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