Hola a todos 👋
I’m back again to report my progress as I sum up the month of October.
How have you been?
Mine has been great because I got more Spanish recently versus the previous month (September).
To see why, I’ll explain now what happened in October, including the discoveries I made.
October Update
Right away, I’ll show you my total input for October.
Here’s my total Spanish input for the month, courtesy of the Dreaming Spanish tracker:
The grand total of all these minutes is 117 hours and 42 minutes.
In a 31-day month this averages out to 3.80 hours per day.
Most of the best times were in the final week of October, wherein I got plenty of vacant time in my hands. And I was prepared to spend it on Spanish immersion. It was during this time that I crazily grinded for 1,014 minutes in a single day!
Looking back to my September goals, I was hoping to get to 300 hours in total for Spanish CI (comprehensible input) content, hence the strong final week. Unfortunately I only finished at 289 hours, which is nevertheless close to the target.
I discovered some pretty awesome things, including:
- More grammar points starting to make sense, my favorite being the uses of que to build more complex sentences, plus the tengo que rule and its variations
- New vocabulary helping me understand much more sentences than before
- Noticing conjugations and how a single word can change using different conjugations depending on the situation and point of view
- The use of audiobooks and adding them into the content mix
- The spellings of Spanish words, including correct and incorrect ones I was assuming in my head, thanks to reading
- Being able to search YouTube on specific topics I want to watch (typing in keywords)
Another milestone worth celebrating is that I finished all of Dreaming Spanish’s beginner videos, and now I’m graduating and moving towards intermediate videos.
I also tend to celebrate when a new word I discovered comes up in two or more different situations. Just being able to carry a single word elsewhere is already a success!
Goals for November
Now that October is finished, it’s time to move on towards November.
However, I want to be careful with setting goals that are too ambitious. But I also need to set goals that would push me hard. Therefore it has to be balanced for it to work.
Here are the goals I could think of:
- Greater Focus on Spanish – I mentioned this because I’m also dabbling in other languages such as Mandarin and Japanese, as well as maintaining my Korean which is my first foreign language. That’s why I wish to keep Spanish my main vertical for November.
- 300 Hours in November – I will try to ramp up to 10 hours per day for this month while I’m still feeling hot in Spanish at the moment. It’s more doable because I can listen to audiobooks already, plus I’m diving into an ocean of intermediate Dreaming Spanish videos.
- Commence Reading – At my level, I’m confident I can now pull the trigger for Reading 📖, because it’s time to correct my spellings and put my eyes to work. Then later on I plan to practice writing in Spanish because I want to be well-rounded in the language.
That’s all for now.
While I have this challenging input goal, I can allow myself to relax a bit because Christmas season is approaching. Usually November is the time I start planning for gifts, so I expect some days to be below average.
How are you in your Spanish learning journey? Let me know by leaving a comment below.
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