100 Days of Spanish

       This week was much better than last week. I got a total of eight lessons despite the huge anatomy exam that's been looming over my head. The technique I used for keeping Duolingo in the corner of my eye worked very well. Having a tab open of the occupation you need to work on makes it so much easier. It reduces the will power needed to open it every time you need to work on your new hobby. I expect that next week I will do even better on my lesson goals because I will be past the exam.      In the Hasselkus reading, the concept of places being containers of experiences was explored. I think the best example of that happening to me in my life was the new apartment I moved into when I moved to Pocatello. At first it was just a concrete box for me to sleep in, but then I got married! After that, my new bride moved in and gradually she started to cover the walls with art. The shelves became overflowing with all of our books. The fridge was filled wi...

     This week was my slowest one yet for Spanish! I had an embarrassing six lessons total for my progress. So, things could be going better. There were quite a few days that I didn't even open the app because it just had no appeal to me at all. I was planning to catch up over the weekend, but I wanted to make it to my six year old niece's birthday party in Utah, so I spent all of Saturday and Sunday with family. This week I really want to hit my goal though, so I need to find a way to make practicing easier. I had this exact same problem with my guitar last year. The thing that worked was putting it on a guitar stand, instead of leaving it in the case. After I did that, every time I entered the room I would see my guitar in the corner, and start practicing on impulse. I think the theory behind my life hack was reducing the number of steps between thinking about doing the occupation and then actually doing it. Before I would have to get my case out of the closet, open it,...

      It's the second week of my one hundred days of Spanish challenge and I've already had some problems. My main problem it turns out, is that my ultimate goal of finishing the Duolingo Spanish tree is pretty intense. I started out very strong my first week, but this last week, I only hit one half of my quota, equaling fourteen lessons, which can be seen in the top picture at the bottom of this post. With that in mind, I think that I can reasonably change my goal to complete one half of the Duolingo tree at the end of my one hundred days, and be completely finished one hundred days after the semester. I had some pretty high hopes, but it looks like I should reign in my expectations a bit.      The other problem I face with my Spanish challenge is sheer boredom. The app is fun, but it gets repetitive if it's your only learning source. A lot of the time I worked on Spanish last week was through reading comic books in Spanish. My favorite right now is "...

           It's the first week of my one hundred days of Spanish and the challenge has already been a blast!  I'm on track to finish the entire Duolingo tree before the end of this semester . I came up with this goal as a way to kickstart the apprehension  of my third language. So far I have completed 95/136 lessons in this unit. That sounds impressive, but only about 20 of those lessons were from this week. I had already been working on Duolingo for about two months, but I still have a long way to go. Each of these tree sections are about 136 lessons on average. Each lesson takes about ten minutes to complete, meaning that I must spend forty minutes every day on this project in order to finish the tree by my goal date. My progress will be tracked by taking a weekly screen shot of the section lesson counter, plus a screen shot from the previous week for easy comparison.    On the continuum of self and society influence, I would say that ...