SPANISH MISTAKES MADE

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
 - Albert Einstein

Monday's Spanish lesson with the song went great. It was fun and I got some new (at this point it is all new) phrases and words from it. Now I've put it aside knowing that I am supposed to do long time periods between study sessions. Originally I was going to wait until Monday to revisit it, but I noticed a word today I should have known from the song but couldn't recall. So I'll be working on it again today.

And then I screwed up. For Tuesday and Wednesday I had decided to work on a tv show. I tried a few on tv including a show where a dog was a cop. Not just a cop, but apparently a brilliant cop. He found a gun in a tv, a way into a room and knew to drop tiles on the bad guys head while he (the bad guy) was shooting a gun and so forth. It was a little silly. Although, perhaps my dog is just holding back on me and all dogs can do such things. Anyway, I also tried an entertainment show, a kid's show and another more reasonable cop drama. Couldn't follow any of them even with captions on.

I needed something I could watch over and over again until I got it and that wasn't too difficult to start with. So I hopped over to YouTube and found Extr@. Now it isn't actually a tv show, but I don't know enough Spanish for any regular shows. It's a fake show for learning Spanish. And it seems to be at the right level for me.

On Tuesday I watched it repeatedly, first without captions, then with English captions and then Spanish ones. Unfortunately, the Spanish captions do not have the accent marks which saddens me. I tried speaking along with the Spanish (I skipped where Sam was speaking as I don't want to pick up bad habits) as I rewatched the show. I actually didn't make any flashcards or pick up any vocab on Tuesday, both things were probably a mistake on my part.

On Wednesday, I found the complete transcript with accent marks here. I decided that I should write down the transcript and translate each line underneath it. Then I could make flashcards from that. In my mind this was a great plan, in reality it was boring. Boring actually doesn't even do it justice. It was watching paint dry level of excitement. Only with work. Now this may be ok for some people, but it just doesn't appeal to me. I'm lazy and easily distracted. And even breaking my work up into small groups of time didn't actually help. I just dreaded going back to work on the transcript. Additionally, it was taking a long time to do all that writing.

I feel like I made no progress on those 2 days and I don't have enough days that I can afford to waste any much less two. I need to refocus and get back on track. So today I picked a new song to work on - De Qué Me Sirve La Vida by Camila and I'll review my previous song. This should get me back into enjoying learning and hopefully get me some new vocab. Friday I will return to Extr@ and skip writing up the transcript and go straight for flashcards.