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 ...
