Aprendizaje de Hoy

Well, yesterday was a little slower on the Catalan and Esperanto. I harvested the words that were in my short-term memory but didn't really learn new items. This morning so far I learned 10 new items in each language, and plan to double that at least by the end of the day.

I am looking forward to selecting my next Catalan course thru Memrise.

In other language news, I feel like my Spanish conversation skills are improving. Yesterday, I was able to sustain 15-30 minutes of conversation with a couple different people without resorting to Spanglish and with perhaps 80-85% comprehension on my part. It felt good :)

Fins després!

El niño que vivió

Time for a new entry, now that the weekend is here. I'm happy to report that my order from Amazon arrived a couple of days ago. Since then, I've been reading thru the first chapter of "Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal". I have been pleasantly surprised at how much I can pick up without having to refer to the dictionary -- I would estimate about 40% comprehension. Of course, it helps that the story is familiar to me.

I have also been working with Madrigal some more. I did a quick tally of roughly how many words I have in my passive recognition vocabulary based on Madrigal's word groups and transformation rules. I came up with about 1265 words. Not all of them are high frequency, but a lot of them are, so it's good to be able to recognize them.

In other news, I think that I have my classes prioritized this semester. The one that is going to take the most work by far is the Real Analysis, but it will probably also be the most rewarding. The Combinatorics class comes in a distant second for difficulty and a close second for interest. As for the Stats class, so far it hasn't really been difficult at all. I am looking forward to learning more about the specific linear models and how to program them in R. I still want to get certified with SAS; I just need to figure out when I will have enough time to do it.

Spanish Update

Today I added about 75 words from the first 8 lessons in the Madrigal book to my Spanish collection. These are only the ones that are not part of the English => Spanish word transformation groups that the author provides. I think it would be interesting to come up with an estimate of how many Spanish words fit within those categories; I am sure that the count would be well into the hundreds and possibly into the thousands!

When my dictionary arrives, I will go back and enter the Spanish definitions for the items. I could start doing this with Real Academia Española's dictionary widget, but it could lead to definition overload right now. I can't wait to get started on Harry Potter in Spanish...

The Fall Semester Approacheth

This morning I went up to Mt Pleasant to do my grad assistant training. There were parts of it that I found interesting and informative, but there were also parts that seemed a bit boring to me. I think that this is probably because of my pre-existing interests in learning and memory research, as well as different learning styles and perceptual/cognitive psychology.

More interestingly, I went ahead and purchased my textbooks. The books for Real Analysis (MTH 632) and Combinatorics I (MTH 578) look especially interesting. The book for Applied Statistical Methods (STA 580) seems like a massive brick!

This semester I intend to experiment with using SuperMemo to provide continuous review and recall of the material for my classes. My plan is to enter the class material into SuperMemo collections right after my morning classes and make it part of my daily repetitions.

I have had a good experience thus far using the software to help me with vocabulary acquisition for Spanish, Russian, Toki Pona and lojban. I have also used it to help with remembering various bits and pieces of music theory and statistics. I look forward to using it for my classes!

Learning Spanish

Our recent trip to Mexico has reawakened and strengthened a long-standing desire of mine to learn more Spanish. Ever since my first exposure to the language in 3rd grade, I have felt an attraction to it which I have never seriously followed up on. Now I want to.

I propose to use a modification of the method that Michal Wojcik describes as The Norsk Experiment. I am going to use a monolingual Spanish dictionary right away -- the Diccionario Practico del Estudiante -- and an easy Spanish novel -- Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal.

Two differences in the method that I plan to use: I am using Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish to help with the grammar and to quickly build passive recognition vocabulary, and I plan to add vocab words to a SuperMemo collection, in the form of sentence-items. More about my experiences with SuperMemo in a subsequent post...

I will post updates of my progress as I go!