Fleafreethree's Thai and Sanskrit Log

[fleafreethree]

Since I’ve signed up for the 366-day challenge, I thought I ought to start a log, if only to keep track of how (badly?) I’m doing on that.
For 2020, I have two language-related goals:

(i) I speak Thai reasonably well but there’s a big discrepancy between my receptive and my productive skills so next year, I want to bring the latter up to a level that is a lot closer to the former, although as I actually live in Thailand, this shouldn’t be too difficult. I’m making reasonable progress on switching over to using only Thai at home but for 2020, I’m also going to engage in some combination of: taking regular Italki lessons, journaling, shadowing, essay writing (I went through a period of doing IELTS essays before and I think I’ll do this again) and bi-directional translating, plus whatever else I can think of.

In terms of more practical ways to use/develop my L2, I’d also like to write a book along the lines of Schaum’s Outline of French Vocabulary but (obviously enough) for Thai - my wife teaches English at a local university and I’m thinking of paying some students to roleplay a bunch of different situations and using the resulting language to produce some kind of textbook but if that does happen it wouldn’t be until the latter half of the year.

On top of that, I also want to make some materials in Thai to help my wife’s students learn English - the students are absolute sweethearts but their progress in learning English is almost entirely non-existent, and while there are many reasons for this, part of it is because they simply have no idea how to go about learning a language. Unfortunately, the kind of knowledge and experience that’s available on forums like this is pretty much entirely unknown to them (in the Rumsfeldian unknown unknown sense) and so for some time, I’ve thought about trying make this available to them. Many of the students have no real interest in learning English but for some of them, a course in learning how to learn a language would, I think, be enormously useful. Again, though, this is a much more long-term project.

(ii) For Sanskrit, things are much more straightforward – start and finish Maurer’s ‘The Sanskrit Language’. I’ve had a go at this before and made it through the first half-dozen units before running out of steam but through 2020, I’m going to be mounting a fresh assault. There is a total of 40 units so at roughly 1 per week, this should be eminently achievable as a side project.

[fleafreethree]

Nothing very exciting to report from the first week of the new year. I managed to put in at least 30 minutes on my two languages, even if what I did was somewhat less impressive than I had hoped.

Sanskrit: I completed unit 1 of Maurer and started on unit 2. I like to type up the exercises in Word and doing that and adding vocabulary and grammar to Anki actually takes up a surprisingly large fraction of the time I spend on Sanskrit. I suppose it’s all good (and adding vocabulary to Anki is pretty much unavoidable) but it does mean that my progress is a little slower than I had thought. That said, I also noticed that there 32, not 40, units to do so I’m very confident about finishing within a year.

Thai: I find this a bit more difficult. With Sanskrit I can just open a textbook and plod on with that for however long I choose to work but I don’t have this option with Thai and because I don’t have any obvious structure to my learning that I can hang on to, I’ve been a lot less productive – clearly the answer is to write out some kind of curriculum for myself, or at least a schedule of what to do. In the meantime, I spent last week carefully transcribing an interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J707Df3AfH8), partly as a listening exercise and partly to use for shadowing. I also wrote about 1000 words on New Year’s resolutions so that covers me for the week’s output challenge for writing, plus I’ve started reading a book called ไทยปิฎก (Thai-pi-tok – it’s on the relationship between institutional Buddhism/the Sangha and Thai politics) and I’m listening to a lot of podcasts. Unfortunately, input isn’t really the problem and as yet, I haven’t recorded anything for the speaking side so that’s another thing I need to give some thought to. Perhaps a daily audio diary would be the easiest thing to start off with. I think I’ll also have a look at iTalki tutors. On the plus side, we’ve switched over to using about 80% Thai at home, which should have a bigger impact that anything else.

Unfortunately, I’m away for a few days this week so there’s a fair chance that the 366-day challenge is doing to suffer an early loss. Never mind. Onwards and upwards.