All Spanish practice with real world materials runs the same way

[conuly]

First, I go "Wow, I understand way more of this than I thought! I'm great at Spanish!" and then I go "Oh, oh, oh fuck no, I do not understand this at all, I do not understand this language even a little!"

It's never in the reverse order. I wonder why that is?

(Speaking of comics....

*********************

The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack

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Trump Fired This Top Watchdog. Now He’s Speaking Out.

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Trade War Retaliation Will Hit Trump Voters Hardest (I may have posted this before)

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The Real Outrage About the Yemen Signal Group Is That It Called for Attack on Civilian Home

DOGE staffer 'Big Balls' provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show

Turkish student at Tufts University detained, video shows masked people handcuffing her

Comments

My experience

[cactuswatcher]

I took four years of Spanish in high school, but that was long ago. When I was in college I was taking German and Russian, but I bought a few books in Spanish. Except for a couple books of Peanuts cartoons I didn't try very hard to read them. Since I went to grad school in Russian, I pretty much let Spanish go for decades. When I moved to Arizona in 1999, I watched the Spanish language national news (from Miami) every night. I felt good that I could understand about half of it. I learned about 9/11 from them, although I didn't trust what I thought they were saying. So I switched to an English station and found out I understood better than I thought I did.

I gave up watching Spanish language news, mostly from the shock of 9/11. About 2020 I started occasionally watching a cooking show in Spanish on YouTube presented by a typical abuelita from Michoacan, Mexico. It is pure Mexican food cooked on a primitive wood-fired cooking surface. I suspect that she's been inventing dishes so she can keep the show going and bringing in money. To this day it normally seems like I can only understand about half of everything she says. But in the last year or so I realized I could turn the playback speed down. At 50% speed I can understand a good 90% of everything she says, after all it's a cooking show and she says a lot of the same things in every video. Last year I tried reading some of the Spanish literature I've owned but haven't looked at since college. I understand about 75% without using the dictionary, which is a lot better than I thought I'd do.

[frandroid]

> Experts ‘amazed’ at survival of Valerie the miniature dachshund

At this point they should just let Valerie live her best feral life...

[ioplokon]

Honestly, probably fatigue. It can be really tiring using your second language. So you probably are doing okay until you hit your limit & get tired.

I know for simultaneous interpretation, even experts hit a wall like 10-30 minutes in, where your performance degrades. That's why you tend to work in pairs & switch off. When I've done it, we tried to switch roughly every 5 minutes, if possible.

[conuly]

I'm not sure I know enough Spanish to count it as a second language. More like a half a language?

Re: My experience

[conuly]

Good job!

[conuly]

I'm sure if they could just catch her and bring her home she'd remember she likes her humans.

[ioplokon]

Even more tiring! :p

[armiphlage]

One product my factory makes is inertial reference systems for aircraft. If you know your starting point, have accelerometers that feel changes in motion, and an accurate clock, you can calculate your position fairly well. Measurement errors build up over time, so you need to reset the system each time you land at an airport.