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 ...