This week was the first time that I felt I faltered a little bit with my Learning Project. I still continued doing daily lessons on Duolingo and Drops (I’m at a 38 and 22 day streak, respectively), but often it was just the bare minimum needed to keep my streak going. I also engaged with users on Tandem a few times.

As for my goal of doing more listening and speaking this week, I did check out some Spanish TikTok videos and one podcast, but my Spanish learning took a bit of a back burner this week. Here are some brief details about both of these platforms:

TikTok

Scroll through the images above to see some recommendations of helpful accounts I came across.

Trying out some different search terms in TikTok helped me to see an array of content. With minimal effort, I came across several interesting accounts. A few of them offered everyday tips for how to sound more conversational or avoid making common mistakes when speaking. A couple were bite-sized lessons that had text on the screen to teach conjugations, vocabulary, etc. Overall, I found TikTok to be an additional platform that has lots of learning content, but you would have to diligently write down the terms you want to practice and keep reviewing them in order to retain any information (or re-watch videos multiple times over a longer span of time than a usual TikTok scroll entails).

Podcasts

Unfortunately, I didn’t get around to listening to as many podcasts as I had planned. I have several that I’d like to try out, but only managed to squeeze in the time to listen to one this week. It actually happened to be by News In Slow Spanish, a website I tried out earlier (and talked about in a previous post). Turns out the ‘podcast style’ lessons that I referred to are actually podcasts! I listened to the next episode from where I had left off (now that my free trial with that website has ended). It was good to know that they offer their content as a podcast for free, so I can continue with these later on if I want to. These lessons are great – and offer a mixture of English and Spanish, so you are able to follow along fairly easily.

I think the reason I had difficulty finding time to engage with podcasts is because it still requires a lot of my focus and attention when I listen to them, so it is not a podcast you can put on in the background while you’re doing something else. At this juncture, I still need to think hard to translate in my head, so I had to focus solely on listening to the podcast and couldn’t multitask. That being said, I do think it’s a good way to learn if you want to develop your listening skills, so it is something I am interested in exploring more in the future as I continue my Spanish learning journey!

Unexpected Learning

Before I began formally learning Spanish for this class, I enjoyed Spanish music and have a playlist of Spanish music on my phone. As I was driving home yesterday, some of these songs came on and I found myself recognizing some words being sung in the songs. I also realized that I could get a general idea of what the songs titles meant because some of the words were familiar.

For example, with the song in the images below, I recognized “Olvídate” as “forget” and knew “El” meant “he or him,” so was able to guess that the song meant something like “Forget About Him” (see reveal of the translation by moving the divider line between the pictures to either side).

This happened again in another song that came up. I knew that pueder/puedes/puedo were conjugations for the verb meaning “can.” Verbs ended in ‘o’ (puedo) are in first person (so = I can). In “Enamorarte,” I saw the stem ‘amor’ and guessed that it meant something about love. See the full translation and song title in the images below.

Also, I recommend you check out these two songs – they are great!

Final Evidence of Learning

In a week that felt like a bit of a fail, my biggest win was demonstrating/documenting where my Spanish skills are currently at for my final evidence of learning. More details to come next week in my last post, but I will tease it by saying I’m super proud of what I did and where I’m at!

Until next time,

-KKF