Felicitaciones

So I did a thing. 

The Thing, but blurry:

Explanation to follow

About a year ago, I started loosely studying Spanish for our trip to Jaco in Costa Rica in February. It started off easy and then it got more fun, so I just kept learning with the Duolingo app with my phone.

After loosely studying for several months, I was pretty decent at reading and writing, but my speaking and listening were still quite elementary.

It's like learning all the definitions of square dance, but not being able to actually dance because you've only ever heard one caller and have never really danced.

I had studied languages in the past in high school like French and German, but never Spanish. I thought, "Well, I've come this far. I didn't come this far just to get this far."

Famous first words.

On our trip back from Canada in July, I decided to get serious about it and actually pursue fluency. I read a blog and found a website called Dreaming Spanish which is all about a comprehensible input method of learning.

So then I set a goal: 300 hours. Why 300 hours? Because of this roadmap.

this here is an excerpt of the roadmap

Shivers go down my spine when I set goals because the core of my being just knows how flakey I am about completing them.

 

Turns out that my issue with setting goals aside from all the corporate PTSD is that it has to be something that, at my core, I care about learning/doing/achieving or else I just lose interest way too fast.

But I told myself, hey- let's just do six months and see where we get. Learning via comprehensible input will keep it fun, so I don't even have to stay motivated; I just have to participate and my brain will naturally do all the heavy lifting.

However, to accelerate my milquetoast listening and pronunciation skills, I also subscribed to Pimsleur's audio course.

300 hours seemed achievable in six months. I had just over 100 hours when I began in July, and in the spirit of keeping things fun and colorful, I made a chart to track my progress. Just like back in the good ol' days of summer reading programs, I loved being able to color in little boxes when I had done my reading for the day, so I set milestones for chunks of progress that would make a pretty progress bar.

My "daily goal" in the upper left corner of my chart was 15 min of Duolingo, 30 min of Pimsleur, and 15 min of Dreaming Spanish. I didn't stick to this. I just invented this to make it seem palatable to my left brain.

Unfortunately, I was like 2 months in when I realized that I had messed up the dates in Excel and had left off half of September and October, but the dates had already rubbed off anyway from the wear and tear of the paper so whatever.

It's remarkable how much character one sheet of paper can get from daily use. You can definitely see when we traveled in August where I was doing Duolingo before bed in the hotel room just to prevent my streak ending. I kept my chart in my Spanish notebook where I jot down new vocabulary and verb conjugations.

After a short while, "doing Spanish" became like my part time job - playing with grammar in Duolingo, completing my audio lessons, watching videos - and I was committed to the fun! Some days I would do more than 3 hours, watching videos over lunch and taking long walks, talking to myself all the way to the bamboo forest and back. I even picked up a newspaper from the Mexican restaurant to read it just because I could.

Today I ended my Pimsleur subscription with just over 315 hours. I finished a month early than I had planned not only because my chart was muy equivocado hahahahaa but because I was already doing multiple audio lessons a day and ready to end that subscription so that I could hop over to Dreaming Spanish and get into their premium content.

It feels good to finish something for once, but at the same time, I didn't really "finish" anything. 

Not even my goofy chart.

The 300 hour goal was really just something arbitrary that I assigned myself to, but if anyone asks, I'm a B-1 student. The next milestone is 600 hours, but I hesitate to call it a goal. I mean, watching my Spanish stuff is already so habitual to me, so I'll probably just slide into fluency without even trying to. 

The easier it gets, the easier it gets! And the chart was a fun time for a time.

I'm making a lifelong career of expanding consciousness.

I also enjoy sunshine and breathing oxygen.

Subjunctive tense,

TWS