### Recap Finished season 1 of La casa de las flores, season 1 of Jane the Virgin, and LatAm audiobook for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I also reworked my immersion tracking. Previously, I was using Polylogger and including time spent on Anki and vocabulary. I've since transitioned to my personal Airtable setup (which I'll write about...eventually) and am only including time spent on immersion. ![[Screen Shot 2022-02-27 at 7.06.56 PM.png]] By the next check-in I'd like to build some stats on the different activities (reading/listening/watching) into my tracker. I'm following the [Refold](https://refold.la/roadmap/) learning philosophy, which is based on a mix of comprehensible input and spaced repetition. Currently on stage 2A. In truth, I think I'm ready to move to stage 2B but I'm in no rush to read through Refold's 2B guide. I'll probably set up some sort of "test" for myself to see if I should move on to 2B after I finish La casa de las flores, the series I'm currently actively immersing with. ### Criteria for moving on to stage 2B >You are ready to move on to Stage 2B when you have level 3 comprehension while reading an episode of a TV show. This should be an episode that you’ve never seen before, though it can be part of a series you have been watching. >To evaluate your comprehension, watch the episode line-by-line, read the subtitles, but don’t do any lookups. You should be able to: > - Recognize 50% of the words being used. > That doesn’t mean that you understand or know these words, only that you get the sense that you’ve heard/seen them before. > - Occasionally understand entire sentences. > - Follow the plot points of the story, although the details will still be a mystery. So for the test, thinking I'll actively immerse with the 1st episode of something slice of life like Madre sólo hay dos, then pick the 2nd or 3rd and evaluate my comprehension according to the above. ### Media Immersion #### **Active Immersion** [**La casa de las flores**](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8387348/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) - Completed season 1, am about to start season 2 of this. Have been watching with Spanish subs, stopping to understand each sentence with unfamiliar terms, grammar, etc. I think I'll fondly look back at this show as the one that started it all for me. I watched it a few months ago with Spanish audio and English subs, before I began taking my Spanish immersion seriously, and it sparked...*something*. I loved a few of the characters, the humor, the messy intergenerational plotlines, and wanted to watch more. Paulina de la Mora, Maria José, Virgina de la Mora, all fantastic characters with great dialogue. The magical realism, the flowers, the family portrait motif, all make it a joy to watch. Sure, it's trashy at times, got a messy plot, sometimes no plot, but that's not making me love it any less. On my rewatch, I'm finding that with Spanish subtitles I comprehend much more than I thought I would. But I do worry a bit that without the subtitles I would have no idea what they're saying, so I'm trying to keep watching some shows with no subtitles in my free flow immersion. It's fun to learn the Mexican slang (and cursing!). I'm also glad that I'm noticing the differences between the majority Mexican characters speech and the Spanish characters. I've been mining a ton of sentences from this show. #### **Free Flow Immersion** [**Jane the Virgin**](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3566726/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) - Completed season 1, also about to start season 2 of this. Have been watching with no subs, without pausing or rewinding the show. I watched most of Jane the Virgin in its original English many years ago and immensely enjoyed the telenovela humor. I remember finding it to be a fresh take on telenovelas, poking fun at the genre ***without*** mocking it. I feel like I comprehend about 70-80% of it? Maybe more but I'm hesitant to rate myself more highly as could just be ignorance of what I'm missing. But I feel good about my comprehension with JTV - which I think is to be expected, because I've seen it in English, and it's a Spanish dub, and dubs are simplified. But I think that because of this show's Spanish influences, it's a special, enjoyable experience to rewatch this in Spanish. Comprehension varies scene to scene. Typically, for the family life, romance, and telenovela filming scenes I understand like 95% of it. But sometimes the crime and police investigation scenes are lost on me. For free flow immersion I've also started watching whatever I find that looks interesting on Netflix. This weekend I watched the following with Spanish subtitles: - [**La llamada**](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5176252/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) - hysterical, IMO a great watch, especially for those with conflicted Catholic upbringings like me. - [**Alguien tiene que morir** ](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10311932/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) It was good to check these out and get more exposure to the Spain accent, as the main shows I've been watching are LatAm accent. I was impressed at my ability to follow along. There are occasional scenes that are lost on me, but with the Spanish subtitles, I feel like I'm already passing criteria to move to 2B. I'm finding that I really like glitzy period stuff, dramas that are soapy in clever ways, etc. I'm 100% fast becoming a Manolo Caro/Cecilia Suárez fan. She's fantastically bonkers in La casa de las flores, and Alguien tiene que morir was a fun watch, although she had less to work with and the plot definitely went off the rails. #### **Passive Listening** **Harry Potter series audiobooks**, read by Carlos Ponce - about to start Goblet of Fire. Want to note that I think my "passive listening" is really more like free flow immersion. Yes, I'm typically doing chores or on a walk while listening, but I'm paying attention. If I don't feel like I paid attention, or genuinely just put a podcast on in the background, I don't add it to the tracker. Listening to the audiobooks is interesting...some days I feel like understand a ton, and other times I'm totally lost in the scene and trying to draw on my knowledge of the Harry Potter plot to fill stuff in. My plan for passive listening is to finish all the Harry Potter audiobooks, then return to podcasts like No Hay Tos, maybe Caso 63, and try a bunch more. Really want to drill listening hard and not be too reliant on subtitles. In English my reading ability eclipses my listening ability, both due to natural proclivities and my everyday activities. I've always been an avid reader, strong preference for getting written documents at work vs. synchronous meetings at work, etc. Because for Spanish, my primary goal is to be able to converse, possibly travel, I want to focus on listening, and eventually speaking, moreso than reading/writing. I have a feeling that my reading abilities will eventually follow without thaaaat much special attention. Could be wrong, and I should probably be more careful with that assumption considering that in Spanish, accents can totally change the meaning of a sentence, but we'll see! ### SRS/Anki/Sentence Mining TBH, not sure that I really do this "correctly". I get emotionally involved with the shows and sometimes tend to pick sentences that resonate, then identify a word in it to focus on, vs identifying words I don't understand, then mining the sentence. Oh well. Anyway, I've been sentence mining La casa de las flores heavily. I keep to 3 new cards a day, and I complete all reviews, including those for the ES1K (most frequent 1000 words) deck. So far my Anki card format is as follows: **Front**: - Sentence in Spanish **Back**: - Audio - English meaning of target word - Source of sentence ![[Screen Shot 2022-02-27 at 7.16.58 PM.png]] I find Anki to be a fun supplement. I think as I move into 2B I'd like to experiment with listening cards (so, sentence audio only on front), but I'm happy with this setup for now. --- Overall, my comprehension ebbs and flows, but it's coming along nicely. I'm recognizing more words in every sentence, starting to recognize and understand more complex conjugations that I never learned in Spanish class, such as the simple future, conditional perfect, etc. I am struggling a lot with understanding direct and indirect objects, and definitely missing some nuance with different conjugated forms, so I'm thinking to incorporate more grammar study. --- Created: February 27, 2022 Last Modified: February 27, 2022