TAC Language Odyssey: First Half Year is over!
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.
doviende said,
July 6, 2010 @ 20:13
In my experience, most people have trouble adjusting to *cooking* vegetarian, because they just don’t know what to cook, but it sounds like you have that covered already.
I’ve been vegetarian for about 10 years, and people constantly ask me if I eat enough protein, or can I still do sports, and other ridiculous questions like that. Since I became vegetarian, my fitness also became much greater, although I think the two are unrelated. I never really did any experiments to determine how I felt eating meat and how I felt not eating meat, but I feel great now
Congratulations on the Greek progress, that’s exciting. What sort of Arabic will you be studying? If you’d like some Lebanese/Jordanian Arabic to listen to, then Radio Canada International has a daily 1 hour podcast with many shows in the archives.