I just wanted to say hello, and also thank you - yesterday I completed the 5th Spanish challenge. I’m now fighting with my conscience about whether I can afford the next 10 yet or not, but I think temptation will probably get the better of me,
I originally signed up at SSi to learn Welsh, but although the first challenge was great other things got the better of me and I didn’t get round to continuing. I’ve now got a pressing need to learn Spanish, and came right back here.
The style of SSi suits me perfectly, and is actually very similar to how I learnt German with another programme beginning with “P” - the cost of that other programme, plus its being overly-targeted at American business men, put me off using it for other languages. SSi is like what I wished the other one would be.
SSi does have one disadvantage though… it makes me seriously question my own methods as an English teacher, which was my main occuptation here in Germany up until recently. If I decide to take on more students in the future, I’ll definitely be tring to integrate this approach into the appointments in some way.
My other half, who is a fluent Spanish speaker, is amazed at how much I’ve learnt in such a short amount of time. I’ve picked some vocab up from her over the years, but all of a sudden I’m stringing complex sentences together… and she hasn’t yet noticed that they’re all comprised of the same 20 or so pieces ;).
I’m looking forward to doing the next set of challenges, whether it is later today that I give in to temptation, or in a few weeks time. I’ll also get back to Welsh in the not too distant future too.
The SSi method seems to work well for me too. I want to learn Spanish too, but I don’t find enough time whilst i’m learning Welsh. Hopefully that day will come soon!
I have just started learning Spanish here too. I am on the 7th challenge at the moment. Good luck with the rest of the challenges if you decide to continue. I’m sure that you’ll continue to make great progress (especially if you take advantage of the fact that you have someone at home who you can practice with regularly).
I look forward to hearing from you further down the line
We’re going to work out a set-up for language teachers at some stage (when we have the spare dev time) - so that they could provide discounts for their students and share the revenue - probably a year or so down the line at the moment, though…
15 months since starting SSiW. I’ve done the courses then the levels and making a lot slower but continuing progress since. The Spanish i picked up has somewhat faded, which has made me realise that I would need to do it as intensely as I did with Welsh to make it stick. Having a 1st language partner must help a lot, but also be frustrating as you both would want to be at the point of conversing fluently as equals in Spanish as quickly as possible.
@Y_Ddraig_Las how intensely did you do Welsh? I’m trying to do a challenge a day with Spanish - I did do two challenges in one day when I had missed a day. I caught up by doing one in the morning and one in the evening. I think having a regular schedule helps though. It is a shame there isn’t a subscription for Spanish like there is for Welsh, it would be extra motivation to keep up my target and would save quite a bit of money in the long run. I read here on the forum why that is though, and I can understand it to some degree. Then again, maybe those who subscribed all made it through in a month :P.
@a_jay and @sammurf, thanks for the welcome. How long have you been learning?
@aran - that is an interesting idea about a referal programme with language teachers - and a very clever, slightly sneaky way of getting the message about SSi to more people ;). I think SSi would be a great component to the inverted classroom methodology though - I can well imagine doing an SSi challenge at home and then meeting a teacher to practise and expand to other contexts.
I had been trying to learn on and off since 2007 (using different material), but only really got going properly in 2013 when I decided to book myself on Bootcamp in 2014. Like you this way of learning suits me, I am always busy and being able to stop and start when family life takes over is a real bonus.
This is the model that we’ve seen work particularly well with other tutors - @elizabeth_jane does this with a Welsh class in Australia, and has had terrific results (after putting a LOT of work into how to make the classroom sessions really entertaining).
We don’t want to be in the least little bit sneaky about it - when we’ve got the bandwidth to go in that direction, we’ll reach out to a bunch of teachers and see what would help them most…
That might be a misperception - it’s natural that your conscious control will always fade, but the question is how quickly it comes back - what’s the longest SSiSpanish session you’ve done since you felt that it had ‘faded’?
I can believe it - both that the results have been amazing, and that the classroom sessions took a lot of work!
@Y_Ddraig_Las I agree with Aran about how quickly languages come back. I’ve seen this a lot with my own students, and I’ve experienced it myself. In fact, very recently I started rewatching an anime series, and was amazed how many Japanese words came flooding back to me. I had 2 years of evening classes once a week about 10 years ago, and I thought I had forgotten everything.
Yes, this. There are, I think, reasonable grounds for believing that memories never entirely vanish - and we certainly know that revisiting them pretty much always strengthens them more than the original encoding…
I’m in education too and a lot of jargon and “book knowledge” in some of the units I teach and I have utterly turned into an evangelist for the spaced repetition / recall practice / interleaving style that SSIW is using for that too!
To be honest i haven’t done one recently. I’ve been concentrating on trying to learn some Welsh in preparation for Bwtamp.
When i do get going again it does come back more easily, absolutely. It’s just that the words I learnt didn’t come back when I was thinking about them because I haven’t done a Spanish session for a spell. It’s like how the Welsh i did at school did all come back once I started with SSiW. My point was that to make progress you need to do something almost every day, but every session you do means you learn more quickly after a break.
So, yesterday I completed lesson 25. Now I am trying to decide whether to let it settle in or keep going while the going is good. The other alternative would be starting on Welsh, but I still want to get my Spanish as fluent as possible before the end of summer.
Even better news, the phone rang a couple of nights ago and I got to have an unexpected conversation in Spanish - I’ve been practising with the other half a bit each evening, but speaking to someone else is something else completely.
Oh, absolutely - and the gold standard for real, valuable learning - well done!
If the aim is to get as far as possible by the end of the summer, I’d recommend pushing on (and maybe revisiting challenge 25 of Level 1 once every month or so).
Pushed on I have - started level 2 last night. I shall continue my one a day routine and I should be at the end of the level by the start of next month :).
- I’ve been practising with the other half a bit each evening, but speaking to someone else is something else completely.