In search of words...

Right, so I failed my Spanish exam the other day.  Pretty disheartening :(.  It was to cover the last three chapters and we were told to review direct/indirect objects, imperatives, and present subjunctive.   Okay so I did that.  I made a serious effort at that -- up to and including drilling all the exceptions to all the rules.   I both know and understand it.  So A, pretty pleased at that.  And B, should be ready for an exam right?

Except that where I went wrong is the exam is actual application.  So all the study exercises of the "conjugate verb X in the sentence" variety, or rewrite sentence in subjunctive, or any variation thereof goes out the window when it's "read this article and respond".   Frig.  So my vocabulary still sucks.  Which means that even though I understand the article well enough to respond, know how to respond and which tenses etc to use, I can't use them if I don't know the words to apply them too :(.  So that effectively wiped out both the reading comprehension and the writing portion.

Listening, as per last time, was a complete disaster.  On the plus side -- I at least understood parts of it this time (progress over last time).  On the down side, none of the parts I understood were relevant to the questions asked.   AND part of the question was essentially "write a synopsis of what they just told you".  Well I could barely figure out what they were telling me, much less reiterate it back in Spanish (again, vocabulary).   Given a ton more time and a pause button I could've done it, but not at rapid fire speed with only one repeat.   Fail.   Only thing that made me feel slightly better is that student peer with significantly better vocabulary (although zero grasp of grammar?) who spends a lot of time in Guatemala, said he can carry on conversations on the phone in Spanish with no problem, but he couldn't catch that.  So at least I'm not alone.

Then the grammar section, which I should be good at, half of them I couldn't understand the question.  Again - fried by vocabulary rather than lack of knowledge.   And of course there's no vocabulary list for the course -- you're just randomly supposed to know things.   I spend a ridiculous amount of time learning words, clearly I need more words, but would be really nice if I could point that in a useful direction *sigh*

Lacking a useful direction, my latest was that I'm learning a lot from Harry Potter, maybe I should make a vocabulary list for that...   But then that seemed excessive...  So maybe somebody's already done it?   LOTS of somebodies already have done it.  Varying degrees of quality but eventually found a list with useful vocabulary to learn that seemed correct.  lol.  Other than that, all my lists come from my self-teaching textbooks (which DO have vocabulary lists)...

I keep telling myself it IS much better than it was and I AM learning.  And I know that I learn best when I'm at the bottom of the class.  But is it ever hard on the ego to be there :(.  I'm not a fan of feeling stupid.

Ah well - mini victories...  Harry Potter is at least getting easier to read.  Lol still painfully slow, but that's got to count for something right?