a set schedule, so I suspect we're going to operate mostly on drive-by conversations, and I'll be looking for additional partners to work with as time goes on, but I think I make some progress; I did have a conversation in Spanish (that was, if I was completely honest, interspliced with plenty of English, but still mostly Spanish).

As Day 1 comes to an end, and the weekend dons upon us, I feel that I need to continue working with my flashcards a lot, to learn phrases.

As it stands, I also have "Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal" sitting on my desk. My current gameplan with it is to start reading it, and make flashcards out of the words I don't understand. This is similar to how Learning with Texts and LingQ work, and I may end up retyping passages from the boot in my local copy of LWT.

I've found LWT difficult to use though (mostly due to interface lag), and entering words to be a slow and annoying process, hence why I think a more passive response with just a spreadsheet and Anki may be more successful.

I'll post an update what I decide and whatever happens ...

Prelude: Defining my goals for week one

As I'm now less than 24 hours from the beginning of the 90 day Spanish challenge, I needed to break down what my goals for the first week look like. While its nice to say that I have my overarching goal (specifically to get through a conversation with my grandmother at the end of 90 days and "be fluent"), I need to have shorter term objectives to get through it.


I've continued to try and play memory games with myself to retain my Spanish, and I've managed to retain works that I read on roadsigns while driving such as "carril", and "cuota". I've also continued with my Duolingo lessons, though I need to be careful not to fall into the trap of that replacing having conversations


As such, as we enter week one, I've set myself the following TODOs:

• Find some Spanish language partners
• I have an account on italki which I've used before to try and find partners, and I just bought a new headset for Skype as my old one has unfortunately stopped work (I could probably fix it with a sodering iron, but its pretty DOA at this point ...
• I need to find or buy a webcam as well, but Walmart didn't have one, so either got to get one of Amazon or at Frys
• Begin studying my Spanish phrasebook, specifically the "Social" section.
• I have one of the Lonely Planet guidebooks. My plan is to use Anki to turn parts of the "social" section into flashcards
• Memorize some of the conversation connectors from the language hacking guide
• Goes with above, going to use the same technique as well

  My goals for the end of the week, one large, and some mini-goals:

• Muddle through a conversation mostly in Spanish (it may be cookie cutter Spanish; aka, ask a question, give an answer, etc), but it will be good enough
• Learn to count to 100
• Learn the days of the week

Building up to the 5th ...

As we slowly approach July 5th, I'm getting more excited for my official go-date. As I continue to drive across the country towards my home in Portland, OR, I find myself trying to play mental games to remember what Spanish I picked in previous lessons, and while traveling through Mexico.

As it stands, I've done some more lessons on Duolingo, and have started downloading podcasts to my phone which I'll start listening to as I drive (I hope; I've had some issues with trying this in the past).

I realize this isn't much of a status update, but its mostly to keep me on track and excited towards actually learning Spanish.
 

Prelude to the Challenge, Dulingo, and italki ...

After posting on Planet Ubuntu about my attempt to gain a level of fluency, I've decided I'm going to keep track of it in a separate blog, which will I'll try to make notes in on a regular basis, with a video update with my current progress once a week on Wednesdays.

So far, I've started doing Spanish lessons on Dulingo to build up some vocabulary. One of my previous attempts at learning Spanish got relatively far, but kept being steamed from the fact that I simply didn't know words or how to express concepts which was a constant issue. Surprisingly, I seem to remember more Spanish than I realized, but its still relatively rusty.

Duolingo, for those who you unaware, is a website trying to translate the entirity of the internet by the same creators as reCAPTCHA, and also works to try and teach basic lessons via "gamification" of Spanish.

I know the most important thing though on gaining fluency in Spanish is the fact that I need to go out and speak it. Thus I've revived my account on italki.com, and began looking for both individuals for language exchange, and considering the possibility of taking some lessons on the side.

I won't start either one of these things until the 5th though, when the challenge begins, since that is the date I expect to finally get home to Oregon; I've been traveling for the last two months across Canada, the United States, and as of most recently, Mexico!

I may write about said travels in another blog post, but for now, this is Michael, signing off.