Hope all you fine folks are doing well with your studies this week. Share your experience so we can all celebrate or commiserate with you!
It’s
not going wellgoing fantasticJk I think I’m being a bit too tough on myself… but French is kicking my ass as usual. Thankfully the Anki vocabulary training is getting easier now that I’m pass the complete beginner stage, since everything is looking more and more anglaise
Tried picking up the online course again yesterday, and got bodied with all the verb conjugation questions (at A1 level 😂)! But I think I might have to do more proper coursework at this point to improve my grammar. Also more reading and listening, I should probably go watch some old Tintin cartoons… and hopefully in a month or two I can go back to the French language speaking meetup again and properly speak this time around
On related topic, my employer does offer a 2-3 weeks intensive course thing, where they’d teach French the entire work-week. I’ll try to ask my professeur (in French all teachers are called professors actually… which I found rather interesting) about this later, but if anyone has experience with such intensive courses I’m all ears
I’ve never done intensive but it sounds doable for a few months at a time. Obviously it depends on your specific program, but expect like 50+ words per day vocabulary and an intense grammar program with it.
It’s pretty much the fastest you can possibly learn, which makes it a lot of work and quite difficult.
You learn so quickly that it will also go away quickly. So be sure to practice after the course if you want to “retain” it.
Gotcha. So I work at a French-speaking university (yes I have my regrets of taking this job) where just about everything & anything is done in French… Which would explain why they would offer a course like that, since some international students might need some help, & I assume retaining the info won’t be hard if you’re forced to do everything in French afterwards
Thanks for the info btw. I’ll contact my professeur and see if that’s actually an option
Intensive is like 4 hours of lecture per day btw. (And a fair bit of review/study after that, daily). Obviously there is good opportunity here, but be sure you have enough time for it before committing.
Or otherwise, be sure to ask for how many hours/day or hours/week would be expected of you.
85% on the final exam of my German class. It was equivalent to A2.1 (with A2.2 and A2.3 if I were to continue). Although the class was clearly good, it was substantial amounts of time and money invested, and the stated schedule feels quite slow (3 hours a day / 30 weeks on A2 alone?).
At least at my beginner level, I think I can self study further and faster (especially with 10 weeks of class under my belt). I do have a substantial amount of German exercises / books that I’ve been meaning to get through. So a few weeks (months?) of self study probably is fine.
I am worried about my speaking skills for the near future. But I do think that today, my main hold up is simply vocabulary. Reading, grammar exercises, and other activities should improve my vocab. I’ll look into speaking / talking practice later. For now, I’ll try self study / shadowing for my speaking practice.
Self study is averaging a bit above 1 Grammatik aktiv lesson a day (on good days I can get two done). I also flipped through the whole book and I think I’m actually aware of all grammar concepts from A1 through B1. I just need the practice so that my skills can do it.
Vocabulary wise, my plan is to coast on frequency list for now (while I’m focused on completing Grammatik aktiv), then use Nico’s Weg A2 level to shore up my vocab. Grammatik aktiv is 100% German so it is some supplemental vocab practice.
Anki remains set at 5 words a day (+10 cards/day) for now. I really don’t know how others can push 10, 20 or 50 words a day. My long term hope is that when I get my vocab from my graded readers or other related coursework, it’d be possible to increase back to 10 or more words/day.
Between Anki and Grammatik aktiv, that’s over an hour day commitment. Every car drive is passive listening to German music only, I do browse some German YouTube and other passive practice. I know it’s not a complete study course but it’s what I got for now…
Realizing despite the lack of work done in Irish, I’m able to understand bits here and there even so. Also realizing that I was never taught future tense in school, (I was a very early dropout of the education system and was never home-schooled). I’m managing to get a lot farther in my Irish studies due to the Molly lectures, I need to go back over a few of her videos for better reference, and still have yet to make that card generator for Anki, so that’ll still take a while. Also to add, Anki have their own third party API for making/managing cards, but I’ve never really gone into APIs very much so that’s like probably the second time going to really try to pick some package not made by Python themselves.
Next to that, Spanish, I’m completing, but being lazy on, still need to dive more into Migaku and flash cards. Duolingo completely restructured their Spanish recently, and suddenly expects me to know another 10+ words I’ve never seen before, like the word for a hake fish, I never even heard of a hake fish before, let alone in Spanish. Also they’ve seemingly replaced a lot of the example conversations with AI voice actors instead of retaining their regular voice actors, and it’s just, idk, they might be saying the words correctly, but it sounds like I’m listening to someone choke on food throughout.
Then the Japanese, I’ve been slowly pushing through with my piles of reviews and they seemingly just keep getting bigger no matter how much I put away. Ended up spending a whole hour today on Japanese flashcards, and still have 120 cards left in my pile. Which is another thing. I’ve set the goal of putting 30 minutes a day onto each subject and I’m realizing that that’s far from enough to get far in any language. Especially for my Japanese, which should more like be AT LEAST a full hour, bare minimum. I’m doing all this work and getting nowhere fast it seems.
This all being said, I am going to pace myself building up to the lofty goal of an hour per language each. I still have other, probably more important things to do during the day, besides my languages, and I’ll probably be leaning on things more once I build up the nerves for it. Rather take it easy, get there very slowly instead of jumping in and immediately burning out.
Still doing the maths, reading, Blender, programming, daily self care, and chores. Again, not as much as I want to do, but I’m still sort of staggering as it is, so I want to be careful about overdoing anything.
Considering starting just unsure how to go about previous attempts were false starts at least partially due to lack of planning.
Which language?
Spanish
I second the recommendation for Dreaming Spanish. If you need help with a plan, here’s one to get started with: Watch a video from this superbeginner playlist every day. You can watch on Youtube or you can sign up at their website for progress tracking, but watching on their site for free has some limitations.
You can get more info about how it works here or here. Now, they’ll tell you that studying any other way isn’t needed or is harmful. There’s reasons and probably some truth to that, but I’m always weary of Youtube video makers telling me all I need to do is watch their Youtube videos for 8000 hours.
The other starting point I’d recommend is Language Transfer. Their method is cool, and assumes no knowledge coming in. Imo, starting your learning here is a good supplement to the other videos I mentioned. So as plans go, I think you’d do well to listen to one of these lessons each day in addition to a Dreaming Spanish video.
After you’ve got a sense of it built up, do grab a beginner’s textbook and learn some grammar. Can’t rec any, since I just learned with whatever we had in grade school. But imo there’s value in it.
From dabbling in it, I’d say just go ahead and start anywhere, Duolingo even, whatever wets your toes. The plan can form as you’re going, you don’t need some massive study routine planned out before you start, as you generally need to change things up and change things to suit you better as you go anyway.
If you’re stuck for starting places, there’s Duolingo and DreamingInSpanish, and also maybe a Spanish book to also reinforce grammar concepts.
I’ve been thinking about the videos and podcasts I listen to (in Japanese), and realizing they’re at too high a level. I enjoy listening to them and picking out words/phrases, but my brain is getting a little too cozy zoning out. Since my listening is so weak, I’m trying to get simpler and slower input that’s easier to understand.
I hear that. I’m now 60 eps into Shun’s podcast and am definitely finding my focus getting sharper with it. I think a big part of it was breaking my passive listening habit in general; I realized I would throw on a MtG podcast in the shower or in the car and mostly tune it out. Side benefit: I’ve started doing more active listening to an audiobook in the car instead now.
Let me know if you find any good content!
