Bits of preterite, conditional, imperative and subjunctive
One of the virtues of Glossika's sentence-speaking approach is that it frequently gives you 3, 4, or more different ways of saying pretty much the same thing. A further virtue is that this, necessarily, puts the same message in different tenses and moods. So today's sentences about 'taking days off' deployed the present, perfect, preterite, conditional, imperative and subjunctive — and maybe more tenses or moods, that I didn't notice or don't remember.
The Glossika Sentence-speaking Method
Although speaking sentences out loud feels quite artificial, it actually mimicks the arbitrary mix of speech patterns you encounter in the real world — to a far greater extent than stepped courses with graded vocabulary.
As I've noted previously, I'm now quite convinced that this method has helped me respond more immediately and less self-consciously to questions I'm answering from other audio courses.
But, the Glossika method has limitations — beyond the obvious one, of feeling very synthetic.
It would be improved immeasurably, if they lengthened the 'silent' gaps in the recording to match the length of the utterance that precedes them.
In almost every case that a long sentence is spoken, the student is given less time to repeat it than the super-fast talking native speaker took to pronounce it in the first place.
Guarranteeing that the student fails to complete their part is unquestionably bad practice.
Self-directed Mix and Match Methods
I've no doubt that I'd be progressing faster if I had a good Spanish teacher to guide me and a bunch of peers to chat with. But even with those supports, I'd still advocate self-direction — for the simple reason that every individual has different tasks, goals and capabilities in a language.
Every written, video or audio course that I've sampled suffers from one common deficiency — it's predominantly linear. It presumes that the course authors are taking the student on a 'journey' from the status of beginner to proficiency, through a series of carefully crafted steps — like telling a story.
I don't pretend that this approach can be entirely avoided — authors have to plan something, and they need to find some sort of 'voice'. But the language-using contexts they create are necessarily artificial, inauthentic. And, without active input from the student, ultimately of low-value.
Good tutors know this, so they pepper their courses with diversions and asides (a braided stream), while spiralling back over previously covered topics.
But the fact remains, that they are still directing a process which can't address the particular needs of every individual student.
One of the things I've been very aware of in recent days, is just how many of the topics that I'm still stumbling over in Spanish are not revisited in many 'spiral curricula' — presumably, because they are so simple and basic that authors don't think they need to be returned to, formally.
That's not to say that authors don't give students the opportunity to practice basics, like gender agreement, subject agreement and object pronouns in the more advanced parts of their courses — that sort of failure is practically impossible in any language.
But I've seen very few teachers/authors that say something like, "OK, let's go back and focus, in detail, on some of the things we covered in the very first steps of this course". And, even if they did, different students would need to address different aspects of those first steps.
So, for example, my knowledge of other languages creates a different set of problems from those experienced by a 'typical' English-speaking monoglot. And, in any case, 'typical English-speaking monoglots' don't really exist. An American English speaker will have different issues from a British English speaker. People with science and engineering backgrounds will use their 'native' language differently from compatriots with humanities backgrounds. Bookish people have different speech patterns to those who are more audio-visually oriented, etc., etc.
In short, the best learning programme is likely to be one that's negotiated between the student and language teaching experts — with each exploring their own strengths and weaknesses, with some humility.
Demonstrative pronouns with gender
Yet another case of getting all bar one of the substantives correct, but making several errors of agreement, adding one unnecessary article and getting one adverb-verb order wrong.
The one substantive error was to use 'ése' where 'éste' was called for. The error was triggered by the sentence reversing the usual order of 'this' and 'that' in a comparison. Had I simply paid attention to the fact that the English word 'this' was used in the second clause, I'd have got it right.
I made two errors by failing to pluralise adjectives.
I got the order wrong when I said 'funciona nunca' rather than 'nunca funciona' — there's a whole bunch of adverbs like this that I constantly get in the wrong order, e.g. ya, nunca, siempre, todavia, etc. I need to figure out why I'm doing that. Negative transfer from English or Italian?
Finally, I said 'de una otra ciudad' where I should have said 'de otra ciudad' — another bit of negative language transfer from English. I, clearly, need to figure out and memorise one or more rules about when articles in English are innappropriate for Spanish.
Imperfect and Conditional
Today's LT lesson focused on expressing 'had', and 'could' in the past and future — including 'could have' and 'would have'.
I anticipated most of the questions from the lead-up and correctly answered all of them. But I'm not at all sure that I could have conjured up all of the expressions without any external cue.
So that's top marks for memorising the forms, but there's still work to do on uttering all these expressions unprompted.
One final observation — I don't have any significant doubt about when to use the imperfect or preterite pasts. But I am still unsure about when to use the simple conditional, without poder.
Present Tense Irregular Verbs
Another set of exercises on the same 12 verbs as yesterday.
Trivially easy. 100% success.
Still worth doing, for both embedding purposes and the reassurance that I can now do something that I wasn't very confident about six weeks ago.
I still need to work on the full range of tenses, especially for those verbs whose stems change in the preterite.
Plimsleur Word and Phrase Exercises
As I've noted before, the exercises that I'm currently doing are possibly a bit less challenging than ideal. But I noticed today, just how good they are for correcting bad practice, before it gets even more embedded.
In this case, it was an old bugbear — my English brain wanting to use 'estar' for 'there is / is there?" rather than 'hay'. I suspect that this wrinkle is going to take forever to iron out, but I can't see any realistic way of getting there, without the sort of constant repetition and prompting that Plimsleur style courses provide.
Another, less serious, bugbear that Plimsleur reminded me of today is the use of 'necesitar'. I constantly want to use 'deber' or 'tener que' instead. Obviously, all three convey some sense of necessity, but the two that I'm using have a stronger conotation of obligation or external pressure. I just hope that enough Plimsleur recordings use 'necesitar' for it to become an option closer to the front of my mind.
That techique has definitely succeeded in prompting me to consider using 'quedar' in phrases like "Where is X (located)?" and 'llevar' in phrases like "bring/get something". Neither of which came naturally to me.
Verbs requiring the preposition 'con'
As so often, I made no errors of substance on these exercises, but a worrying number of incidental or attention errors.
Attention errors led me to use 'juntarse' and 'espantarse' when I should have used 'asociarse' and 'asustarse', respectively. The verbs I used mean 'to associate with' and 'to be afraid of' a person or a someone. Whereas the cases in question involved association with a company and being afraid of the dark.
I also failed to notice that 'dar con' means 'to come upon'.
I got the 'you' subject right in the main clause of one sentence (i.e. tú), then foolishly referred to 'usted' in the subordinate clause — sigh.
Lastly, I didn't know that "Sunday mornings" translates as "los domingos por la mañana" — no wonder the Spanish need to speak so quickly!
Summary for the Week
OK, could do better.
Getting Spanish work done on teaching days is probably the most fixable issue — I know I can do it, and how to do it, because I've done it. I just need to really force myself to make the time to prepare in advance.
I don't think there's one magic ingredient that's going to solve my problem with diurnal rhythm, but I'm pretty sure that the task requires much greater willpower in the mid-to-late evenings. Gettting back to cycling would probably help — if only it wasn't so cold and dark!
Clearly, I need to break the cycle of missing out on the bike ride, because I'm trying to catch-up with the daylight Spanish work I miss by getting up late. It's a difficult cycle to break out of permanently.
Learning Tasks Checklist
| Task | M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Word/phrase aural+oral | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Sentence aural+oral | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Socratic aural+oral | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Verb exercises | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pronoun exercises | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Preposition exercises | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reading | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Physical exercise | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Non-subbed video | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Subbed video | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Research lang. learning | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | List 'issues' | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | Prepare materials | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |