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!
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!
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