Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2018

[Neurotip]

How is everyone doing with their New Year's Resolutıons?

Good question. BTW that's a fascinating typo in 'Resolutions'... unless it was deliberate

1. Get Icelandic up to a solid A1, hopefully approaching A2, with 100 hours of study.
2. Get Italian up to a solid B1, with 100 hours of study.

The Italian is mostly going to be listening to podcasts and reading articles online; for Icelandic, studying simple texts (preferably parallel texts) alongside Icelandic Online and lots of Anki. I think I can commit to four hours a week - doesn't sound all that much, but I have a goal in one of my other hobbies that's going to take me a fair amount of time as well, and then there's Real Life...

Weeellll... I haven't been counting hours so I cannot answer the question strictly as asked. However:
- I have definitely been putting in at least a couple of hours a week of listening (divided more or less equally between my two TLs), and I have probably got up to a couple of hours a week of miscellaneous other TL-related activities, so I reckon I've been putting in the hard yards as intended
- I'm already closer to A2 than to A1 in Icelandic (woop - doesn't sound much but I'm very excited about this)
- I was at least a strong B1 in Italian before I started (oops), but earlier today I was watching an unscripted round-table (rather heated) political discussion and noticed that I was understanding about the same amount as I was six months ago in scripted podcasts. This I call progress.

[Hank]

Is winning the lottery considered a language related New Year's Resolution? It would definitely give me much more time to study languages. Not only that, I could spend a lot of time in Wales and get some immersion.

For 2018 I want to continue maintaining Spanish and improve my listening comprehension and output. My listening comprehension isn't horrible right now, but it could be much better. I guess my output isn't completely horrible, but still tons of room for improvement. For Welsh I want to be able to read comfortably and at least be able to get the gist of the spoken language. I think this is doable.

I also want to fight off wanderlust and not start a new language until I'm comfortable with Welsh. Unfortunately the urge to dabble in Japanese is strong right now.

I haven't won the lottery...yet. I'm sure I'm due to win sometime very soon.

Spanish

Between getting satellite radio with a Spanish language news channel and finding a Mexican TV show that I really like I have done quite a bit more listening so far this year. My comprehension is improving. I haven't done a great deal with output. Output practice is kind of frustrating for me knowing that I'm terribly unlikely to need to use Spanish.

Welsh

I'm still plugging along and still improving. My biggest obstacle is that I have the burning desire to learn Welsh but I don't feel the urgency that I felt when I was studying Spanish. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to read comfortably by the end of the year. Welsh vocabulary is confounding. It's definitely possible and I'm not feeling any stress about it. I'll get there eventually. I haven't done a great deal of listening practice but when I do listen I usually get the gist. My output isn't good but I can at least string together some horrible sentences when I concentrate.

Wanderlust

I've given up on the idea of learning Japanese in the near future, even though I think it would be fun to learn at some point. I dabbled with Duolingo Italian. I'm not really feeling any wanderlust right now.

Overall everything is going well.

[smallwhite]

How is everyone doing with their New Year's Resolutıons?

BTW that's a fascinating typo in 'Resolutions'... unless it was deliberate

Good catch! It did look funny, so I read it again syllable by syllable, but couldn't work out what was wrong

[Jaleel10]

I started on January 1 with a fancy new Assimil book. Here I am 6 months later! Still haven't completed the book though

For the most part of my studies I have been studying every single day, even though I live in a country with no hispanohablantes I still try to be exposed to SOME Spanish each day. I even finished 3rd place in the first 6W challenge of the year!

About a month ago I started integrating native materials into my studies. I even discovered an entire new side of Youtube lol. 'Spanish Youtube' is huge lol. I am also watching tv shows dubbed in Spanish, as well some native shows (with subs in Spanish). And I can finally enjoy them! My comprehension is shoddy but eh! it's is only up from here, right? Reading has been fun as well, never really liked it in any of my native languages but I really don't know what changed with Spanish lol. I am not attempting to read Lovecraft or anything lol, but there are bunch of very interesting short stories around my level that I can read with a fair level of comfort. I used to get frustrated a lot when reading but now it's one of my favourite things to do.

Podcasts have been fun too, even though I can't really listen to native level podcasts but there is a bunch of podcasts that are made for intermediate students and I can cope with them just fine. And there are A LOT. And a lot of them are from Spain too, which is awesome because I have fallen in love with the country since the start of my studies haha and would like to adopt their accent and slang when I am good enough at Spanish.

I guess my speaking is a bit (a lot) weak right now, but I am chatting online through voice or text to natives each day, so I am sure I will see solid improvement come end of the year. A lot of people say I speak well for a beginner and that my accent is very good. When I started I didn't really have a solid goal with Spanish but after experiencing what I experienced the last half a year I want to be very proficient in the language. As proficient as I can be while living in South Africa I set myself a goal of B2 by December next year. Here goes nothing!

Big thanks to the senior members of the forum for creating and maintaining such a good community. Not to single anybody out but big thanks to Iguanamon who's advice, comments and logs I have been following and reading a lot of. And to Eido and Bex who I am secretly competing with

[gsbod]

Passing the Goethe Zertifikat C1 exam (German). I'll try in the summer, if it doesn't work out I can try again autumn/winter.

Whoops, that's a no then! In my defence, the timetable for the exam in my local area really didn't fit with certain work commitments I have had this summer. Maybe I'll try again in the autumn. Maybe.

[Denzagathist]

Honestly, I was so horribly depressed in January that doing anything related to language study at all would have felt like a major accomplishment at the time.

I set the wonderfully vague goal of wanting to study Japanese every day in order to get to the point of not feeling ashamed of my level. I'm still a bit ashamed of my level, given that I've been living in Japan for nearly a year now, but not as embarrassed as I was previously. Whether that is due to significant improvement or simply caring less is another matter, though. Call it a win?

I also initially planned to study the language of whichever country I decided to visit in the spring. I chose to visit Vietnam. I did not study Vietnamese. Oh well, I still thoroughly enjoyed Vietnam.

[smallwhite]

End of Quarter 3.

So 75% of the year behind us. I hope everyone is doing great with their 2018 Resolutions!

[tarvos]

Not die while improving languages somehow

I have managed so far! It's a miracle!

[zenmonkey]

So 75% of the year behind us. I hope everyone is doing great with their 2018 Resolutions!

My main resolutions were to continue actively studying towards C1 in German and work on Tibetan and Hebrew and to appreciate the use of my other languages.

I'm doing ok, still plugging away. I even added some fun with Setswana.
Looks like I even built some goals for German along the way.

[Brun Ugle]

1. Write in my log every week.
2. No new languages!

1. Nope.
2. Nope.