Michelle's 2022-24 Log (Spanish, French, German, Korean, and Italian)

[brokenrecord]

Well, I ended up taking a longer break than I intended. Work and life got busy in the middle of May, then I went out of town for a week around Memorial Day, then I spent June packing and preparing to move, which happened the first week of July, and since then I've been dealing with fixing a bunch of minor issues that have arisen in my new place (plumbing leaks, appliances not working, etc.). I think things have finally settled down (knock on wood), and I'm taking this week off from work so I relax and get a bit more settled in, so I figured this would be a good time to get back into language work.

I haven't done a ton since my last post, but I managed to get some language work in:

Italian: I finished the Duolingo tree finally! I've replaced it with Duolingo Stories. At the moment they're a bit easy for me, but I'm only on set 3 of 12, and I think as I progress further they should get a little more challenging.

Spanish: I've gotten through about 85% of Cantoras — I really should have finished it by now, but no one's on the library waitlist, so I keep extending my loan. My goal is to finish in the next week or so.

French: I finished season 4 of Le bureau des légendes. I haven't started season 5 yet but would like to get to it at some point before the end of the year.

German: I got about halfway through Wolkenschloss, but trying to read it and Cantoras at the same time got to be a bit much so I haven't opened it since May. I also am not super invested in the story so that's not helping. Not sure if I'll end up finishing it or not.

Korean: I got through episode 18 out of 20 of Vincenzo but then took a break right before I went out of town and never picked it back up. This is actually mostly because I was enjoying it so much that I didn't want it to end and was trying to drag it out, but it's been over two months now, and there are a couple other kdramas I'm interested in checking out, so I need to finish it already. My goal is to do that this week. I also kept up Drops for awhile but took a break and haven't gotten back to it.

Japanese: Still not officially tracking it, but I've been keeping up with learning Katakana on and off, and I'm finally almost done with the Duolingo lessons on it. Not sure what I'm going to do when I've completed them. I know I'm not ready to jump into the language for real yet. I might just stick with reviewing Katakana and Hiragana for awhile.

As for the time I spent on languages the past few months:

Spanish:
May: 8.5 hours (reading: 5.3; grammar: 0.5; Duolingo: 2.9)
June: 0.2 hours (all Duolingo)
July: 0.6 hours (reading: 0.5; Duolingo: 0.1)

French:
May: 5.1 hours (listening: 4.5; grammar: 0.6)
June: 0 hours
July: 0.3 hours (grammar: 0.2; Duolingo: 0.1)

German:
May: 1.4 hours (reading: 0.9; grammar: 0.5)
June: 0 hours
July: 0 hours

Korean:
May: 53.5 hours (kdramas: 42.2; reading: 0.2; grammar: 4.6; SRS: 6.5)
June: 3.0 hours (all SRS)
July: 1.1 hours (all SRS)

Italian:
May: 3.6 hours (Duolingo: 3.2; grammar: 0.4)
June: 0.04 hours (all Duolingo)
July: 0.1 hours (all Duolingo)

I am pretty sure a couple times I did Drops, I forgot to add it to my tracking spreadsheet, so this isn't 100% accurate, but those are only 5-10 minute sessions, so it should be close enough.

I've once again been reconsidering my language learning schedule. I think having just one book and one TV show going at a time works better for me than trying to get in a little TV and reading in each language every week, but I'm also spending much less time on listening/reading than in past years. I haven't done any German listening or read anything in French, and it's already August! Part of the problem with German listening is just what's available to me. I like being able to watch stuff on Netflix so that I can turn subtitles on and off (and Netflix often has TL subtitles, which most other streamers don't), and I like using Language Reactor with what I'm watching. However, the number of TV shows in German on Netflix that appeal to me is limited, and I've gone through most of them already. French is also difficult at times, although not as bad.

I was trying to think of ways that I could get more listening in, and it occurred to me that I could find Youtube channels with ~10-15 min videos to watch in each language. I'm not a big Youtube watcher in general (I mean, obviously I have watched things on Youtube before, but I don't subscribe to any channels or spend a ton of time there in general) which is probably why I didn't consider it before (although now that I think of it, I did used to watch some of the Easy German videos awhile back), but I think it could help me keep up listening comprehension without being a huge time commitment, and with Youtube videos, I won't have to worry about keeping track of any narrative thread. I've spent some time this past week looking into various channels and have found some that look promising. I'll mention specific names in future posts if I actually stick with them.

A bonus is that Language Reactor also works with Youtube, and there are a decent number of channels that have TL subtitles (and even those that don't still have auto-generated captions, which can have errors, but often can still be helpful if I'm trying to identify a word I missed). The downside is that some of them may actually be too clearly enunciated/easy to understand — I already have okay comprehension in all three languages (better than okay in Spanish), and what I really need is more practice at understanding slang and mumbled dialogue and that sort of stuff, and a lot of the types of channels I find most interesting (for example, ones about travel, science, history, etc.) are almost too polished. But hopefully I can find some options that will be challenging enough for me. And I'll still try to watch TV (and movies, which tend to be more readily available, but at the moment they feel a bit too challenging for me, especially since my listening is pretty rusty at the moment) in one language at a time, but watching Youtube videos will be a supplement to ensure that I don't go ~8 months without any listening practice again. Kind of like reading newspaper articles in all my languages but choosing one book in one language to read at the same time. Granted, I've been really bad at keeping up reading newspaper articles consistently, but hopefully I can get back to that as well.

Otherwise, I still plan on rotating through languages for grammar work like I have been before, and I've decided just to use Duolingo for extra practice in all languages (except Korean). For Italian, at the moment I just plan on focusing on finishing Duolingo Stories (well, in addition to grammar workbooks). For Korean, I want to keep up with Drops, Memrise, and the intensive kdrama work I was doing before.

Anyways, I'm excited for my new plan, but my problem is that I always get excited by new things and then lose interest in a couple weeks. Hopefully I can keep this up for at least a month or two. The fall is probably going to get busy again but I'm hoping I can get into enough of a routine before that.

[brokenrecord]

August 7-September 17

Spanish:
-Cantoras: chapters 8-9 (done!)
-Youtube videos: 16 videos
-newspaper: 1 article
-Duolingo: unit 129

French:
-Arrête avec tes mensonges: pages 11-98
-Youtube videos: 15 videos
-newspaper: 1 article
-Duolingo: unit 95

German:
-Duolingo: unit 24
-Youtube videos: 12 videos
-newspaper: 1 article

Korean:
-nothing!

Italian:
-Duolingo: 11 stories
-newspaper: 1 article

Well, things didn't go quite as planned after my last post. As you can see above, it's not like I've done nothing, but I haven't been as consistent as I'd like. I haven't had a ton going on, but I'm adjusting to a new schedule and work generally getting a little busier, so it's sometimes been difficult to remember to make time for languages, and there have been other hobbies I've been more interested in spending time on recently.

On the plus side, I finally finished Cantoras, which only happened this past week and is part of why I put off updating for a few weeks — I wanted to be able to say I had finished it before updating. It's not that I disliked it or found it too challenging to get through, but I just wasn't really invested in the story in the end and had taken enough long breaks from it that I had forgotten some of the plot, so I didn't follow exactly what had happened to all the characters in the end. I don't think it was a bad book, but it didn't keep me engaged enough, I guess.

In general I've just found it difficult to find reading material in languages other than English that I find engaging enough to keep me interested throughout the time it takes to complete them. I think a big part of my issue is that I'm a very quick reader in English, so even if I'm reading something I'm not totally into, it's easy enough to push through and finish whatever I'm reading and then move on to something else. However, my reading pace is so much slower in my TLs than my native language, so when I try to do the same thing, I push through too quickly, lose the thread of the plot, get completely lost, and then never recover. It frustrates me to be struggling so much with reading because I do think in the past it's been a huge benefit to increasing my comprehension, and I'm such a big reader in English that I feel like the same should be true in my TLs. I've realized I need to reconfigure my approach to reading in my TLs and just slow things down a bit. I think trying to complete the Super Challenge in Spanish and half challenges in French and German last year didn't help any because I was pushing so hard to read as much as I could, I got burnt out a little, and I'm still suffering a bit from that. I think I just need to work on slowing down my reading and focus on complete comprehension, not just understanding each individual word on a page but really keeping focused on the larger plot. If I pick up a book and don't remember what's going on, I need to go back to the last point that feels familiar and start from there. I'm going to focus more on reading for X number of minutes than trying to focus on reading X number of pages per day. And I really need to stop trying to push through books I'm not enjoying because it's just becomes too much of a slog.

Anyways, after finishing Cantoras. I switched to French material and picked up Arrête avec tes mensonges, which I'm enjoying a lot, to the point that I'm actually more than halfway through it after only a few days. It helps that it's on the shorter side (under 200 pages) and the plot is so focused (with only two real main characters so far) that it'd be pretty difficult to get lost. Still, I think working on slowing down my reading pace, making sure I'm understanding everything that's happening rather than just trying to get the gist, and going back a few paragraphs every time I pick it up again to refresh my memory of where I left off is helping.

My plan of using Youtube videos for listening has been working out okay so far. I've found some channels I like with enough videos to keep me occupied at the moment. For French, I've been watching Bruno Maltor (travel) and Nota bene (history); for Spanish, Alan por el mundo (travel) and La media inglesa (Premier League); and for German, WDR Reisen (travel), Kicker (Bundesliga), and Manu Thiele (Bundesliga). If I start to get bored or run out of those, I have a list of others to check out and add into the rotation. I haven't been completely consistent with watching Youtube videos, but I figure every little bit helps. I do feel like I need to find a new TV show to start (preferably in German, since I haven't watched any German TV this year).

I'm still using Duolingo to do French, Spanish, and German review, but Duolingo reconfigured the trees into new learning paths which has been pretty frustrating. It's good that I'm just using Duolingo for extra practice of grammar/vocab I've already been exposed too — if I were learning a language from scratch when the update happened, I think I would be completely lost. I don't love that stories are now interspersed with lessons — I don't find them particularly useful for Spanish, French, and German based on my level (the dialogue in the Spanish ones just feels so slow to me), and it doesn't seem like there's a way to skip past them without testing out of an entire unit. I had been using the stories with Italian, but since I had completed the Italian tree when the update happened, all of them are marked as completed. Luckily if I go to duolingo.com/stories directly, it still has me where I left off before the update, so I've just been going there to make my way through the Italian stories. I imagine at some point the direct link won't work any more, but hopefully I can make my way through them before that point. For some reason all the French lessons I've gone through so far have used the heart system, but not any of the German lessons, and only a couple of the Spanish ones. I don't know why there's a discrepancy or if I'll ever get to a French lesson that will let me make more than 3 mistakes (or vice versa for German), but it's frustrating not to have the control I used to be able to have (in the past, the heart system only came into play if I was trying to test out of a crown rather than going through each individual lesson). Anyways, I know I'm not the first to complain about Duolingo, but I've generally been positive towards it in the past, whereas at the moment I'm very annoyed with it. I think it's still useful as extra practice (especially since I've been struggling to motivate myself to work through any of my millions of grammar workbooks recently), but it's been an adjustment.

I've been doing absolutely nothing in Korean. I said in my last post I wanted to finish the last two episodes of Vincenzo, but that hasn't happened yet. I have a bit of a mental block when it comes to Korean right now — the thought of working on Korean just feels a little stressful to me, and I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe just because I know Korean requires more mental energy from me than any of the other languages (Italian would probably require more if I were doing anything with it beyond Duolingo), whereas Spanish, French, and German are pretty easy for me to dip in and out of. I definitely have no intention of dropping Korean, and I swear I want to finish Vincenzo (I was really enjoying it when I watched most of it last May!), but I don't think I'm ready to really focus on it at the moment, so I'm just going to leave it on the backburner until I feel ready I guess. Which for all I know will happen tomorrow, and next week I'll be back here saying that not only did I finish Vincenzo but several other kdramas as well.

Finally, since a month has passed since my last post, my August round-up:

Spanish: 7.2 hours (listening: 6.5; reading: 0.3; Duolingo: 0.4)
French: 6.2 hours (listening: 5.7; Duolingo: 0.5)
German: 8.1 hours (listening: 7.6; Duolingo: 0.5)
Korean: 0 hours
Italian: 0.3 hours (all Duolingo)

Anyways, that's what I've been up to. My plans at the moment are to continue focusing on listening and reading in French, German, and Spanish and see where things go. Hopefully it won't be another month plus before my next update!

[brokenrecord]

September 18-24

Spanish:
-Youtube videos: 1 video
-newspaper: 1 article
-Duolingo: working on unit 130

French:
-Arrête avec tes mensonges: pages 99-159
-Youtube videos: 1 video
-Trois places pour le 26 (106 minutes)
-newspaper: 1 article
-Duolingo: working on unit 96
-PMP French Verbs: R17-18

German:
-Duolingo: working on unit 25
-Kleo: halfway through episode 1.01
-newspaper: 1 article

Korean:
-Drops: 2 days

Italian:
-Duolingo: 3 stories

On the plus side, I'm updating after just 1 week rather than a couple months, and I did get some work done this week. On the minus side, I started the week off pretty strong really tapered off in the middle.

As I mentioned wanting to do last week, I started a new German show on Netflix called Kleo. It's about an East German spy, and so far I'm finding it pretty engaging, but I'm only halfway through the first episode. Since I have been using Youtube videos for extensive listening, I decided to use Kleo for more intensive listening. I've been using the Language Reactor extension and have it set so subtitles are blurred the first time through and pause after each line. If I understood the line perfectly, I'll continue on. If not, I'll repeat the line with the German subtitle showing so I can match the dialogue to the subtitle and look up any unknown words. Obviously this is a bit time-consuming, which is why I have only managed to get through part of the episode. I also just don't feel like I have enough time to do the intensive listening with Kleo and extensive listening with Youtube videos every day, so I think I need to work on alternating between the two. Instead, this week I just kind of abandoned doing either after a couple days, but hopefully I can get back to it this week.

I'm also still reading Arrête avec tes mensonges and am really enjoying it. I definitely could've finished it this week (I have roughly 30 pages left), but it was another thing I ended up dropping near the end of the week, mostly because I just didn't have the energy to get back to it, and I think I was also a little worried about whether the story would wrap up in a satisfying way, so I was dragging it out a bit. But I do want to finish it this week. I've also been doing some reading aloud while I've been going through the book which does take more time, but I think it really helped me slow down my reading speed and make sure I understood every word, so I may continue with that. I also watched the Jacques Demy film, Trois places pour le 26, without subtitles this week, which was mostly because I have been going through Demy's filmography recently but couldn't find a copy of this film with English subtitles (or even with French subtitles), so I ended up watching it without. The movie is a bit odd and not my favorite of his, but there were elements I enjoyed. My comprehension was decent enough to follow the plot.

I did some Korean for the first time in months this week — only Drops, and it was another thing I fell off from by the end of the week, but it's something. Hopefully I can get back into Korean in the coming weeks.

[brokenrecord]

September 25-October 29

Spanish:
-Youtube videos: 2 videos
-Duolingo: finished unit 130
-PMP Intermediate Spanish Grammar: 6.03-6.08

French:
-Arrête avec tes mensonges: pages 160-190 (done!)
-Youtube videos: 3 videos
-Duolingo: finished unit 96

German:
-Duolingo: finished unit 25
-Kleo: finished episode 1.01
-Youtube: 2 videos
-Der Totengräbersohn: chapters 1-2
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: unit 65

Korean:
-Drops: 4 days
-KGIU Beginning: lessons 13.2-13.3
-Master Korean 2-2: worked on unit 6.02
-Anki: My Sentence Deck: 4 days

Italian:
-Duolingo: 6 stories
-PMP Italian Verbs: units 6.03-6.05
-Orgoglio e Pregiudizio: chapters 1-2

It's never a great sign when I stop updating weekly — it pretty much always means I haven't been doing any language work, so there's nothing to post about. I had a bit of a rough month with my cat having a minor medical issue (she appears to be completely fine now, thankfully, but I definitely couldn't focus on anything while I was dealing with that) and then I went out of town for a week. But I had already started dropping most of my language work prior to that, so I can't blame those things entirely. It's just my constant struggle to fit in 5 languages with work and my other hobbies and everything else going on in my life. But I keep trying anyways!

French:
I finished Arrête avec tes mensonges finally! I enjoyed it, and I thought it was well-written (as much as I can judge that kind of thing at my level). It was a little more challenging in terms of vocab than some of the things I've read in French over the past couple years, but the story was very straightforward and easy to follow, so I never really felt lost. I'd probably check out more by the author in the future.

German:
Since I finished a book in French, I started reading a book in German — Der Totegräbersohn, which I think I saw mentioned/recommended here somewhere. I've just been reading via the preview chapters on Amazon to see if I like it. So far it's been entertaining enough, although I've been finding it fairly challenging in terms of vocab. I'll probably end up buying it and continuing with it. I'm also trying something new where after I finish reading for the day, I summarize the plot in a Word document. I'm not bothering doing it in German — the goal of this is just to jot down key details, character names, and plot points so that I can refer back to them if I end up taking another break so I can make sure I don't lose the thread of what I've already read. It also has the benefit that if I finish a section, go to summarize it, and realize I don't really know what happened, I have to go back and reread it to make sure I really followed what was going on, so I don't keep trying to push through the book too quickly. We'll see how well this works for me.

I'm also still making my way through Kleo very slowly. I'm enjoying the show, but my comprehension really isn't great. There aren't many lines that I understand perfectly on the first time through, so I keep having to rewind and listen again while reading the subtitles. Hopefully my comprehension will start improving.

Korean:
I've still been neglecting Korean, but I did finally get back into Drops, my Anki sentence deck, and some grammar/workbook work, which is better than nothing. In Master Korean, I had left off right on a few listening comprehension exercises, so that was what I jumped back into. My listening comprehension is definitely incredibly weak, and jumping right into listening after doing almost nothing with Korean for ~5 months meant I was completely out of practice and very rusty, so it did not go well. My Korean level is definitely not at the point where I can take 5 months off and jump in right where I left off. My Anki sentence reviews have also been a bit of a struggle so far. I'm still doing pretty minimal Korean at the moment, but I have considered going back to my intensive kdrama work. I think it's helpful, but it's a very gradual process, and I tend to get sucked into it and then lose all my time to it and then don't have time for anything else, which I don't want. But I do want to finish the last 2 episodes of Vincenzo before the end of the year.

Italian:
I'm still working through Duolingo Stories and am getting close to finishing with those. A few months ago I was thinking I might take a break from Italian for the foreseeable future because I wasn't entirely sure how far I wanted to take it or if I wanted to devote as much time to reading/listening in Italian as I have been in Spanish/French/German. But recently I've been reconsidering — there's a chance of me taking a trip to Italy in the next few years, and it'd be nice to have at least some basic comprehension of Italian before that point. So I'm planning on upping the amount of time I spend on Italian. I'm going to abandon HP7 — I'm just not as into Harry Potter as I was when I was younger and don't really feel like pushing through it. I'm still at a point with Italian that I want to read something translated that I've already read before in English to give me a little boost in comprehension/context, so I started reading Pride and Prejudice in Italian. I'm also thinking about picking back up the edX Italian course. I did unit 1 of the beginner's course back in late 2019 but then abandoned it because I didn't feel like I had the time for it. I still probably don't have the time for it, but I may try to fit it in anyways.


Finally, a summary of what I did in September:

Spanish: 3.6 hours (listening: 1.0; reading: 0.5; duolingo: 2.1)
French: 10.2 hours (listening: 2.7; reading: 5.0; grammar: 0.2; duolingo: 2.3)
German: 3.6 hours (listening: 1.4 w/o subs, 0.6 w/subs; reading: 0.1; duolingo: 1.5)
Korean: 0.2 hours (all SRS)
Italian: 0.5 hours (duolingo: 0.45; reading: 0.05)

[DaveAgain]

German:
Since I finished a book in French, I started reading a book in German — Der Totegräbersohn, which I think I saw mentioned/recommended here somewhere. I've just been reading via the preview chapters on Amazon to see if I like it. So far it's been entertaining enough, although I've been finding it fairly challenging in terms of vocab. I'll probably end up buying it and continuing with it.

If you'd like to sample some others before buying, Khayyam described Der Brief für den König as "fun, easy and innocent". One I liked was Die Geschichte von Herrn Sommer.

[brokenrecord]

German:
Since I finished a book in French, I started reading a book in German — Der Totegräbersohn, which I think I saw mentioned/recommended here somewhere. I've just been reading via the preview chapters on Amazon to see if I like it. So far it's been entertaining enough, although I've been finding it fairly challenging in terms of vocab. I'll probably end up buying it and continuing with it.

If you'd like to sample some others before buying, Khayyam described Der Brief für den König as "fun, easy and innocent". One I liked was Die Geschichte von Herrn Sommer.

Thanks for the recommendations — I really do appreciate it! However, it looks like both of those might be at an easier level than I'm looking for. I shouldn't have said mentioned finding the vocab in Der Totengräbersohn a bit challenging as if that were a negative – that's actually a point in its favor since I'm looking to improve my vocab. I just found it a bit surprising that there was more unknown vocab than I had been expecting, especially since the book feels almost like YA at times, even though it's not categorized as such. But I really do always appreciate recommendations, and Die Geschichte von Herrn Sommer looks particularly interesting, so I may check it out again in the future if I'm looking for something less challenging.

[brokenrecord]

October 30-November 5

Spanish:
-Youtube videos: 1 video
-Duolingo: started unit 131
-PMP Intermediate Spanish Grammar: 7.01-7.03

French:
-Youtube videos: 1 video
-Duolingo: finished unit 97
-PMP French Verbs: R19-25

German:
-Duolingo: finished unit 26
-Kleo: worked on episode 1.02
-Youtube: 1 video
-Der Totengräbersohn: chapter 3
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: unit 66

Korean:
-Drops: 7 days
-KGIU Beginning: lessons 14.1-14.2
-Master Korean 2-2: worked on unit 6.02
-Anki: My Sentence Deck: 7 days

Italian:
-Duolingo: 7 stories
-PMP Italian Verbs: unit 6.06
-Orgoglio e Pregiudizio: chapters 3-9
-Learn Italian with Lucrezia: 1 video

Not a bad week. There were a few days when I couldn't get to everything I wanted to (I haven't been as consistent with watching youtube videos as I'd like, and I avoided Kleo for most of the week because I didn't have the energy), but I still managed a fair amount.

German:
I reached the end of the Amazon preview of Der Totengräbersohn so I went ahead and bought it. It's pretty cheap (only $4.50), and I was intrigued enough to want to keep reading. Plus, as I said above to DaveAgain, while the vocab is more challenging than I was expecting, it's a good kind of challenging. I had also looked briefly at Vom Ende der Einsamkeit but decided against it because it had less unknown vocab in the pages I sampled. I may go back to it in the future. I've also been thinking about creating an Anki deck for German vocab I get from what I'm reading/watching, like I have for Korean, but I haven't felt motivated enough to do that yet. I have been highlighting every word I look up, though, so I'm thinking I might go back when I finish the book or at least get a little further along and add the words that I highlighted but still don't know the meaning of.

Italian:
I've really been enjoying reading Orgoglio e Pregiudizio. I was worried it would be too challenging, particularly in contrast to HP7, but it actually seems less challenging. I mean, it's been awhile since I spent much time reading HP7 in Italian, so maybe I've just improved substantially since then, but all I've really been spending my time on is Duolingo, so that doesn't seem very likely. It helps that the first few chapters are pretty short, so it's easy to have a goal of reading one chapter a day and be able to do it in one sitting. There's still plenty of vocab for me to look up, but not an unreasonable amount. It's been over a decade since I last read the book, so it's been fun returning to it.

I also found a youtube channel, Learn Italian with Lucrezia, which I might continue with for extra Italian practice. I've only watched one video so far which was definitely too easy for me (just basic intro expressions – otherwise, the video was entirely in English), but she has a variety of different levels, so I may rotate in these videos with the other youtube channels I've been watching for Spanish, French, and German.


Finally, a summary of what I did in October:

Spanish: 1.9 hours (listening: 0.5; duolingo: 1.1; grammar: 0.3)
French: 2.6 hours (listening: 0.5; reading: 0.7; grammar: 0.2; duolingo: 1.3)
German: 5.1 hours (listening: 1.5 w/o subs, 0.3 w/subs; reading: 2.0; grammar: 0.3; duolingo: 1.0)
Korean: 1.3 hours (SRS: 0.8; grammar: 0.5)
Italian: 1.4 hours (duolingo: 0.4; reading: 0.8; grammar: 0.2)

[brokenrecord]

Well, I'm back again after a couple month break! I feel like a broken record at this point (now you know the reason for my username). Normally I'd start a new log for a new year, but a) we're already more than halfway through February, and b) I'm only on page 2 of this log after a year, and I have little reason to believe I'm going to start updating more regularly this year, so I think I'll just stick to this log for at least another year. I haven't been doing a ton in my time away from the forum. I had a lot of personal things to deal with at the end of the year/beginning of this year, and even when I had time to spend on languages, I just didn't have the mental energy and preferred to spend my time on other hobbies. I tried briefly in January to get slowly back into things with Duolingo, but I abandoned it after a few days. I tried to get back to languages again this week, and it's gone better, so hopefully I'm back for the time being.

I definitely don't have any grand plans or goals for this year. Right now my biggest goal is just to maintain where I am — maybe make some slight improvements, especially in Italian and Korean, where there's more room to make improvements, but as long as I'm not worse in any of my languages by the end of the year, I'll count that as a win. I don't want to lose all the progress I've made up to this point, but language learning just isn't a priority in the same way it was a few years ago for me, so I'm trying to figure out some kind of balance where I don't drop language learning entirely but also have time for other hobbies.

My main tools this week have been Duolingo and grammar workbooks. I've finished the tree and all the stories for Italian, but I'm still using it for about 5 minutes of practice in Italian. I haven't finished the trees in my other languages, so I've just been progressing through those as normal. I'm even doing Korean again — I know the Korean tree has its issues, but I'm primarily using it as a source for learning new vocab and reinforcing things I've learnt elsewhere, so I think it'll be okay for that purpose. The grammar workbooks I've just been rotating through like I have in the past, doing a few exercises in one language each day.

I'm still making my way through Orgoglio e Pregiudizio and enjoying it a lot. I really expected it to be a lot more difficult than it has been. I still have to look up plenty of vocab since my Italian is at a high beginner level at this point (maybe verging on low intermediate? Only for reading, definitely not for listening or speaking), but it hasn't been so much that I find it frustrating.

I don't really have the energy for Anki at the moment, but I've picked up Drops again for Korean since I find it pretty enjoyable, and I'm limited to only around 5-10 min per day and then I'm done, which is one reason it's more tolerable to me than Anki. I still feel like I'm struggling with wanting to acquire more Korean vocab but not wanting to use Anki and it taking more time for most words to stick in contrast to Spanish/French/Italian/German. I had been working on that with going through kdramas intensively, but that ends up being such a huge time commitment; it's hard for me to just do a couple minutes or 1 scene of an episode because I'll usually get sucked in and want to keep watching the show. Which isn't the worst thing, and I'm fine with spending all my free time working intensively with a kdrama for a couple weeks in a year, but it's just not something I have the time to do consistently. I've tried children's news articles, but I find the sentences to be too long and have too much unknown vocab, and I also don't find the subjects of the articles interesting enough to make me want to work through them either. I like Korean Stories for Language Learners, but the stories are all folktales, so a lot of the vocab in the stories feels like it should be lower on my priority list (for example, 좁쌀, which means millet — not a word I feel like is really vital for me to learn right away).

All this to say, I decided maybe I should check out a webtoon to work on reading/acquiring vocab. The sentences are generally shorter, there are images to help with context and comprehension, and I find it easier to read a couple panels of a webtoon vs. just watching a few minutes of a kdrama. Plus it's something I can do while taking breaks at work, which I can't really do with kdramas. I had read like ~15 chapters of 이태원 클라쓰 (Itaewon Class) a few years ago, which I think was useful, but then ended up on one of my language breaks and never got back to it after that. I didn't really feel like picking it back up (not even entirely sure where I left off), so I decided to start 유미의 세포들 (Yumi's Cells). I haven't watched the TV adaptation yet, but I'm a couple chapters in, and I'm enjoying it so far, and finding it not too challenging to follow. I still have to look up a ton of words, but there's a good amount of vocab I know well, some stuff I vaguely know and get reinforcement from looking up again, and then a lot of brand new vocab. For everything I'm looking up, I'm making a word list in Excel with the word in one column and the English translation in the next column. I'm not sure if I'm going to do anything with this list or not. Like I said, I don't really feel motivated to work with Anki right now. I've mostly just been browsing the list once or twice a day to get a little extra reinforcement beyond looking them up the first time. I'm also making note of if I've looked up a word multiple times. Maybe I'll add the most frequent words to Anki at some point in the future when I'm more in the mood.

So that's my big new project at the moment. I've been feeling very motivated with 유미의 세포들 so far, but I always get really excited and motivated when I start a new project and then it ends up petering out when I find other things to direct my attention to, so it's possible I'll never finish this, but I figure any amount I do will help. The first 10 chapters are free, and then after that, I think I'll be limited to 1 chapter a day, but that should be fine — so far they've been taking me about 20 min to work through, so for most days, I won't want to spend more time on reading than that anyways. And if I run out of chapters to read and want more, I can always find another webtoon to read.

Anyways, that's what I've been up to! Hopefully I won't disappear again for a couple months, but, well, no promises.

[brokenrecord]

February 19-25

Spanish:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 134
-PMP Intermediate Spanish Grammar: exercises 8.01-8.03

French:
-Duolingo: finished unit 100
-PMP French Verbs: exercises R29-36

German:
-Duolingo: finished unit 28
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lesson 70

Korean:
-Drops: 7/7 days
-Duolingo: worked on unit 5
-KGIU Beginning: lessons 17.01-17.04
-Vitamin Korean 2: worked on unit 1-3
-Yumi's Cells: chapters 3-9
-intensive work with Love to Hate You: episodes 1.01-1.04

Italian:
-Duolingo: practiced 7/7 days
-PMP Italian Verbs: exercises 7.01-7.06
-Orgoglio e Pregiudizio: chapters 21-27

As normal, when I'm getting back into language learning, I feel very motivated and focused at first, so I got a good amount done this week, although I've struggled to make time for any kind of listening practice, and it's been mostly focused on Korean. But still, not bad!

I know I said I wasn't looking to get back into working with a kdrama intensively, but working with Yumi's Cells started making me feel more motivated to acquire more vocab and just get more exposure to Korean in general, so I started watching Love to Hate You and working with it intensively this week. It has the benefit of only being 10 episodes around 50-60 minutes (unlike most kdramas which are 16 episodes and can be 75-90 minutes, depending on the show), so it felt like a bit less of a commitment. It's not one of my absolute favorite kdramas so far, but I've been enjoying it a lot, and I do feel like it's been helping me progress. Working with kdramas like this still isn't something I can do consistently every week for an entire year, but I was in the mood to do so this week, so I figured I might as well take advantage of it.

I've kind of settled on what to do with my Korean vocab list at the moment. I've been adding a ton (nearly everything I look up, and I end up having to look up a lot of words), so the list is over 400 words at the moment. I've been choosing around 5-10 words that are either things I know I've been exposed to before that I really should remember at this point, or words that I've had to look up multiple times since I started keeping this list, and then I focus on trying to remember those words and test my memory of them each day. After ~5 days of getting the words correct, I remove them from the list. Obviously if they don't end up sticking, they can always get added back to the list in the future. It was getting too hard to review every single word on the list every day because it's just so long now, but I kind of glance through them and refresh my memory of a couple, especially the ones that have been coming up more often, or words that I just think would be useful to know. This is obviously not as efficient or systematic as using something like Anki to memorize vocab, but it feels a lot less stressful and time-consuming to me than using Anki right now, and it's at least a small step up from simply looking up the word and moving on. I like being able to focus on the stuff that's been coming up more frequently, too (kind of like using a word frequency list, but tailored to the things I'm actually reading/watching). Again, not sure if I'll keep this up long-term, but I think it's been helping things stick a little better than they were when I was just looking vocab up once and doing nothing else.

Anyways, that's about it for the moment. I'm very focused on Korean right now, which is the language that needs the most attention anyways, so that suits me just fine. Maybe I'll try to get some listening in for my other languages this week.

[brokenrecord]

February 26-March 4

Spanish:
-Duolingo: finished unit 134
-PMP Intermediate Spanish Grammar: exercises 8.04-8.05

French:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 101
-PMP French Verbs: exercises R37-R38

German:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 29
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lessons 71-72

Korean:
-Drops: 7/7 days
-Duolingo: finished unit 5
-KGIU Beginning: lessons 18.01-18.04, 19.01-19.02
-Vitamin Korean 2: finished unit 1-3, started unit 1 review
-Yumi's Cells: chapters 10-16
-intensive work with Love to Hate You: episodes 1.05-1.10
-intensive work with Vincenzo: episode 1.01

Italian:
-Duolingo: practiced 7/7 days
-PMP Italian Verbs: exercises 7.07-7.10
-Orgoglio e Pregiudizio: chapters 28-34

This week was pretty similar to last week, although I've been spending even more time on intensive work with kdramas. I finished Love to Hate you this week, which was a very fun and cute show, although not one of my absolute favorites that I've seen. After that, I decided to finally get back to Vincenzo. I had gotten through 18/20 episodes last spring (I actually left off ~20 minutes into the 19th episode) but then real life things came up so I never finished it. I kept meaning to return to it because I really enjoyed the show and wanted to know how everything wrapped up, but it always seemed odd to jump back in with less than 2 episodes left to finish. Watching Love to Hate you kept reminding me of Vincenzo (just on a surface level of them both featuring characters who are lawyers; they're not at all similar in terms of tone/plot), and I found myself wanting to get back to it. I decided it had been long enough since I watched most of the show the first time that I could just start back at the beginning again, so that's what I've been doing.

It's been taking me much longer to get through Vincenzo episodes this time. When I was going through it last spring, I would use Language Reactor to pause after every line and then I'd try to see what I recognized from the line, mouse over for translations, look at the English subtitle, and then move on. It would take me maybe 2-2.5 hours or so to get through a 90 minute episode. I'd occasionally break an entire sentence down using mirinae.io, but not every sentence. This time through, I'm breaking down every single sentence and adding nearly all unknown vocab to my vocab list. The first episode took me roughly 6 hours to get through (broken up across multiple days, of course). There's definitely a possibility that I will fail a second time to get through the entire show because I'll be distracted by something else in a few weeks. Hopefully not! On the plus side, I feel like I've been acquiring more vocab this way than what I was doing before. It also helps that I've been continuing with Drops and reading Yumi's Cells, so I end up seeing the same words in multiple locations, which helps me remember them.

Otherwise, not much to report. I still haven't managed to get any listening in or do much in my other languages besides Duolingo/grammar (plus reading for Italian). At some point I'll want to get back to doing more in other languages, but I'm fine with focusing most of my time and energy into Korean right now.

Since February is over, here is the breakdown of my February hours:

Screenshot 2023-03-05 at 8.53.43 AM.png

Screenshot 2023-03-05 at 8.53.21 AM.png

Not surprisingly, a ton of work with kdramas! I imagine March will end up looking very similar to this.