With November finished up, we have another month’s worth of numbers, bringing us to a total of six months’ worth of data logged through this blog. Six months is a nice, round number, which sounds like a good time to reflect and analyze how things have gone and see if any more long-term patterns have … Continue reading A Look Back on Six Months of Progress
As I round the first year of this language project, I’m feeling pretty good about where I’m at. My reading ability is at a high level and I’m continuing to feel improvements, with my listening ability catching up at a steady pace. My output abilities are still left rather undeveloped, but more and more expressions … Continue reading What I Know Now About Starting
I’ve mentioned in passing before that I write fiction in addition to the variety of other things I fill up all my time with. In truth, though, there hasn’t been much fiction writing happening for the last few years for me, so when November came around, the month of NaNoWriMo, I decided that I ought … Continue reading Language Learning and Procrastination
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
Fumbling Toward Fluent 