Emily's language log - Heb, Spa, Ger

[EmGeeFab]

I've been tracking my work since Jan 3 via a spreadsheet and I notice that I do a lot more listening than anything else. This week, I'm going to try to switch things up.

Hebrew
I've listened every day this week. I listen to a Tel Aviv morning radio show at 90% and Streetwise Hebrew when cooking and cleaning. I also listen to Living Language Advanced when driving between kid activities. It seems to fit where I am right now well.

Hubby and I watched a Hebrew/Arabic movie this week, Tel Aviv on Fire. I was able to pick up a lot using the subtitles. When we were talking about it afterwards, I realized that hubby got a bit confused about one character's nationality due to not noticing differences between Hebrew and Arabic.

This week, my non-listening work will focus either on reading a short story to discuss with my tutor or on watching YouTube with subtitles and forcing myself to go back and understand things.

German
I listened a lot this week, mainly to the podcast, Der Tag, but also to a new one, Anhören, about linguistics. Fitting, right? I've gotten behind in my reading, and only spent 18 minutes reading this week. My tutor noticed that I was sloppy with dative verbs, so I've made cloze and vocab cards for them so that I can memorize them in context.

I'm working through a Wälzer of 650+ pages right now and want to finish it by Feb. 1, so that'll be my focus this week.

Spanish
The ULAT is awesome and I'm doing it with my kids. I'm also working through Anki cards I made with my barely-8-year-old son. It is slow going, but this is a slow simmer language for me. We're learning a few songs and rhymes in Spanish, too, which is what he focuses on when I do ULAT with my older kids.

[EmGeeFab]

Update:

German: Loving loving loving podcasts: Der Tag and Eine Stunde History are my favorites while cooking and evening house work after kids are in bed. I no longer clean up right after dinner but save it until later so I can do it in quiet and listen to podcasts. I've started Ende der Einsamkeit and appreciate the beauty of the language usage, especially the verbs.

Hebrew: I found a language exchange partner and met with her for the first time yesterday. It went well; we are at good levels to help each other and seem to have a reasonable amount in common.

Etgar Keret short stories continue to be bizarre and I read through one last week. This time I read through it twice, marking up words I couldn't get from context. Then, I typed up a list of unknown marked words and translated them all. With the printed sheet in hand, I reread through the story again before writing a summary and discussing it with my tutor. I think this is the first short story where I got about 90% of it. I didn't add the words to my SRS because a lot of them seemed too non-mainstream (effigy?) for right now.

Spanish: Still sold on The ULAT, which is a series of videos that teach via immersion. I use them with my homeschooled kids three times per week.

I was trying to keep a log as a spreadsheet, but often do language activities at night and have no desire to use the computer in the evening. I might switch to pen and paper. But I've been doing at least 30 minutes each German/Hebrew daily since Jan 1.