One of the more interesting things that’s been happening to me while learning Spanish is noticing when improvement creeps up on me. There are lots of times when improvement is very noticeable, especially in the early-going. Going back to El Principito after a couple of books and being able to blow through it was obvious, … Continue reading Improvement Creeps
After getting annoyed with myself in the previous blog over my loss of focus on listening practice, I put in more effort through the week, and ended with a pretty stable block of time every day watching a variety of things. I’ve been doing the listening practice for a long time now, longer than I’ve … Continue reading Listening to a Language Vs. Hearing One
This week I capped off the Harry Potter series in Spanish. It didn’t exactly take me by surprise that I’m done with it now, as I’ve been reading through the whole series quite avidly and more or less sprinted my way through the final book, but the fact is it’s over. This feels like a … Continue reading How Many Words Have I Read So Far?
The common metaphor people use for language learning is climbing a mountain. It’s a pretty serviceable metaphor, you got the sense of scale and intimidation of looking up from the base and having trouble seeing the summit, you got the parts of the trek that are easy walking between parts that are more rough to … Continue reading The Difference Between Input and Output
I ran out of Bojack Horseman early on in the week, something I knew was coming soon as I more or less binged my way through the last two seasons. It’s a bit of a bummer, as I really like the show and it was a good thing to practice with, but the show will … Continue reading Returning From Breaks
I think that so far in this blog, I’ve done a bad job of accurately describing my listening comprehension level in Spanish, and may have presented things in a misleading way. Not on purpose, mind you, describing these sorts of things is kinda hard. It’s difficult to be truly impartial, what with my perspective of … Continue reading Defining Listening Comprehension
Most people who start in on a long-term, time consuming project eventually have to deal with burnout. I mentioned last week that I was worried that I might be going through a bit of burnout currently, and I was right. It hasn’t completely capsized my study time or anything, I’m still finding the time and … Continue reading Dealing With Burn-Out
A lot of language learners talk about the Intermediate Plateau, a point in the course of language learning where improvement seems to drop off and the learner is left spinning their wheels. They’ve gotten to a good level in their target language and can do quite a bit already, but not in any comfortable or … Continue reading The Intermediate Plateau
If you were to jump down to the numbers section for this week’s blog, you would see that last Saturday was rather abnormal for me. I had the day that was unusually free and could spend it basically however I wanted to spend it, and it turns out that what I wanted to do was … Continue reading Language Learning: Work or Play?
Toward the start of this blog, I stated that I had an advantage with learning Spanish growing up here in Denver, where there have been lots of native Spanish speakers around me. From the start I wasn’t left totally unaccustomed to the phonemes of the language, and I already knew how to do things like … Continue reading My Dumb Mouth
