I've spent the past week in Chachapoyas enjoying this lovely small town and working on my Spanish. By most people's standards, this week was pretty boring. It was all work and no play... ok there was a little bit of play. However, I learned a lot about how I want to move forward with my studying.

I’ve been staying at Chachapoyas Backpackers Hospedaje. I showed up in the middle of their transition to a new building so it’s been a bit chaotic but the new building is beautiful. And for the first time since I’ve been in South America, there is REAL HOT WATER from a hot water heater and it is glorious.

I’ve been working every day out of Café Fusiones and it is excellent. Good wifi, real espresso, great milkshakes and meals

I worked with a Spanish teacher, Alfredo, for 16 hours this week. He and his family are awesome. They run an English school out of their home for children and adults. 1/3 of their students attend for free and commute in from the rural areas outside of Chacha. They are among the kindest people I've ever met. They invited me into their home, fed me (lots of popcorn; my fave), and even invited me to attend their son Fernando’s 10th birthday! One fun thing I learned: it's not taboo to talk about people's weight. Alfredo freely shared at dinner that his wife was overweight and she didn't bat an eye. I was very confused.

I also made some new friends including an awesome screenwriter from Germany who's working on his first feature-length film. We went to the fanciest restaurant in town: $13 for my half a duck.

Next Steps

Tomorrow, I'm headed to Trujillo on the coast. If it's anything like Máncora, I might get stuck there for a bit, haha.

Spanish

I started the week frustrated with my Spanish and though I've made progress, I'm still frustrated. I'm 6 weeks into my trip and though my Spanish is better than ever, it's still not enough to converse comfortably at a basic level. Even in domains I know (eg. ordering in a restaurant), I stumble over words and have trouble understanding the other person. I imagine it's horrible listening to me.

Alfredo had a different method of teaching than previous schools that focused on grammar. Instead we worked on contextual conversation and parsing media (newspapers, books, songs). It was far more interesting and I retained the new knowledge better, but it still didn't bring me closer to parsing regular conversation.

On Wednesday, I was sitting in the park drinking wine and feeling frustrated and it felt so familiar. It's the same feeling I had when learning how to code. I graduated in 2012 with a CS Bachelors and several internships under my belt but it wasn't until 2016 that I could comfortably say I knew how to write software. It annoys me to this day that it took so long to achieve that level of comfort. I feel if I had been provided a better map I could have gotten where I needed to go much faster.

I asked several second-language Spanish speakers about their experience and it was remarkably... unsatisfying. They didn't have real answers. I talked to a few peace corps volunteers (one a Northeastern grad, small world!) and their only advice was... keep going; that it took them 3 months to a year to process and understand. A few of my faithful readers made the same comments (Thanks mom and Shelley 😄 ). While I don't doubt the truth of this strategy, I find it terribly unsatisfying.

This perfectly timed quote showed up in my inbox Thursday and sums up my frustration:

"If you haven’t started, then taking action is more important than finding a better strategy. If you’re already taking action, then ensuring you’re working on the right thing is more important than working harder. Your effort sets your floor. Your strategy sets your ceiling."
-James Clear

So I dedicated Friday and Saturday to researching different language learning methodologies. I'm still making sense of everything I read and trying to condense it into a coherent strategy so I'll save that for a follow up post.

The sad news is that language learning research is sparse, shallow, and biased. Most online tools proclaim that students will be fluent, but in reality, the tools don't get students beyond upper beginner or lower intermediate. The reviews of these tools aren't done by people who successfully used the tool. They're based on what the reviewer thinks a language learning tool should be.

I finally stumbled across the "Mass Immersion Approach" (MIA), which actually provided some explanation for its opinions. I don't agree with the entire philosophy, but there are a few pieces that stick out to me:

Fluency means “spontaneous expression of thought” which only occurs from subconscious familiarity with the language. If you are trying to piece together grammar structures like a puzzle (as I'm currently doing), you cannot be fluent. The MIA creator asserts that top-down learning (eg. grammar) will never get you to fluency, but that bottom-up learning (pattern matching through massive content absorption) will eventually get you there, even without formally studying the language.

According to this method, if your goal is fluency, comprehension is the most important skill for new learners to focus on. This breaks down into a few parts:

Actively listen to things you don't understand:
- First, focus on hearing the sounds of the language
- If you can hear the sounds, focus on parsing the words (without meaning).
- Listen to full speed adult conversation rather than simplified content. In real conversation words meld together. For example, in English, the phrase "Don't you want to" turns into "Donchya wanna" when spoken quickly.
- “Actively Listening” means focusing though the author of MIA also supports passive listening because you will occasionally pay attention to it.
Natural learning occurs through contextual clues. The goal is to understand the context so your brain can fill in the meaning of the words you don't know.
You must expose your brain to tens of thousands of contexts to learn naturally.
You can speed up your rate of learning by studying basic grammar and vocabulary but these tools should be secondary to content absorption.
For vocab flashcards:
- use real sentences from real media rather than single words or artificially constructed sentences.
- Utilize a Spaced Repetition System for efficient learning.
- As quickly as possible, move from bilingual to monolingual cards (learning in the language).
There is no such thing as thinking in a language. You can understand the meaning of a sentence without ever putting it into words.

Based on the above methodology, I've been listening to hours of Spanish podcasts that I don't understand with the goal of parsing sounds and words. After just one day, I tested my progress by listening to "News in Slow Spanish" and found I understood WAY more of it. I realized that I knew most of the words and could infer the others from context. For the next week, I'm going to continue the MIA approach and see where I get.

Politics

No update for you today other than that the protests in Bolivia and Chile are getting worse. If things don't get better in the next few weeks, I may need to reverse course again.

If you made it this far, thank you for putting up with my angst and frustration. One day soon I will be proficient and you can celebrate with me instead of consoling and commiserating.

Hasta la semana que viene amigos