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…
Read moreSo I did 30 days of vegetarianism and 30 days of intensive Arabic study. The results are far from impressive.
Read moreWell, 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.
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]
Read moreI was just answering Rebecka’s comment on my Modern Greek milestone and I found that my answer turned into a lengthy argument about why I like taking private classes and how I use my tutor. So I decided to write a new blog post about it instead, so that others could read it as well.
Right now I’m supplementing both my Greek and Chinese studies with 1-on-1 lessons on Myngle. I find them very useful in helping me advance quickly (the opposite of what I experienced in group lessons).
I typically take a lesson when I have a concrete need or goal. For example, the other day I was reading a learners’ grammar on the Greek tense system and found that I didn’t really understand the difference between θα γράφω and θα γράψω, or generally tenses based on the stems -γράφ-, -γράψ- and γράφει. The grammar had some examples, but each sample sentence was about a different topic and I couldn’t infer much about the crux of the matter. So I scheduled a lesson and asked Rania to think of sample sentences where the same idea (writing a letter) will appear in different tenses due to slight changes of context. For a native speaker, it’s not really hard to do if you ask specifically “What is a context in which I’d have to say ‘θα γράφω μια γράμμα’?”. Having these sample sentences with minimal variance really helped me understand why the changes occur, plus I have now entered the sentences into my Anki and test myself on them regularly (English to Greek).
Of course the lessons are never just about questions I have, we also practise conversation or listening comprehension or whatever else I feel is my weakest area at the moment. I do need a tutor for conversation at this point, rather than an unsuspecting native speaker, because once I’m talking about a subject, I refuse to give up on expressing something I wanted to express. I do try to rephrase sentences, but, if that does not help, I will ask for every single word I’m missing and then try to build the sentence. Unlike a lot of language learners, I do not keep silent or change topics if an idea is clearly beyond my level to express. Whether I’m having the discussion in Greek or in my mother tongue, I do not allow my limited vocabulary and grammar to hinder me from expressing the same ideas. Right now that typically requires angelic patience from whomever I’m talking to, so I prefer not to talk too much in Greek with friends. However, I believe it’s the fastest way for me to improve, because I’m learning words and structures that are 150% relevant and useful to me. What’s more, I can then discuss the same topic in Greek decently well with anybody else, no matter if it’s music, Berlin, what’s happening in our lives, the economy crisis or anything else I have talked about with Rania.
I just had another Greek lesson via Myngle and the topic was a text with lots of positive and negative imperatives. I thought that the explanations my teacher was giving didn’t appear to be very difficult language, so on a hunch I asked her to use Greek as much as possible in this lesson and only switch back to English if I appeared not to understand something.
You know what? It worked great. I actually understood 85% of the words, even though she wasn’t talking particularly slowly, and I understood 100% of the meaning. Some of it is probably because my forage into Greek verbs, which I’ve been practising on Anki, essential words for this context like χρησιμοποιώ (to use). But also I have the feeling that something just clicked and I’m a lot faster at both understanding and using Greek words now.
Okay, so here’s what I plan to do in order to improve my languages in what’s left of 2009. I meant to do a lot more until now, but work and graduating and life interfered, you know the story. I still haven’t graduated, but I believe that it’s time for a new resolution.
1. Chinese – Learn 1500 characters for a total of 3000, improve conversational ability, be able to read “The Little Prince” looking up less than 10 words per chapter.
This will be my main target. During the IJK I studied nearly 250 brand new characters in just 7 days and I have 1603 characters right now in my Anki (Hanzi statistics keeps track of them for me, great plugin!). However, I will need to spend more time on about 100 of these cards, so I’ll count it as ‘knowing’ 1500 characters right now. In January 2009 I only knew 833 characters!
In terms of conversational ability, I can get by in China, but I couldn’t talk about what’s going on in my life without first looking up one word per sentence or so. I’m working on this with my Myngle teacher Aileen.
Apart from my special easy reader “San Ren Xing”, the easiest Chinese reading I have available to me is “The Little Prince”. It has been getting a lot easier lately with all the characters I studied, but there is still a fair amount of words I need to look up, including words consisting of characters I already know, or characters I forgot. Wenlin makes it easy, but my goal shall be to have to look up less than 10 words per chapter by the end of the year.
2. French and Italian – Read two novels each
Reading in a foreign language other than English still takes me a LOT of time, so I want to practise that. Right now I have started on two novels: “Ségou” and “Il giro del mondo en 80 pizze”. I started on a different Italian book before but it was too hard. I will not set goals for active usage because I will have to finish two essays and one thesis in French in the near future anyway, for my degree. I will try to find a tandem partner for Italian though, because my Italian is so rusty.
3. Modern Greek – Finish reading “The Little Prince”, practise talking, increase Anki deck to >1500 facts
Right now I have only read four chapters of “The Little Prince” in Greek and my Anki deck contains 443 facts. My vocabulary is bigger than that, but here I don’t have the possibility of indicating words I know to get a better count. However, I will probably add all new words and phrases to Anki, so that progress shall be visible.
4. Spanish, Swahili, possibly Arabic, Indonesian or Maori – will chip away
I can’t say more than that I will continue to give these a bit of my time. For Spanish I currently attend an Edufire conversational class twice a week, for Swahili I’m slowly going through Assimil Swahili and I’m considering taking up the others again.
Everybody, please wish me luck and keep me faithful to this plan!