The Ambitious Goals of a Wallflower [ES, IT, ZH, and More!]

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marie39
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Re: The Ambitious Goals of a Wallflower [ES, IT, ZH, and More!]

Postby marie39 » Sun Mar 08, 2020 4:05 am

End of February 2020 Wrap-up

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I honestly just want to put February behind me. Things have been rough in my personal life recently.

Italian: I started doing something in Italian and then nothing. Like I said, things have been stressful in my personal life so I was not really in the mood for anything this month.

Japanese: I made some good progress with Japanese in February so I feel pretty good. I focused on it a lot and managed to finish Japanese for Busy People Volume 1 finally. I'm going to take some time to review and then move on to the next book. I also started typing up my notes as a way to review but also so I can recycle my binders and paper.

Mandarin: I need to stop putting off Mandarin. I procrastinate because I know I have to review and it intimidates me. Mandarin isn't as easy to jump back into like Spanish or even Italian or Catalan.

Spanish: I just love Spanish since it's the only language that I'm consistent in right now. I managed to read two books in February. Those books were El Sueno de America by Esmeralda Santiago and Siberia by Jesús María Sáez. Both books were alright but I would not reread either one so I'll probably donate them later. Aside from that I'v been watching more youtube videos in Spanish. I still watch way too many English youtube videos and channels though. I would like to change that. And I'm still watching the telenovela, El Clon. And I'm still actively writing in my journals.

Catalan: I had a little motivation for Catalan this month. I've been studying it through Spanish resources which is not as confusing as I was afraid it would be. I actually like comparing sentences in Catalan and Spanish. It's interesting to see how much is similar and what little details are different. I'm going back and forth between Assimil's Catalan sin esfuerzo and Aprender catalan sobre la marcha. The second book seems like a wordlist broken up by topic with some verb conjugations and sentences thrown in.
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marie39
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Re: The Ambitious Goals of a Wallflower [ES, IT, ZH, and More!]

Postby marie39 » Fri May 01, 2020 3:36 pm

I'm not going to bother recapping March or April in this thread. I will mention one thing though: I surpassed my Spanish goal of 30 minutes a day or 900 minutes a month for the month of April! I actually reached a total of 1,113 minutes in Spanish for April. 717 minutes of which was reading and 323 minutes was listening (tv and youtube). I'm very happy with this. Hopefully I can continue this trend.

Plans for May

May is going to be a busy month so I want to take a second to talk about my upcoming plans. A lot of new things are starting this month. I am participating in Tadoku, the 6 Week Challenge (6WC) and the Super Challenge.

Tadoku: I have a goal to read 36 books by the end of the year in Spanish, or 3 books a month. I am currently one book behind. That seems more impressive than it is when you consider two books were under 100 pages and one was a textbook for learning Catalan. I count them on my spreadsheet though so I'm fine with how it is right now. Anyway, I plan to mostly read in Spanish for Tadoku this month. I also signed up with Italian and Japanese. I do have a goal of reading 12 books by the end of the year in Italian and I'm currently a bit behind in that goal.

6 Week Challenge: I'm trying to push myself with Japanese currently so I am hoping that the 6WC will help motivate me to study a lot of Japanese.

The Super Challenge: I signed up with Spanish (double), Italian (full) and Japanese (full). I'm honestly only aiming to complete the listening part of the Japanese challenge this time around. I doubt I'll be able to read quick enough by the time December 2021 comes around.

Pages Spanish: 0 / 10000
Audio Spanish: 0 / 18000

Pages Italian: 0 / 5000
Audio Italian: 0 / 9000

Pages Japanese: 0 / 5000
Audio Japanese: 0 / 9000
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marie39
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Re: The Ambitious Goals of a Wallflower [ES, IT, ZH, and More!]

Postby marie39 » Mon May 11, 2020 12:51 am

Week of 5/1 - 5/9

May is off to a decent enough start. My focus has been on Spanish and Japanese.

Super Challenge

Pages Spanish: 228 / 10000
Audio Spanish: 230 / 18000

Pages Italian: 0 / 5000
Audio Italian: 49 / 9000

Pages Japanese: 0 / 5000
Audio Japanese: 53 / 9000

MIA/AJATT: On April 25th I decided to give the MIA/AJATT approach a try. I created two youtube profiles: one for Japanese only and one for Spanish only. I've been recording my listening and anki times for both languages. It was a little bit of a rough start but I feel like I'm getting into a groove now. My listening hours for both Japanese and Spanish are almost the same. They're very close for total minutes at the time of writing this. I'm trying to average about an hour a day of listening for each language.

One thing that I found interesting is that, when I listen to Spanish or Japanese, I also tend to listen to the other language that same day. When I don't do any listening practice, I tend not to listen in either language that day.

So, I know everyone advises not doing MIA for two languages at the same time. I also know that my Spanish is better than my Japanese. I'm wondering if I can continue to split my time between Spanish and Japanese. It might also be better to do MIA in Spanish for three months while trying to finish up my Japanese textbooks then switch to MIA in Japanese.

Spanish: I finished reading Escapar para vivir by Yeonmi Park this week. This is a nonfiction memoir story about one woman's life and escape from North Korea. With Kim Jong-Un in the news somewhat recently, I wanted to read a book about North Korea. This book was also available on Kindle Unlimited. Since Tadoku is this month and I'm trying to make Spanish my main reading language, I'm trying to read in only Spanish, Italian and maybe Japanese this month. No English. So, I also started reading El caso Hartung by Søren Sveistrup (one of the book club picks) and Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal by J K Rowling.

I also resubscribed to Scribd and started listening to the audiobook La Bailarina de Auschwitz. Scribd has a bunch of perks now including free subscriptions to TuneIn radio which has stations and podcasts in lots of languages and FarFaria which has children's books with audio in English and Chinese. So, that was a nice find.

I've also discovered a Peruvian drama that I'm really enjoying. It's called "El Último Bastión" and it is on youtube. My other listening practice has just been random youtube videos which do not count towards the Super Challenge. I'm only counting films, tv shows, documentaries and audiobooks (without text) for my Super Challenges.

Finally, I also did a little writing in my kpop and personal journals. Have you guys heard about the new "kpop" group KAACHI? I watched so many youtbers in Spanish discussing this group. They call themselves a kpop group but they're based in the UK and sing in English. Only one member is Korean too. Most people feel like this doesn't count as kpop mainly because they're not in Korea. There are kpop groups with foreign idols but they sing in Korean and are based out of Korea.

Japanese: Japanese has been my second focus language since February. So, I've been very motivated to work on my Japanese skills this year. Like I mentioned above, I am trying to implement the MIA/AJATT approach with Japanese. Finding listening material has gotten a bit easier lately. I felt a little lost getting started but I think I have a plan now.

I'm trying to get at least 1 hour of listening in a day. I'm also working on creating an anki deck of 1,000 vocab words and another deck of 2,000 sentences. My plan for the sentences is to start by going through my textbook Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication. Then I'll move on to blogs and easy news for new sentences. I am also still working through the textbook Japanese for Busy People Volume 2. I also have volume 3. I want to finish these two textbooks this year.

I am trying to do a full Super Challenge for Japanese. My focus is going to be on films so if I can complete the 100 films part of the challenge, I would be happy.

Italian & Other Languages: I've done a little bit of listening and reading in Italian. I'm currently reading Il leone di Roma by Adele Vieri Castellano. I'm having a hard time finding good shows online. I tried watching the movie "Ciao Brother" but turned it off half way through.

I started watching the Korean drama "Crash Landing on You" on Netflix. I'm obsessed. I'm also slowly working on reviewing my Mandarin flashcards. I'm trying something new where I write out the hanzi as I go through the flashcards. I'm thinking of go through my textbooks and rewriting the dialogues and paragraphs from each chapter as a form of contextual review.
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marie39
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Re: The Ambitious Goals of a Wallflower [ES, IT, ZH, and More!]

Postby marie39 » Sun May 17, 2020 4:42 am

Week of 5/10 - 5/16

Spanish: I set a goal for myself to watch one episode of a tv show each day and I completed that goal this week. I was really into this Peruvian drama called El Último Bastión. I'm on episode 12 now. I'm going to have to switch things up though and probably get back to watching El Clon for a bit. I've also been watching random youtube videos. I followed a make-up tutorial in Spanish and discovered a vlog channel by a Mexican woman living in Saudi Arabia.

I started listening to the audiobook La bailarina de Auschqitz while I'm cleaning. My problem with listening to audiobooks or podcasts in Spanish is the same problem I have in English: sometimes I tune out the audio and it becomes background noise for sections of the story. I guess it's good to still have Spanish playing in the background.

I'm also still reading El angel caido. Just to mix things up a bit, I watched the coursera course "corrección estilo y variaciones..." week one videos. It was interesting. The audio had Spanish closed captions as well.

Japanese: I finally finished up lesson two in Japanese for Busy People Volume 2. I also started watching anime again for some reason. I have not really watched anime since I was in high school. I used to love Jdramas though. I feel like it's not as easy to find Jdramas like it was when I was younger, or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. Kdramas are what's popular now though. Speaking of Kdramas, Crash Landing on You is my obsession right now. I'm making my boyfriend watch it too. I'm amazed I'm not single. :P

Anyway, the anime I started watching are Carole & Tuesday and ボールルームへようこそ. Both had English subtitles that I could not turn off. Still, I could recognize some words and phrases from the spoken Japanese here and there. I actually really enjoyed the first couple of episodes of both shows so I'll probably continue watching them. I started Carole & Tuesday with my boyfriend so I'll probably watch that with him.

I also started reading chapter 2 of a manga called Citrus. I could recognize some kanji and words. It can be a bit time consuming when I'm trying to gather sentences and vocabulary from the manga and I have to look up kanji because there's no furigana. I have the KanjiCam app on my phone but the camera part never works. Also, when I go to draw a kanji to look it up, the dictionary doesn't like my strokes/drawing. :lol: Looking up kanji by the radicals is cool though.

That's all for this week. I have a plan for Italian next week. We'll see how that goes. This weekend (Friday to Sunday) I'm dabbling in Breton. It's interesting. :D
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