Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

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cathrynm
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Re: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

Postby cathrynm » Mon Jan 01, 2018 5:26 am

Goal with Japanese is to take the N2 this year. (I may take N2 even if I failed N3, which hopefully I didn't) Make it all the way through 'a book.'
And Finnish just to keep going, do something every day.
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Dylan95
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Re: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

Postby Dylan95 » Mon Jan 01, 2018 5:01 pm

Goal 1 - Continue to build up my Russian vocabulary on a daily basis through extensive reading, writing, anki, and quizlet.
Goal 2 - Eliminate as many habitual mistakes as possible in Russian over time.
Goal 3 - Write daily logs in Russian/English about any books and articles I read, or of anything I would like to take note of.
Goal 4 - Improve my English vocabulary for the GRE, and for the sake of becoming a better writer.
Goal 5 - Start fazing a new language into my daily studies.
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Re: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

Postby DaveBee » Mon Jan 01, 2018 5:17 pm

АмериканскийДурак wrote:Goal 4 - Improve my English vocabulary
Do you have a plan for how you intend to do that?
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Re: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

Postby Dylan95 » Mon Jan 01, 2018 5:43 pm

DaveBee wrote:
АмериканскийДурак wrote:Goal 4 - Improve my English vocabulary
Do you have a plan for how you intend to do that?


Extensive reading and Anki srs flashcards :)
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Re: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

Postby Zomxilla » Mon Jan 01, 2018 10:17 pm

In terms of measurable goals, I want to reach 1000 words of Cantonese vocabulary by the end of 2018. Something less measurable - have decent conversational Cantonese. My main driver is going to visit Hong Kong at the end of next year. My partner is a native speaker and since we've moved in together he's worried his Cantonese will slip because of disuse. The obvious solution is for me to learn it ;)

Since I'm still relatively new to learning languages, (on and off for the past five years - mostly off) I'm not sure of my best strategy yet. It will probably involve a bunch of flash cards and HK drama, plus as much conversation as I can manage.

In order to achieve these goals I'll try and post to my log daily. This might get more difficult as I get back to work in a week, so I'll see if I need to switch it to a weekly summary.
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Re: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

Postby zenmonkey » Tue Jan 02, 2018 12:18 am

iguanamon wrote:For me, I try to achieve without goals. I've found that the best goal is no goal. So, that necessarily leaves out task bars, counting hours and pages for me. I don't need those things because I'm motivated anyway. That being said, a new year is as good a time as any to start something new.


I appreciate this school of thought - goals and vocalisation can be very counterproductive. But nothing is so clear to me that I can say with certainty what works or does not work for me.

Inconsistency is pretty sweet, though. I'll stick to that.
I'll also stick to language, old books, and travel as motivation.

Sometimes I'll just be happy with repeatable activity rather than goals - focusing on the next step and the short term have gotten me pretty far sometimes. Well, then look, squirrels!!

But before looking forward, a quick look back. In 2017, I got back into focused language learning and I did get a few things done:
  • Completed B1 & B2 test in German
  • Started active study in Hebrew and Tibetan, learning both writing systems - not perfectly but enough to be mental state of "this is neat!"
  • Those led me to play with Ladakhi, Ladino and Yiddish
  • Attended my first Polyglot conference
  • Played a bit with Tzotzil, Assyrian, Nahuatl, Occitan, Greek, Icelandic (travel), Slovak (travel) ...
  • Played a bit more with Italian and Portuguese but not enough to say I've reactivated these (and that's a small disappointment)
  • Bought lots of language books
  • Wrote 4-5 language related apps and started 3 new language projects


Pretty good year - looking back! But at the same time, I dropped a few things like Portuguese, the study and was rather inconsistent at times.

(These won't be particularly SMART or structured...)

For this year I'd like to continue with my German (and work on the C1), continue with Hebrew and Tibetan and see how those go. I'm going to spend a bit of time rethinking my learning methods along the way - I'll still be using Anki, ASSIMIL and italki but each with some adjustments - various learning ideas from posts here, blogs, podcasts and books (Wyner and Roberts and Kreuz) have me thinking about improvements or changes.

I've also got on-going language learning apps in the pipeline - for alphabets, immigrant support and Yiddish - I hope to see these move to solid products.

Travel: I'm looking forward to seeing some of you in Bratislava or elsewhere. Travel is always a motivation to dabble with a language and sometimes something sticks and becomes a project. I'll be going to Philippines and Mexico this year and a few other places. Good moments to pick-up books and the taste of places and languages.

And my daughters - Aside from the classic 4, one is working on Akkadian and another on Italian so that adds a little bit of motivation for projects and plans.

Have a great 2018!
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Re: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

Postby s_allard » Tue Jan 02, 2018 1:48 am

Now that the Spanish DELE C2 is out of the way, 2018 is going to be the year of implementing what I pretentiously call my Fast Learning for High Proficiency Language Performance method. It stems from a combination of studying the methods of hyperpolyglots such as my models, Kenneth Hale, Richard Simcott and Alex Rawlings, and my own musings over the years at HTLAL and here. The old-timers know that I have talked endlessly about fluency, the CEFR model, what is a word, percentage comprehension and word coverage, analytical understanding, optimal productive vocabulary size, using short recordings with transcriptions for listening comprehension, and test preparation.

All of that is water under the bridge now and I hope not to revisit those themes in this forum. Instead, I'm going to walk the talk by applying these principles to see how much I can learn of a language in three months and one hour a day. My first goal is B2 German for an exam that I've registered for on March 29 and later on to Italian B2 for June this year. After that we'll see.
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Re: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

Postby Dylan95 » Wed Jan 03, 2018 1:34 pm

Also, I would like to stop worrying about writing emails perfectly. I get all worked up over not coming off polite enough etc. and I end up taking way too long to respond from time to time as a result. (May not sound language-related, but it definitely is, especially since I'm mostly referring to work related emails in my target language)
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Re: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

Postby Cainntear » Thu Jan 04, 2018 10:34 pm

I'm finally going to put my programming and language skills to good use.

I hope to produce some simple software under an open-source license that I can release later this month, and then more complex stuff kept under a proprietary license later in the year.

(Although now that I'm thinking about it, the wee open-source project I was thinking of might end up becoming a webservice....)
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Re: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

Postby Expugnator » Tue Jan 16, 2018 10:30 pm

My main resolution for 2018 is to get serious about serious languages: Russian (in the first semester), French (evaluate my level somehow), Mandarin (ditto + prospect some professional use for it, for it is already worth something as it is) and English (try to defossilize the fossilized mistakes while working on pronunciation). I want to change my attitude regarding these languages, so I think here we can talk about resolutions rather than goals.
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