白田龍 wrote:I'm currently trying to find time to work on my beginner Japanese and Arabic, and advanced Persian and Mandarin...
My advanced languages are worked through narrow reading (in order to minimize the number of new words) and haphazard listening/watching schedule. I add the new words to SRS for reinforcement, but the cards are deleted after I can remember it past a few days. Lower level languages, however, are too much of a drain, I really don't have the time for this anymore... I will work intensively when I on vacations from work, and through the rest of the year I will just passively watch some media every once in a while for maintenance.
Yeah see part of the thing with me is that, while I can watch videos and listen to podcasts/the news in German to my heart's content, I know that that won't help my grammar skills. I do really enjoy doing that and it's one of my procrastination methods, but it's not going to help with grammar. It will help with receptive vocabulary, which isn't a bad thing - though reading would be a little more useful in terms of skills that I feel the need to improve.
I also just have a fairly high amount of motivation for learning both French and Biblical Hebrew. It would be very easy for me to focus on those to and maintain my current level of German, but improving it while also focusing on those two is hard. French is somewhat high stakes as I'm taking a university class, but it's very easy to work at the pace we're going at. I suppose this is the one good thing about it not being an intensive course. And then Biblical Hebrew is one of the few language that I keep coming back to as feeling a very strong desire to learn for various reasons and I'm currently taking it very slowly which is working well for me. There's also a lot of relevance for me which is helpful and, unlike any other language I've studied, I'll kick myself for having put it to the side when I realize how much I could have learned had I not (Dutch is almost like that, but not quite).
Dutch is where things get almost more complicated because there is tons of linguistic transfer from German and English. It's probably the most fun language for me for that reason (it's the one language that makes me really excited when I figure out a new concept
and that I even kind of look forward to studying grammar in), but out of the 4 it's the one that I have the least motivation to learn. It's very fun for me, but I just have less motivation. If I was taking an in person class at a college then I'd have as much if not more motivation than French, but I'm not. It's kind of one of those, "I know I can get to a very high level in Dutch without much cognitive effort, I just need to do it."
I think figuring out where I'm going to go to grad school at will really be what launches me into putting more focus in German or Dutch. I'm applying to programs in both countries (all but one of which is in English). Really once I find out whether or not I've gotten a very large scholarship will be when things change or stay the same.