Refold/Mass Immersion Approach: Spanish ~400-Hour Update
My second update for my Spanish learning journey with the refold approach
This is my second update for my Spanish learning journey with the refold approach. For my first update see here. For more information about the Refold approach see here.
General Progress
Reached 400 total hours of immersion. Finished my first non-translation book. Reached level 5 understanding of my first native TV show. Outputted for the first time. Found preliminary data that suggests image-based Anki cards are best for mature-card recall for sentence mining.
Reading
I’ve read three Spanish books since my last update: El Reino del Dragón de Oro, the second book in Isabel Allende’s young adult series, Cajas de Carton, memoirs of an American University professor of his childhood as a migrant picker in the 1960s and 2/3 of the translation of Lev Grossman’s The Magician King (for some reason they changed the title to The Magical Forest). I’ll elaborate on each of these books below.
I began El Reino del Dragón de Oro with the intent of no longer immersing in translated content. I still think this is perhaps a good consideration to keep in mind, as untranslated language is definitionally more unnatural than native content. However, I think this factor is pretty far down on the list in terms of choosing immersion content. Yes, El Reino del Dragón de Oro was natural native content, but I despised it, and couldn’t get myself to immerse as often as I did with Harry Potter. And immersion time Trumps everything else. I’m sure there are many native Spanish books that I would enjoy, but I have to spend the time and money to find them, and some, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, are probably best enjoyed when my reading has improved.
Cajas de Carton was one such book. The writing and the story were very straightforward and compelling. While I still picked up some sentence mining vocabulary, this book was fairly simple, and I would definitely recommend it as an initial native book for Spanish learners following Refold.
El Bosque Mágico has been a big step up for me. Part of this is reading on kindle, which I think lowers readability. However, I think most of the difficulty is due to a large jump in vocabulary and complexity of the language/the ideas that are presented. I’ve read The Magicians in English, and it’s certainly what I would call a “literary” book, so this is probably why. However, I’m learning loads of vocabulary, and because of the fact that it’s on kindle, I’ve been able to sentence mine much more easily.
Total Immersion time: 220 hours
Future Plans: Africanus by Santiago Posteguillo, Una Historia de España by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Translation of Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie
Open Questions: Is it better to immerse with physical books or Kindle (kindle is far superior for sentence mining)?
Sentence Mining
I’m now up to 301 sentence cards, with about a 90% retention rate on my mature cards.
I’m conducting a bit of an A/B, A/C test with sentence mining. I have three different types of back to a card: an image(recommended by fluent forever), English definitions(recommended by masterhowtolearn), and Spanish definitions, which was what Matt has recommended. My hypothesis going in was that images would provide the best recall, followed by Spanish definitions, followed by English. Images provide a strong mental link between the word an its meaning, and I was skeptical of masterhowtolearn’s suggestion of bilingual cards considering he is not fluent in an L2.
However, being a scientist, I decided to collect data. These are my results so far for mature retention
Image: 32/34 correct
English: 8/9 correct
Spanish: 25/28 correct
I did a Chi-squared test and obtained a p-value of .98. Significance is obtained at p<.05. Basically cannot conclude anything about which back of the card is better. I think this is a factor of low sample size that will resolve itself when I’ve done more reviews. I will continue this experiment over the next year.
Writing
Pretty much the same as last time. However, upon the release of the third stage of refold, I’m thinking it might be time to start using text-based services such as HelloTalk to start outputting/immersing in native-texting language when I hit ~400 hours of reading.
Listening
I made a lot of progress with listening to ~180 hours this month. I’m still having a hard time with motivating myself to watch TV, especially as I’m coming to realise that a lot of content written for open-ended television series is low quality art.
However, I did find some gems in the rough. The adaption of Ildefenso Falcones’ La Catedral del Mar succeeded in making me extremely emotional. There’s a video in which Matt talks about how native speakers treat you as you progress in the language: there’s increasing praise that suddenly drops off as they start treating you as human being instead of as a foreigner. From my experience, there is a similar experience in reverse. Natives of your target language are aliens speaking in gibberish. Like actors in silent films, I trouble thinking of them as real people with ranges of emotions just like mine. But through my improvements in Spanish, and the goddamn good writing and acting of this show, I was finally able to make that jump of really seeing Spaniards as people with just as full range of emotion as me. La Catedral del Mar was brutal and horrific as often as it was noble and kind, but it was the first time non-English content has torn and twisted my heart in the same way that my favourite English books and movies have done.
I also achieved level 5 fluency for a few episodes of El Cid on Amazon Prime. I’ve generally been focusing on European Spanish with my listening because I enjoy the content more, and it seems like that is paying off.
Continuing to passively consume music. It has been helping with reinforcing vocabulary that I already know, but since most songs are love songs, the general gist is not a challenge for me to understand. I’ve probably listened to 20–30 hours of music over the past month, but I’ve counted it at quarter time because I don’t think it’s very useful for my improvement.
Total Immersion time: 180.2 hours
Future Plans: Tiempos de Guerra, Ministerio del Tiempo, Dub of Death Note Anime.
Open Questions: How to find more Spain Spanish period pieces?
Speaking
I had a date with a Spanish girl in which I conversed in Spanish for about an hour. It went okay: the main problem was that I was struggling to find the words I needed, and to totally comprehend her. But not bad for less than 200 hours of listening. Will probably hold off on more speaking for another few hundred hours of listening.
I’ve also been learning some Spanish songs on guitar which involves singing.
Explicit Grammer
None. I don’t think this is in anyway required, although might be good idea to brush up on some of the verb conjugations.
Overall Impressions
I was very happy with my listening progress this month, and less so with my reading. Sort of the reverse of last month. I think this is largely due to the fact that I am really pushing the comprehension frontiers with my reading, while my listening is playing catch-up with a dialect that I understand.
Full immersion link data link.
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