Judith's language learning blog

Are you interested in language learning? If you’re reading this blog, then probably yes. However, I’m sure that you’re not aware just how much the internet can help you in learning languages. My favorite resources below – this is going to be a lengthy post…

So I did 30 days of vegetarianism and 30 days of intensive Arabic study. The results are far from impressive.

For the first day of my vegetarian experiment, I actually made a raw food dish for lunch. Not intentionally – it’s a family recipe that comes up whenever the heat makes you unwilling to eat a hot meal, yet you need something filling.

(Read on for the recipe)

Well, that’s it for the first half year of my language odyssey 2010.

Here’s the evaluation of what I did in the second quarter (May to July 1st inclusive):
47,5 hours of Chinese
28,5 hours of French
13,5 hours of Swahili
57 hours of Modern Greek
15 hours of Esperanto (only counting studying, not using the language)
4 hours of wanderlust (Spanish & Russian)

With regards to progress towards my goals, see this detailed post on the language-learning forum.

According to plan, my focus languages should be Arabic and Italian now, though I’m loathe to leave Greek now that I can finally enjoy Harry Potter in Greek! It seems I’m quite close to my goal there. With Swahili I’m progressing much more slowly than expected though, and even my Chinese and French haven’t benefitted as much as I had hoped, so this year will remain challenging.

For the next quarter, I’m tempted to see how far I can get by tackling Arabic intensively for one month before going back to my routine. I like the idea of a 30-day challenge that might help me discover new things about myself.

I’m also thinking of trying to go completely vegetarian for 30 days, because some people have reported significant increases in concentration and productivity from that. I’m already eating mostly vegetarian as I don’t like to cook meat. I only eat meat at restaurants, when invited somewhere or occasionally lunchmeat on bread. I wonder if eliminating it completely would have any effect – anyway I don’t think I’d miss it. If you’ve gone vegetarian, please let me know what your experience was.

I handed in my last two university essays (minus the final thesis) during this time and celebrated my birthday, both of which took away some of my traditional study time. Most notably, I had left my mp3 player in Berlin and was prevented from doing much Assimil. On the bright side, I read a lot of Greek Harry Potter, found a Greek reader for Greek kids, and had quite a few Chinese lessons with my online tutor.

Chinese: 16 hours!!! This was totally not my plan, considering Chinese is not a focus language. However, I’m not complaining, because I was enjoying myself. I’m using a different Anki deck now, a huge, well-designed one kindly provided by forum member irrationale. I suspended a lot of easy words of course and I’m prioritizing or adding words to the deck based on my Boya Chinese lessons and the Skype classes. In this time I’ve studied 1636 new words in that deck (and 232 leftover ones in my old HSK words deck, which I’m abandoning).

French: 6 hours. Not good, but I DID write one of my essays completely in French.

Greek: 11 hours, mostly reading. Only 2 new Assimil Greek lessons, so I’m now on Assimil lesson 79.

Swahili: 1 hour. Really awful. Only 1 new Assimil Swahili lesson, so I’m on Assimil lesson 52 now. I found that Assimil really isn’t very useful if you’re not using the recordings.

I’m now debating what to do after June, as normally I should be switching focus languages then. I might do Swahili intensively if Assimil can be done intensively. Arabic would also be an alternative, since for Arabic I’m not planning to use Assimil. I’m also interested in doing a Listening-Reading experiment with Russian, but only for two weeks or so.

I’m unhappy with my progress in weeks 20 and 21 of my quest, except for what I did for Greek and Swahili.

Chinese: 3 hours; learned 212 new HSK words in Anki. On the bright side, I now have Anki on my boyfriend’s iPhone, so that reviewing while lounging on the couch or while commuting is an awesome prospect. I’m tempted to get an iPhone or iPod Touch for myself just because of this.

French: 3 hours.

Greek: 10 hours; 4 new lessons, so now on Assimil lesson 77. My Myngle flat rate for Greek lessons is over, so I will be able to focus more on other materials, but I’m afraid of my conversation skill deteriorating too quickly.

Swahili: 4 hours; 5 new lessons, now I’m on Assimil lesson 51. Active wave, yay!

Esperanto and Spanish: Almost nothing, since that trip to Argentina is not looking so likely now.

(This is personal but also contains a lot of advice for those of you who might move to Berlin)

I grew up in a small town and I never thought that I could like a big city. The noise, the hectic, miles upon miles of concrete… I’m a fan of quiet and beauty and I have enough stress that I don’t need others radiating theirs onto me. Planning the future, I never saw myself winding up in a big city.

Just a quick update for those following my linguistic progress, as I’m about to release a long blog post about Berlin.

In weeks 18 and 19 of my quest, I did…

Chinese: 6 hours; learned 310 new HSK words in Anki and studied some Boya Chinese. By the way, this Anki deck contains only the words consisting of more than one character, because I already mastered all the characters last year.

French: 8 hours. I finished reading “Le rouge et le noir” and I ordered a bunch of other French classics, which I shall start reading now. I’m also trying to improve my accent by studying dialogs in Quebec French, which a Japanese university put online.

Greek: 10 hours; 9 new lessons, so now on Assimil lesson 73 and rapidly (well, not so rapidly) approaching the end. I’m also studying Greek almost daily with Rania still, that’s how the majority of my hours come in, and I’ve resurrected my Greek Anki deck after noticing that I just wasn’t remembering some words that Rania had told me.

Swahili: 2 1/2 hours; 4 new lessons, now I’m on Assimil lesson 46. Yes it’s far from the recommendation of one Assimil lesson a day, but these lessons are difficult, I have to study the vocabulary with Anki to retain anything at all, and right now my focus languages are still Greek and French.

Esperanto: 3 hours of translation work.

SPANISH: New addition! Since it is getting increasingly likely that I will be spending January and February 2011 in Argentina, I just decided that I should learn better Spanish. I may even make it my focus language for July-September, instead of Italian. Right now I don’t really have extra time, so I’ve resolved to just spend 10 minutes a day whenever possible studying an Anki deck with the 10 000 most common Spanish words. I’ve done two such sessions so far and found that I can understand 364 of the 400 most common Spanish words.

January started another intensive language-learning year for me (well, as intensive as I can make it, given my workload). I’ve been quiet about it on the blog because I was logging everything on the How-to-learn-any-language-forum, however I now want to drastically cut down my time on that forum, which has sucked a lot of time and energy out of me. That is not to say that it isn’t a good place to get inspiration for new ways of learning languages, or also to find fellow language learners who are going through the same process (go Team H!), but… anyway, I decided to log things here instead.

[Read on about how am I learning languages, what my goals are this year and what I achieved so far]

I’m not sure if you heard of Hunch, it’s a pretty cool free site to help you come to decisions about just about anything. I created several “quizzes” (decision-making engines) about language-learning there and I’d appreciate your feedback – you can also just make an account on Hunch and start improving those quizzes.

What should my next foreign language be? (considering 45 languages so far, I’d appreciate help adding others)
Should I learn Esperanto?
How can I learn a foreign language? (evaluating your aptitude for self-study, classroom study, study abroad etc.)
Which program should I use to learn a new language? (still very sketchy)

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