We’re going straight into the progress review for the week, so let’s get started.
Tuesday 3/02
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 2% of El Ascenso de la Sombra, ~90 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of Green Eggs and Ham, 1 episode of Arte Divierte, ~60 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
Wednesday 3/03
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 2% of El Ascenso de la Sombra, ~90 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of Green Eggs and Ham, 1 episode of La Zona Cero, ~60 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
Thursday 3/04
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 2% of El Ascenso de la Sombra, ~90 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 3 episodes of Green Eggs and Ham, ~70 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
Friday 3/05
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 2% of El Ascenso de la Sombra, ~90 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of Calex MP, ~60 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
Saturday 3/06
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 5 episodes of The Proud Family, ~120 minutes
Sunday 3/07
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 5 episodes of The Proud Family, ~120 minutes
Monday 3/08
- Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
- Reading: 2% of El Ascenso de la Sombra, ~90 minutes
- Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of The Proud Family, 1 episode of Plano de Juego, ~60 minutes
- Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes
- Total Duolingo: 140 XP, 0 minutes
- Total reading: 1/10 books read, 450 minutes
- Total watching/listening: 5 YouTube episodes and 19 television episodes watched, 550 minutes
- Total speaking: reading out loud, 150 minutes
- Total Time: 16 hours 40 minutes
So I really wasn’t sure going into this week what these numbers would look like, thanks to a change in my work schedule (for this and the next 7 weeks, I work my normal schedule of 11 AM to 8 PM taking calls for my job on Mondays, then Tuesday through Friday I work 7 AM to 4 PM on self-paced studying time to prepare for some licensing exams). Keeping up with my usual study activities for Spanish while having my work put through such a large change felt like it might be a recipe for disaster, and I was fully prepared to play it by ear and change things up.
In practice, however, things ended up being largely the same as normal. I am feeling a bit of friction trying to get through the full hour and a half of reading every day, since when it’s self-paced studying, there isn’t the natural downtime built where reading something personal slots right in. Reading a few pages of fiction in Spanish has proved to be a nice brain refresher, though, so it ended up fitting into the flow of the day okay. It just feels like a bigger task to get through. Despite those challenges, I’m still working my way through El Ascenso de la Sombra as the same rate I was at before. I’m starting to get to the climax part of this one, so it’s all home stretch now.
Watching an hour of stuff hasn’t been a challenge, and as you can see, I went a little over on Thursday wanting to cap off Green Eggs and Ham instead of waiting to watch the final episode on Friday. Speaking of, I quite enjoyed Green Eggs and Ham, it was a lot better than I think it had any right to be, and I think the translation work was handled very well. There’s always a struggle when translating stuff that heavily relies on rhymes, but they did a pretty admirable job keeping the narrator’s dialogue in verse, and the show felt very whimsical. After finishing that up, I took Friday as a bit of a youtube palate cleanser before launching into The Proud Family, which is a show I haven’t watched before. Initial impression is that it’s kinda dumb, and most of the characters are awful people, but it’s fun. It’s rather incidental compared to a lot of the things I prefer to watch, but that’s okay, not everything needs the narrative weight of a show like She-Ra or whatever.
Where this work changeup has managed to impact me has been a smidge outside of the normal topics of this blog and in fiction writing. I’ve been writing before work for several months now and have gotten used to that, but I’m not getting up at like 4 AM in order to do that with this modified schedule, it’s hard enough as it is getting up to be ready to start work at 7 as it is. I have time to write after work and all, and generally have the energy to do so, but it is definitely harder than writing in the morning, and my output has taken the occasional hit. I’m right now still on track compared to my usual speed, but that’s from some productive days picking up the slack, and it’s hard to tell at this point how maintainable this current pace is going to be. I may have to scale back a bit, which isn’t something I want to do, but might be inevitable from a practicality standpoint.
Anyway, that’ll do for this week’s blog, I’m gonna keep working at staying on top of things as best I can. TTFN.
Fumbling Toward Fluent 