Judith's language learning blog

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.