Judith's language learning blog

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.