Refold Approach to Language Learning: Spanish ~1000-Hour Update
My Eighth Update about Learning Spanish in a Nutshell
This is my eighth update for my Spanish learning journey with the refold approach. For my first update, see here. For my second update, see here. For my third update, see here. For my fourth update, see here. For my fifth update, see here. For my sixth update, see here. For my seventh update, see here. For more information about the Refold approach, see here. For a basic Spanish Anki vocabulary deck, see here.
General Progress
Reached 1000 hours of immersion. Continued to immerse in chosen focus areas (history and historical fantasy), with branching out into literature, physchology and crime novels. Started feeling very comfortable reading. Massive Anki sentence card push. Started watching films that have won a Goya Award.
The big 1000! Very happy to have finally hit one thousand hours of immersion, after about 2-years of using the refold method in Spanish. I haven’t made as fast as progress as I would have liked, but I’m very happy with my level of Spanish right now. I can essential consume any book I would like, although I hope that reading continues to get easier and more pleasurable. Same with podcasts and YouTube. I have more trouble with movies (soundtracks make it hard to hear) and casual conversation, but I could get by. Essential all I need to survive in a Spanish-speaking country is output practice, which I don’t care to do right now.
Reading
In contrast to the last update, I’ve shifted my focus more back to reading. There are a couple reasons for this. Firstly, since I am doing regular listening of 30 minutes to one hour a day, I’m no longer too too worried about ruining my accent my reading things. Secondly, reading has the best ratio of words learned/time spent immersing. Audiobooks are about as good (although I read slightly faster than an audiobook at this point), but it’s much easier to sentence mine an actual book. Thirdly, there’s a lot more varied content out there (at least that I’ve been able to find). Audible doesn’t have every Spanish book, and I haven’t really stumbled upon the podcasts I’m looking for yet.
I’ve only finished one book during this time: Olvidado Rey Gudú. I have a larger blog post reviewing the book here, but in-short, there’s really nothing like it in the English language. Worth learning Spanish for in my opinion.
Otherwise, I’ve been immersing in a variety of different domains. I’m continuing my historical focus with Africanus and Te Daré la Tierra, continuing to slog through Borges (some stories are much harder to understand than others), and retrying Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I’ve also started reading Reina Roja, which is a popular crime novel among Spanish learners.
Retrying Gabriel Garcia Marquez has really reinforced to me how far I’ve come over the past year. I have pretty solid level 4 or 5 comprehension, and much of what I’m missing is weird turns of phrase. For example, I have a sentence card about a “lanza cebada”, which literally translates to barley spear. Luckily, the Spanish dictionary I use had an alternative colloquial definition that made much more sense (a knight’s spear).
Reading Reina Roja also showed me that the concept of domains has a lot of merit. The book isn’t hard for me to read, per see, but there’s a lot more unknown vocab because I haven’t been encountering types of cars or electric lights in ancient or medieval settings. The first time I read it, I was also very tired, so I did get a little freaked out how low my comprehension seemed to be. Your state of mind while immersing matters folks!
Total Immersion time: 492 hours, approximately 3.5 million words
Future Plans: Finish Borges. Finish Reina Roja. Finish Africanus. Finish Puerta de la Luna. Finish Cien Años de Soledad. That should take me to the next update.
Open Questions: Am I reading too many books at once? GGM has some weird sayings, is there anywhere I can go to figure out what he’s actually trying to say?
Sentence Mining
I’m up to 1135 cards now with a 93.41% lifetime mature retention rate, but only an 86.49% rate in the past month. This retention rate is right where I want it. I’ve recently been adding a ton of cards (around 300 since the last update), and I’ve altered the anki algorithm to be less harsh, which has got me in the target retention zone.
Since the last update I‘ve added 103 cards from Olvidado Rey Gudú ,69 from Africanus, 37 from various Borges stories, 29 from Cien Años de Soledad, 36 from The Heroes, and various other cards from song lyrics or random books. I’m feeling really pumped about Anki now, so I’m trying to ride the train of 10–20 new cards a day for as long as I can (trying to get up to about ~15 minutes of Spanish Anki reviews a day). I’ve also downloaded a premade sentence deck, but I’m finding myself trying to not use it (i.e. making more of my own cards), so I may delete it.
Updated Stats
I’ve continued to count Anki time as immersion time. I’m at about 19 hours spent on Anki, doubling that for card making gives me about 38 hours of immersion from anki.
I also continued by A/B, A/C testing from last time. Here are the numbers for mature cards:
Image: 797/838 correct
English: 714/764 correct
Spanish: 741/808 correct
I am trying to make more English and Spanish cards to correct the imbalanced categories sizes. I did a Chi-squared test and obtained a p-value of .02. Significance is obtained at p<.05. This is significant: looks like the image cards are the best for retention, and the Spanish cards the worst! I will continue to gather data over time, but this is pretty promising.
Scientific Study: I’d love to work on a scientific study with this experiment, so I can generate ecological data points but I’d need a lot more data (probably 100 individuals with maybe ~300 Anki cards for a year). You’d need to have reached the monolingual transition. Reach out to me if you’re interested: I may put together a deck. Would also love for this to happen in other languages: reach out to me if you’d like to collaborate!
Writing
I’ve continued to write Goodreads reviews for the books that I’ve listened to and read. Still limiting myself to what I can think of in Spanish. Maybe a good idea to get those reviews corrected by someone who knows Spanish: maybe I’ll post them on reddit, or some forum. I’ve also started using HelloTalk a bit, but I find that I’m also not really interesting in output at this point. Steven Krashen has also made the observation in his book that reading is actually the most helpful thing to do to improve writing is just to read more, although he does say that practicing writing is more helpful for ordering ones thoughts. If I want to start thinking in Spanish, I think I should start writing more. Currently don’t have much interest in that.
Open Questions: Is writing necessary at this stage of language learning?
Listening
I’m really happy with how my listening has been going. This month was mainly filled with audiobooks. I finished The Magicians, and a novel about Caeser’s early life, Roma Soy Yo. Posteguillo does an amazing job of novelizing what might be an otherwise boring part of Caeser’s life, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of the series. There was some heavy bias, (very anti-Sulla), but Posteguillo was telling a story, and there honestly are a paucity of sources as far as I can tell.
Audiobooks may be the best source of words on a per minute basis, but films are a pretty big part of modern culture too. I’m trying to watch ~1 Goya award winner a week. So far I’ve watched two: Vivir es Facil con los Ojos Cerrados and Uno Para Todos. The first was really good, but I found it depressing how much cultural colonization of Spain there was by the Anglosphere even in the 1960s (also was living under Franco really that bad?). The second movie was a little cheesy, but the sentiment behind it, and some of the moments of the film (like the main character reading a Personal Matter in his car), were really well done.
I’ve continued to track my listening with last.fm: with my conversions, I listened to about 2.5 hours of music (10 raw), last month. I would certainly recommend it if you’re counting music as part of your immersion.
My fears about lack of comprehension ofconversational Spanish from audiobooks have been assuaged somewhat. I recently rewatched an interview of the Chilean Artist Chinoy and understood quite a lot of it. Very marked improvement as compared to when I first tried to watch the video during my first update. I’ve also been listening to a few philosophy podcasts/YouTube channels. Claudio Ojeda is an Argentinian philosopher/phsychotherapist that I really like who has a more conversational style, and I’ve also been listening to El Estoico (a podcast about stoicism). Both usually only have a single speaker on, but I’ve yet to find a good-equivalent of something like the Subversive podcast or Joe Rogan out there. Taking recommendations
Total Immersion time: 505 hours
Future Plans: Find more conversational podcasts. El Gurrero en la sombra del Cerezo by David Gil. Continue to listen to music
Open Questions: Best conversational podcasts about varied and interesting topics? Thinking Joe Rogan of the Spanish world. Bonus points for being outside of the box and not-PC?
Speaking
Not really any interest in outputting right now. I don’t need to currently, and am enjoying just consuming literature and films. When I reach 1200 hours, I will force myself to start taking iTalki lessons. The recent refold podcast has convinced me that I should eventually output, or at least try to do so. Language is for communication. However, the long I wait, theoretically the better my ability should be. Output is acquired through input after all, at least according to Krashen.
Explicit Grammar
None. Reflexive is becoming reflexive which is cool. Articles are also starting to make a lot more sense in sentences in which they were previously confusing.
French
Only doing my leftover Anki cards from my dabbling at the beginning of the year. I will continue to review these, but some of the ones that continually give me trouble are starting to get annoying. I think I may need to start immersing to even maintain a lot of the French cards I’ve learned.
Italian
I have started a Fluent Forever deck (image-word in Italian) of Italian, as well as reading/sentence mining the Harry Potter series in Italian. Certainly Spanish has given me a huge advantage: I’m at level 3 or 4 of comprehension most of the time. Some of this is likely due to me knowing Harry Potter really well. I have the audiobook playing while I read as well, so as to not acquire horrible mispronunciations.
People will often caution learning two related languages at the same time. I think this is a valid thing to worry about, but I am far enough along in my Spanish where I am not worried.
The exact reasons for starting Italian and for this methodology in particular will have to wait for my 100 hour Italian update.
Meditation
Have been bad at doing this. However, I do notice large differences in my abilities at different times of day/focus levels. Get your sleep kids!
Overall Impressions
Things are really starting to come together, especially in terms of reading. Maybe 3 million words is a magic number, because I’ve really noticed an extra level of comfort in reading that I just didn’t have before. However, with reading Borges and stepping outside of my first domain, I can still see that there’s a long way to go. I expect to track my Spanish learning for at least another 1000 hours, at least as of right now.
Open Questions: When do you stop tracking? When are the inflection points you’ve noticed in your learning?
Full immersion link data link.
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Deus ex Vita
