I am an A1 spanish student, creeping up on A2. I am finding it really difficult to focus on focused study, and have recently been spending quite a bit of time listening to english audio books whilst reading the spanish translation. Easy stuff like for example Harry Potter, or Roald Dahl or Douglas Adams.
I can do this for hours without much effort, which makes me wonder, is it a waste of time?
Your Listening-Reading (L-R) procedure is similar to that suggested by a polygot for her L-R method, but if I remember correctly her Step No. 3 was in reverse, Read L1 (English) and Listen L2 (Spanish in your case). There is a good thread on LingQ about the L-R method. Limited resources in spanish audio (L2) is a problem. I am trying it with one book by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho translated in Spanish and English and with a spanish audio available, as I would like to try to learn portuguese next.
Hello, Chrisdub, and welcome to Lingq.
@ chrisdub “I can do this for hours without much effort, which makes me wonder, is it a waste of time?”
The question you should be asking yourself is, “Am I learning Spanish using this method?” If your answer is yes, then you are not wasting your time, and more specifically, you are not wasting your time reading “easy stuff.”
MikeK50 is correct to say that there is a method called Listening-Reading and that one of the steps is to listen to the target language (Spanish) while reading your native language (English). I tried this lesson a bit myself, but I went the extra step of importing the target text and audio into Lingq, thereby getting the best of both worlds.
But when all is said and done, any method that works for you is the method you should use.
Edited to change ‘don’ to ‘done.’
I recently re-watched a video by Prof. Alexander Arguelles, a polygot with many videos on UTube, and he stated that reading in L2 while listening in L1 will, in his experience, and as you are doing, builds reading knowledge in L2 much faster than reading L1 and listening in L2. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Thanks Mike, the prof looks like he has tried a lot of techniques! If you happen to know the rough name of the video, I’d be interested to follow this up. Thanks for the tip.
The video is entitled “Moving from Intermediate Toward Advanced”. Only a small part of this video is about L-R.
Chris did you mean that you are listening to the spanish audio, if not, I think that to learn spanish you must listen to the spanish audio and then perhaps read the English but also the spanish, I can’t see a lot of benefit to listening to the English
I was listening to the English, generally pausing the audio every paragraph and trying to work out how the Spanish worked.
I am at such a low level that if I listened to the Spanish, and read the spanish, I wouldn’t understand very much at all. But it would be better for my listening skills.
I’ve watched the video, and think I agree that my method is best for improving basic reading skills. But perhaps the method has very low level limits.
Chris I am far from an expert but I think if you are at a beginner level, you should find some simple sentences or text with audio, maybe ten, and listen to that for a while, at the same reading the spanish and looking up what the words mean. I think that would be far better. However, seeing you are figuring out how the spanish worked that is beneficial, but I would try and figure it out listening to the spanish and reading the spanish.