Refold Approach to Language Learning: Spanish ~500-Hour Update
My third update for my Spanish learning journey with the Refold approach
This is my third update for my Spanish learning journey with the Refold approach. For my first update see here. For my second update see here. For more information about the Refold approach see here. For a basic Spanish Anki vocabulary deck see here.
General Progress
Reached 500 total hours of immersion. Choose an input area to focus on. Began to push listening/reading immersion towards pairing audiobooks with print books. Found that the format of the reverse side of an Anki sentence card has little effect on my long term retention.
Reading
Although it has been a long time since my last update, I have not been immersing that much because of a variety of issues (lab work, personal relationships, extremely high Anki load). However, I still have managed to read three books and make substantial progress on three more since my last update. I finished La Tierra del Mago, the last book in the Magicians trilogy, El Ladrón del Rayo and a non-fiction book originally written in Spanish called Ikagi. I’m currently almost finished with Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s Una Historia de España and am about halfway through La Cruzada del Océano. I’ll elaborate on each of these below.
La Tierra del Mago and its predecessor El Bosque Mágico were both very challenging books for me. The books are translations of fairly “literary” adult books, combined with large amounts of what I would probably call “Harry Potter vocabulary”: words and phrases that have to do with magic and the supernatural and do not appear in everyday language. I probably would have got more out of immersing in something easier, but there is a weird pleasure in having to fill in the gaps of understanding in stories yourself. The creator of one of my favorite video games, Dark Souls, said that having to fill in the blanks himself while reading English fairy tales (he’s Japanese) is what inspired the creation of that world.
El Ladrón del Rayo was significantly easier to read than the Magicians trilogy, but I still found myself missing a lot of vocabulary. This was surprising to me, as I thought these books were much closer to the level of the first few Harry Potter books, and that I had moved beyond that long ago. Some of this effect is likely due to familiarity: I’ve had seven books of Harry-Potter-specific vocabulary, but not a lot of the Percy Jackson kind. However, I think something else might be at play here too. I’ve been re-reading the Harry Potter books before I go to sleep, and I’ve noticed there’s a lot of vocabulary I’m missing in those books as well. For both El Ladrón del Rayo and Harry Potter this wasn’t an issue, because I have enough knowledge of Spanish/the story to follow the plot, but it does show how far I have left to go in my Spanish journey. Perhaps also it indicates that I have reached a new level where I have enough knowledge that plot becomes a secondary concern to individual sentences. I’m not sure, maybe my readers have feedback?
Ikagi was a non-fiction book about holistic approaches to longevity as practiced by the Japanese. My god was this easy! I read the whole book in a day on a plane ride back from Colorado Springs. This led to me think that it was a good idea to focus my reading efforts on non-fiction, particularly history, which is a passion of mine. Refold suggests picking an area to focus your immersion on, and this seemed like a perfect first step, as I am unlikely to be having the small talk Spanish conversations in the near future, and I can supplement with historical fiction books and TV shows (such as Alatriste and Ministerio del Tiempo). The two books I’ve picked to start: Una Historia de España and La Cruzada del Océano are polar opposites in how they portray history, which together provide a more holistic view of Spanish history.
Total Immersion time: 260 hours
Future Plans: Africanus by Santiago Posteguillo, Capitán Alatriste, more José Javier Esparza
Open Questions: Is there a point in immersion where you start to notice missing vocabulary over missing plot?
Sentence Mining
I’m up to 461 cards now with a 96.18% mature retention rate. This should be lower, but I haven’t added new cards since I finished La Tierra del Mago.
I also continued by A/B, A/C testing from last time. Here are the numbers for mature cards:
Image: 328/340 correct
English: 238/246 correct
Spanish: 263/275 correct
I did a Chi-squared test and obtained a p-value of .77. Significance is obtained at p<.05. Basically cannot conclude anything about which back of the card is better. This is probably a factor of low sample size, because there are a ton of confounders, and may also be due to the fact that I’m not adding new cards, so the data is skewed towards 100% retention. I will begin adding new cards again at about 5/day once my oral exam is finished, so hopefully this will provide better data for the next update.
Writing
No progress. I have stopped writing reviews in Spanish because I think I am really not ready, as my active vocabulary is so small. There will be plenty of time for that later after I have done more immersion.
Listening
I thought listening was going extremely well at the end of my last update. However my time off has really changed things. Lot of backsliding on the listening front, although I can still understand the intermediate Dreaming Spanish videos without subtitles or other aids.
I’ve been audiobooking alongside reading La Cruzada del Océano which has been surprisingly helpful in dealing with the main issue I have with audiobooks, in both Spanish and English, which is attention. I’ve had to speed up the narration however, because even in Spanish, 1x speed is too slow for my reading.
In terms of shows, I feel like I really misspoke about there not being a lot of good Spanish period pieces out there. RVTE.es is full of them, and all that it requires is an internet connection and a VPN. Isabella, Ministerio del Tiempo and Carlos V, Rey Emperador have all been awesome to watch. Isabella was especially fun to watch, as a lot of the cast was in La Catedral del Mar. However, I’ve had to turn subtitles back on to aid my comprehension, which seems like a bit of a backslide to me.
I also watched the second season of El Cid over the course of a few days. Despite its historical inaccuracy, it was very bingeable.
Total Immersion time: 228 hours (not including music)
Future Plans: Isabella, Ministerio del Tiempo, Carlos V, Rey Emperador
Open Questions: When do I need to stop using subtitles?
Speaking
No second date, but I am becoming good friends with another Spanish speaker. However, will probably hold off on more speaking with her for another few hundred hours of listening.
I’ve also been learning some Spanish songs on guitar which involves singing. My favorite thus far is Ángel by Elefante.
Explicit Grammer
None. Verb conjugations are becoming second nature, especially things that I had trouble with in school, like the difference between imperfect and perfect conjugation.
Overall Impressions
The time off really hurt my listening comprehension and to a lesser extent my reading comprehension. If I’m really serious about this Spanish learning thing, I have to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I think even thirty minutes a day would be sufficient to prevent that backsliding from happening again.
Full immersion link data link.
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