So I did it again. I deleted the Facebook app on my smartphone. I noticed I spent quite a bit of time on it just browsing – time which I could have spent studying Spanish. I can still check Facebook through the browser, but I’m less likely to do it because it is a bit more inconvenient and a lot of times that is enough of a barrier. It’s amazing how such tiny barriers affect psychology and habits. I use another app that automatically turns off wifi and data at 10pm on weekdays which gets me to go to bed earlier because I’m less likely to get distracted.

Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time in transit on my way back to San Francisco from Denver so got some good studying time in. In total 84 minutes. Here is the breakdown:

5   Duolingo
64 Coffee Break Spanish podcast 39-41
15 Memrise

Till tomorrow!

What do you think of when you hear of the state Colorado? I think of mountains, rockies. I have never seen them before and as I arrived to Denver this weekend I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t see sweeping views of Mountain ranges. So I decided to go on a small adventure to find mountains.

I did a quick search online and settled on North Table Mountain as being the closest to Westminster (a suburb of Denver) where I was for the weekend. As I’m learning Spanish I also decided to record a short video in Spanish. It is totally not scripted. Watch till the end and see what surprising thing I found on my short hike!

The video is not perfect and I made quite a few mistakes in Spanish, but hey, better imperfect and real than perfect and imaginary.

As for studying Spanish I did total of 60 minutes. Here is the breakdown:
9 Duolingo
23 Coffee Break Spanish podcast 38
28 Memrise

Till tomorrow!

Yesterday I flew from San Francisco to Denver airport and landed pretty late at night. As usually in new places I set out to find a Supershuttle. I never book online, usually I can get a seat whenever I show up. This time it did not quite work that way. When I arrived I saw the Supershuttle, but it was already full. And one unlucky soul, who had a ticket to the previous shuttle which she missed due to a delayed flight, could not get on this one as it was full with ticketed passengers. So neither did I. The next one was in an hour. My first thought?

“Score! I have more time to study Spanish!”

It is a bit tongue in cheek, but it is true. Because I was distracted by studying Spanish, which is an activity that takes my full focus, I was not annoyed or angry that I would not get to the hotel immediately (and it had been such a long day!).

It is the same with dancing for me. As I noticed in the past few days that for me dancing, which also requires full focus, helped me to be “distracted” and not to think about the news about the Malaysia airplane crash.

Maybe people who routinely find healthy distractions from troubling emotional events are happier.

Now, back to Spanish 🙂

Yesterday with all the transit time I managed to get over an hour of study time (72 minutes). Here is the breakdown in minutes:

• Coffee Break Spanish podcast 35
• Duolingo: I’m at topic Adjectives 1 Lesson 8/9, 881 XP points, Level 7, 0 day streak
• Memrise: total 432 items or phrases in long term memory (324 Learn Basic Mexican Spanish + 108 El Menu course)
• 63% towards A1 level on http://www.spanish-test.net/ (need 70% to pass)

So yesterday I managed to do one Duolingo lesson (5 minutes) and I spent 25 minutes on Memrise.

I’m taking a flight to Denver tonight so I should have lots of dead time to study 🙂

Till tomorrow!

Perhaps you saw in my previous post that I just finished a month of studying Spanish and accomplished small victories. In fact I loved learning Spanish so much that I’m now doing another month long mission.

It starts today July 17th and goes till August 17th.

Here are my goals for this mission:

* study every single day, aim for at least half an hour a day, but less is ok too

* keep Duolingo streak with at least one lesson a day

* at the end of it be able to have a half an hour long conversation

What I will do the same

I made lots of progress last month and I believe in large part it is because I studied or reviewed every day (I missed just one day while I was in the woods). So I will continue to do so.

In my previous mission the combo of Memrise and Duolingo apps and Coffee Break Spanish podcast worked well, so I will continue to do so.

What I will do differently

In this mission compared to the previous one I will focus more on Memrise and Coffee Break Spanish and will keep Duolingo just one lesson a day. This is because I saw that when I focused on Duolingo for a week I didn’t see much progress. I think this was because at this stage of my learning my limiting factor is vocabulary and Duolingo is not good for retaining vocabulary whereas Memrise is.

In the last mission I every week I progressively devoted less and less time. (It went from 1st week 9h:49m, 2nd week 7h:15m, 3rd week 5h:52m, 4th week 3h:34m) So this time I will aim for at least half an hour a day so that the average goes up. There were about 7 days in which I didn’t quite reached 30 minutes per day.

I will also try to prepare and write up more short stories about my life so that I have more stuff to talk about and thus have possibility to have longer conversations.

Let’s do this!

It was my first time in Los Angeles and California. I went to college in Massachusetts at the time and visited LA for a student leadership conference. I took a bus from the airport to the hotel, which was quite an ordeal (this is LA with quite shabby public transit!). Inevitably I needed to ask directions and I asked a gentleman in his forties with few gray hair and a fairly big leather handbag whether the bus I was in was going where I was expecting it to go. I asked him in English and he responded in Spanish while gesticulating widely. I re-asked again in English and he still responded in Spanish. Luckily I was prepared and I had a printed map so pointing fingers and saying “si” or “no” did work out and I got where I needed to go.

However, that day I decided that if I ever move to California I will learn Spanish.

About a month ago the time had come. I have been living in San Francisco, California for four years now. Last month I got back from a trip to Mexico, a third Spanish speaking country I visited in the last six months. The other two were Spain and Panama, where I got lost because of my lack of Spanish.

So I decided to enter a mission of learning Spanish for 30 days. Since I have studied languages before I knew what rules to set. The main rule was very simple: study every single day even if it is just for couple of minutes. Since after work, dancing and social life I don’t have any free time to sit down at a desk and study Spanish it had to happen on the go – on the commute, while waiting, while walking or while at the gym.

I had 3 goals for my month long mission. 1) Learn how to order tacos and fish 2) have a five minute long conversation and 3) if I were to go to Spanish speaking country again, not get lost.

And I did it!

I missed only one day of practice while I was backpacking at Yosemite with no cell reception. I was successfully able to order tacos at a taqueria in Mission in San Francisco. Though most importantly, I went to a language meetup and had a 15 minute long conversation in Spanish. Also, I have learned vocabulary that I’m pretty sure would allow me to get where I want in a Spanish speaking city. I also kept an almost daily language learning log at FluentIn3Months forum.

One thing that I learned (besides all the vocabulary and directly Spanish related stuff 🙂 ) was that beginning Spanish is actually easy! It is easier than any of the other languages I have learned in the past, including English and French. Why I didn’t do it sooner? I could have done a month of Spanish before Mexico and I would have had even better time in Mexico.

What I was most surprised about was how much the time of studying Spanish added up. With having no “free” time I amassed on average an hour a day for 30 days! To be more precise 28 hours 35 minutes over 30 days or on average 57 minutes (57h:10s) per day. The range was between 4 minutes and 156 minutes and with median of 52 minutes.

So how I did it?

I studied on the go. I always had my smartphone with me and headphones. In the morning, while getting ready I would listen to podcasts (mostly Coffee Break Spanish). Whenever waiting for a bus or anything else for that matter I would put on headphones and learn using apps. If I didn’t bother anybody by talking out loud I would do Duolingo as it has a speech recognition component, otherwise Memrise to learn vocabulary. I would listen to podcasts while walking, running errands, or at the gym. In those moments which before I would have spent browsing the web or Facebook, now I spent studying Spanish. 4 minutes here, 5 minutes there, it all adds up!

I loved this mission! So I will do another one. Stay tuned!