Initial thoughts
I am quite proud of all the effort that I have put in the past 21 days for the 30 Day Record Yourself Challenge and that I made a firm decision to not be lazy in my study sessions but to improve my speaking skills every week. Also, I am continually amazed by how effective this challenge is at increasing my language skills. My performance week after week is directly linked to understanding where my weaknesses are, my desire to adapt, and if I take action on my feedback. To get an idea of those items, I needed to sit down, get a notepad out, and start responding to some premade video analysis questions that I made for myself when this challenge started. A detailed explanation of these questions can be viewed by watching my “Language Learning Challenge | How to Track Spanish Progress” video.
Why have review sessions for your recorded videos?
At the beginning of this challenge I set a goal for myself to have review sessions to analyze my recorded videos because of my past experiences with poor study sessions. Having a productive study session is extremely important to me because I have spent countless hours passively studying without analyzing the results of my study methods. This made me extremely exhausted, frustrated, and overall decreased my desire to learn Spanish. In those challenging moments, I didn’t have the tools necessary to motivate myself properly or create a strategy to change up my study routine, study time, method or whatever was necessary to change my attitude and productivity. Now, I make sure that each study method that I attempt do know is analyzed for effectiveness, how much fun I have while studying, and if the are aligned with my goals,
Overall progress since week 1
I implemented my own feedback that I gathered from my review sessions and that made a significant change to the quality of my responses in my videos. Just by changing up my study schedule gave me more capacity to be creative, descriptive and I sounded more natural when recording. My blog post ” The Best Time to Make Your Videos?” explains in detail how this helped to increase productivity. I used less um’s and decreased my long pauses since I had a better idea of what I wanted to say. My pronunciation and grammar increased as I focused specifically on saying things correctly and not just speaking as many words as fast as I could. I am very satisfied with my progress and I know that it is preparing me for great conversations with native Spanish speakers in the future.
What I realized?
I remember watching other language learners do this challenge on YouTube last year and noticed they would read off a script or prepare one before they recorded themselves. I did not see the value of this but now after including that in my studies has given me even more gains in my video quality. This frees your mind up to focus more on how you are pronouncing words and phrases and sentence structure versus those items plus finding the right words to say in response to that question. This allows helps you to retain and practice new vocabulary that you have learned during the week. Speaking consistently about what was most recently learned helps with overall comprehension of new vocabulary. Instead of keeping all that information in your head and trying to memorize by force without using it in action. The first two weeks I tried to spontaneously make the video as fast as I could. Without writing my ideas down or including new vocabulary that I learned during the week.
Tips
If you tend to use less descriptive words like cosa (thing), lugar (place), lejos (far), try replacing them with new words that you have learned during the week. You’ll be amazed how vibrant your answers will become.
Don’t do this alone. Reach out and have someone listen to your recordings. You can gain a lot of extra feedback from those who participate in your analysis process.
