Refold Approach to Language Learning: Spanish ~1100-Hour Update
My ninth update about learning Spanish in a nutshell
This is my ninth 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 my eighth update, see here.
For more information about the Refold approach, see here. For a basic Spanish Anki vocabulary deck, see here.
General Progress
Started to output! Reached 1100 hours of immersion. Realized the importance of consistent immersion in maintaining language level. Realized how far I have to go in terms of vocabulary.
It’s been a while since my last update, life always seems to get in the way of Spanish. Luckily Spanish always seems to be there when I get back. I am certainly still enjoying myself loads, but it’s frustrating to be still be missing 1–2 words every page (although I suppose this is above 99% comprehension still), and have some big gaps when understanding podcasts. This is why I need to block out time for a consistent immersion routine of one hour a day on weekdays and two to four on weekends.
Reading
I’m still focusing on reading, for similar reasons as to my last update. Reading really just has the best words per minute exposure, and also the greatest breadth of vocabulary. However, I think I’m back on the other side of the horse in terms of the importance of conversational listening. I just do not get the slang and slurring of speech that I need to understand actual humans from audiobooks alone. That said, I did a solid amount of reading between this update and the last.
I started out by finishing the collected works of Borges that I had started in the last few updates. The last few collections are not as strong as his initial work, but I still really enjoyed stories such as “El Evangelio según Marcus”, and “Utopía de un Hombre que está Cansado”. These are something I would like to revisit when my Spanish is stronger.
Then I finally, finally finished Africanus: Hijo del Consul. A very easy read in terms of vocabulary, but honestly just too much of a slog in terms of plot and character development. I would recommend reading his later work to beginners instead.
After Africanus, I took a bit of a break from Spanish unintentionally. I told myself I was going to focus on Italian, but I just didn’t read at all instead for about 5 months (I have about 40 hours of listening in those months though). In order to get myself back into reading, I started making my way through my translated fantasy backlog and finished Joe Abercrombie’s Tierras Rojas. This was a nice reintroduction, as the book bridges the fantasy and western genres so there was a lot of familiar medieval vocab, but also new “western” words for me to sentence mine.
Finally, I read David B Gil’s second novel Hijos del Dios Binario, which is my first CF (ciencia ficción). I review this book in depth here, however for those who don’t want to read a whole other article, the highlights include an extremely fast-paced plot and a whole lot of biology and computer vocab which will be useful for work.
I’m currently reading a philosophy book that summarizes the work of José Ortega y Gasset: most of his work is in lectures, and my hope is that this book does a good job of summarizing the main thrusts of his thought.
Between this update and the next, I’m making a deliberate effort to slow down my reading and really notice all the words that I’m missing. I’m also planning on consistently reading for an hour a day and taking 30–60 minutes after reading in Spanish to not consume other content. This last point was inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer, who has really made it clear to me that consuming content, without reflection, is almost worse than not consuming content at all.
Total Immersion time: 546 hours, approximately 4 million words
Future Plans: Get through my backlog of books that I’ve mentioned on this blog (La puerta de la luna, Cien Años de Soledad, Te daré la tierra, etc). Reread La invención de Morel.
Open Questions: How long does it take to go from that 99% comprehension to near 100%? Are periods of silence and not consuming content beneficial after immersion?
Sentence Mining
I’m up to 1369 cards now with a 92.78% lifetime mature retention rate, but a higher 93.52% rate in the past month. This retention rate is back to being too high again, probably because I’ve slowed down significantly on adding cards. I may have to even more aggressively adjust the Anki algorithm to be less harsh, as the existing method still leads to my retention being too high.
I’ve added new cards from the various books I’ve read and from new vocab that I’ve learned in my italki lessons.
Updated Stats
I’ve continued to count Anki time as immersion time. I’m at about 24 hours spent on Anki, doubling that for card-making gives me about 48 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: 1297/1384 correct
English: 1201/1298 correct
Spanish: 1332/1447 correct
I now have roughly equal category sizes for each of these groups. I did a Chi-squared test and obtained a p-value of .2. Significance is obtained at p<.05. This is no longer a significant result. The results of the test have bounced back and forth between significant and insignificant, suggesting that perhaps correct/incorrect isn’t the way to look at this data. Perhaps I want to measure the distributions of individual card incorrect/correct ratios and do a t-test or something.
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. Since I started speaking, I’ve also thought about keeping a journal only in Spanish. I still worry about reinforcing bad habits but getting someone to look over this every once in and while (maybe on Reddit?) might be the solution.
Open Questions: What methods do you use to practice writing?
Listening
My listening also suffered from the language break I took, although I still kept up my listening through December, January, and February, whereas reading fell off in November. I’ve restarted listening again early this summer, and have been focusing on listening to interviews and conversations over audiobooks.
Since the last update, I’ve finished two audiobooks: Medio Rey by Joe Abercrombie, which is a young adult trilogy similar in tone to the first law books. I also finished El Guerrero en la sombra del Cerezo by David B. Gil which I review in more detail here. I’ve also been listening to interviews on the Estoico Podcast, and have finally found the podcast I was looking for Caminos del Logos, which is a podcast that critiques modernity through the lens of philosophy. As with reading, I’m finding I can follow the plot of these stories/podcasts almost perfectly. The problem comes with specific words I don’t know. I hope this improves as I listen more.
I’ve also continued to listen to music. Music is great for generating ear worms, and reinforcing vocabulary, but it’s not great for learning new vocab. I’ve been thinking about sentence mining the lyrics of songs I listen to a lot, just so that listening is actually doing something to reinforce vocabulary I’m learning.
Total Immersion time: 556 hours
Future Plans: A film a week and, an hour of listening a day, alternating between podcasts and audiobooks. La Resistencia by Laura Gallego is the audiobook currently on deck.
Open Questions: Do you sentence mine musical lyrics? Film recommendations?
Speaking
I recently started outputting on iTalki, and I wish I had done so earlier because it’s extremely motivating. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of disappointment when you have to resort to English to explain what you’re talking about, or misconjugating the verbs you want to use over and over again. This feeling has been extremely motivating and has inspired me to double down on my immersion.
I’m taking iTalki lessons with four different teachers from different Spanish-speaking countries. Rafael from Spain, Alejandro from Colombia, Misael from Argentina, and Katherine from Mexico. All the teachers have different accents and teaching styles. I would say my favorite thus far has been Rafael, because he is very interested in my day job, and he doesn’t correct me while I’m speaking, which some of the other teachers do. Misael is the most organized and has activities for me to do before classes usually. I take two 30–45 minute lessons a week, which costs me about $15–20. This is well worth it and is much cheaper than a lot of other language alternatives.
I’ve also thought about doing a language exchange on HelloTalk, but people generally want to talk in English on the app, and it doesn’t seem like a good use of my time. I’d rather pay another $10 for another lesson every week.
Output time: 2.5 hours
Explicit Grammar
None, but I’ve been thinking about grammar much more frequently since I started outputting.
French
Only doing my leftover Anki cards from my dabbling at the beginning of the year. I will continue to review these, and the load has generally dropped off to a very low level.
Italian
I have stopped doing any Italian immersion at all, except for the Anki cards that I’ve made from Harry Potter and the premade fluent forever deck. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, I don’t think I have time to do two languages properly. Once my Spanish output is at a level that I feel comfortable with, and I can just read for ~30 minutes a day to maintain my level, I think switching to Italian could be in the cards. Secondly, the amount of times I have mixed up vocabulary both in reading and outputting is way too high. Yesterday I used the Italian word for blood (sangue) instead of sangre in my italki lesson, and while reading Hijos del Dios Binario, I thought the word “binario” was train platform, as it is in Italian, not binary as it is in Spanish. This generally isn’t good for my Spanish progress, especially when I’m really concentrating on my vocabulary, so I think I have to stop Italian for now.
Meditation
Have been bad at doing this. However, I am trying to deliberately pause after media consumption and think about what I just read. Hoping this will be helpful to improve my comprehension.
Overall Impressions
It’s always up and down with language learning, and this update was a bit of a downer for me. Part of this was the extended break I took this spring from language learning, but I also wonder if some of this effect was a Socratic leap to a higher comprehension level where I notice how many things I don’t know? It’s been very frustrating, but I still have to remind myself of how far I’ve come. In the next 100 hours, I’m going to be focusing on vocabulary and really trying to drill down and sentence mine, as well as giving my full attention to immersion materials.
Open Questions: How do you deal with setbacks in your real or perceived language abilities? What are your favorite methods to improve attention and comprehension while immersing?
Full immersion link data link.
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Deus ex Vita
