Learn Spanish Online Egas
- 1980’s Took Spanish in High School. I didn’t do too well in class, but I enjoyed learning the language.
- 1996 Moved to a city where more people speak spanish then english. Unfortunately I forgot most of the spanish I learned. I didn’t pick up any spanish “from immersion”.
- Summer 2003 Met a Japanese girl at a party.
- Winter 2003 Listened to pimsleur while working. Unfortunately I learned nothing from it. Listened to pimsleur in the car…learned nothing useful for my upcoming trip, but learned a few vocabulary words. Went to Japan for the first time with the girl.
- 2004 kept listening to pimsleur on and off. Mostly off. Played around with rosetta stone.
- 2005 Girlfriend got a job in Japan. I wanted to try living in Japan, so started taking a class. the textbook was “Japanese for busy people”. Finished JFBP I. The plan was for me to move to Japan and try finding a job there.
- 2006 Started realizing that it would be impossible to work in my career in Japan. Got busy with work and stopped going to class halfway through JFBP II. The only good thing was that I visited Japan often.
- 2007 Got married to the Japanese girl from the party and she moved back to Los Angeles. I’m not studying Japanese at all now.
- 2009 Got a smartphone and thought I could learn something while walking the dog around the block. Downloaded a few japanese learning apps. Started casually learning kana. Started listening to pimsleur in the car again. Listened to level 1 and 2. Always frustrated that I didn’t have flashcards to supplement the CDs. Frustrated that the school where I used to take classes seemed to close down. Just generally frustrated buy not knowing what to do. Eventually dropped the whole thing.
- 2013 Got interested again and tried a few different free flashcard apps. Reviewed my hiragana so that I could learn some Japanese vocabulary.
- Feb 2013 Decided to buy the anki iOS app and downloaded the JFBP deck because I had the textbooks and wanted to review the vocab that I already halfway knew. Officially started anki on Feb 20 2013. Studied every day and realized that every day I studied made it that much harder to break the chain. Finished JFBP I vocab. Found and realized that the resource I was designing in my head existed and . Started learning core vocabulary and kanji (via an rtk deck). I suspended katakana words because I wanted to learn japanese words. Along the way, I started adding sentences. Realized that after several months of study I still couldn’t understand anything on Japanese TV. Decided sentences and kanji could wait and I needed as much vocab as I could handle.
- Spring 2014 I was getting impatient with my progress around core 2k and I still couldn’t understand much on TV. Realized that I needed to learn grammar and exposure to inflected verbs, so I decided to start adding sentences again. I raced through the sentences because I already know most of the vocab, suspending cards where the vocab prevented my understanding the sentence. After about 2 weeks of sentences I realized that my vocabulary accuracy improved dramatically. Accidentally unsuspended all of the ‘hard” sentences(about 300) and decided to just push through them.
- Summer 2014 Core sentences are caught up with vocabulary. Decided to start Tae Kim. Already being vaguely familiar with some grammar made for a lot of ah-ha moments. Finished 2/3 of Tae Kim (Basic and Essential). Started adding vocab and sentences in parallel. Ran on my sentences so I can easily look up unknown words in the sentences.
- Fall 2014 I’m at ~core2.5k right now. Lowered my leech threshold from 7 to 5.
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