Thanks aaleks, that's really interesting to know! I watched an episode of Мухтар yesterday and I was looking at doors a lot more attentively
***
Yesterday was 30 June and that means we're halfway through the year
I think it's fair to say that 2020 has turned a bit differently to how all of us hoped when we woke up on 1 January and started making plans for a new year. I was determined I was going to track all my language time in a super-duper spreadsheet and I set it up on 1 January with an extra column for "location", the intention being that I would record where I'd done each bit of studying and, by the end of the year, have lots of interesting data about how much studying I'd done on my commutes vs while being at home. Looking back at it now, I can see that the last time I did any studying outside of my home was on the morning of 16 March, when I did 19 minutes of Russian Memrise on the train to Birmingham. I had no idea that morning that it would be my last commute for several months, but that evening I got a text telling me to work from home for the foreseeable future... which at the time I thought might be for 2 or 3 weeks... but now it's 1 July and it turns out the future really wasn't foreseeable because there's no prospect of the office opening again before the autumn. The location column in my spreadsheet is therefore rather redundant, but I'm still filling it out every day with "home". I guess in a way it's capturing the strange reality of this year.
It's easy to get caught up in thinking what a dreadful year this has been so far. I haven't seen my parents since 7 March. I had six really exciting international trips planned, all of which are now cancelled. I'm particularly sad about losing my trip to the Azores, which was booked for June, and my trip to Albania which was planned for September. But I'm trying to hang on to the positives too. I got promoted in March, which wasn't on my bucket list at all. I am enjoying the extra sleep which comes with working from home at the moment. The extra coffee and cake which also comes from working at home means I haven't necessarily lost as much weight as I planned, but I have managed to stick to my new year's resolution of getting 70 000 steps per week even during the strictest part of the lockdown. No one in my family has caught the virus so far. And I've had a lot more time to spend on learning Russian than I would have done if I had anything more exciting to do
Goodness knows what the next six months of the year will bring, but I figured now would be a good time to take stock and look at my goals from the start of the year.
Radioclare wrote:I really want to try to keep up the consistency of language study which I somehow managed during 2019. I've signed up to the 2020 365 challenge with "generic", because I want to continue to study for 30 minutes per day, but I don't want my focus to be exclusively on Russian.
So far, so good. I've managed at least 30 minutes of Russian every day this year so far but I've also made an effort to get more Croatian in. My spreadsheet tells me that I've spent 309 hours on languages in the first six months of the year, of which 174 hours were spent on Russian.
That said, I do want to try and maintain the momentum which I've had with Russian during 2019. Specifically, I want to feel by the end of 2020 that I have a better grip on Russian grammar. I still have a pile of courses which I want to work through. My initial plan is to finish Penguin Russian, which I'm currently partway through (chapter 19). I haven't made a firm decision about what to do next, but I have a German-language version of Russian Assimil which I'm considering going back to (I completed the passive wave a couple of years back, but was totally out of my depth with the active wave. I'm hoping that I've improved enough to be able to manage the active wave now). I also have Colloquial Russian 2 and some new B1 textbooks that I got for Christmas. Plus I would like to finish the RT online Russian lessons, because I think they're a really cool resource.
I'm not sure I have a better grip on Russian grammar, but there's still time
I'm making good progress with the courses though. I finished Penguin Russian in March and that felt like a big achievement. I flirted with Assimil for a while but I just couldn't get into it. I was disappointed because I've seen so many people singing its praises, but I just don't think it's for me. I finished the RT online lessons in May though and I feel like I got loads out of those
I'm also six lessons into Colloquial Russian 2; the chapters are incredibly long, but hopefully the next six months will be enough time to finish it and start my B1 textbooks
I don't want to be completely obsessed with completing Russian courses though, so I think this needs to be the year I start trying to read in Russian. I have a small pile of books which I hope to at least start tackling this year. If the Super Challenge starts running again in May, I might sign up with Russian to give me the motivation to get started with this.
Well, I'm now signed up to a Russian Super Challenge
I've read two Agatha Christie novels in Russian and I'm partway through the first Twilight book, so I think I'm on track with this goal.
At the end of 2020, I want to re-take the Online Diagnostic Assessment for Russian and score higher than I did at the end of 2019 (I scored 1+ in Dec 19).
I can't face taking the test again today so this one will have to wait until December
I want to restore some balance between studying Russian and studying Croatian during 2020, because I feel like Croatian lost out quite a bit to Russian in 2019. This is sad, because Croatian is definitely my favourite language. This is the first time I've studied two languages from the same family and so I'm also a bit nervous about the potential for me to start getting Croatian and Russian mixed up, i.e. that my Croatian could become worse the better I get at Russian.
I am trying quite hard with the balance at the moment. I'm alternating between reading a book in Croatian and a book in Russian for my Super Challenges, for example.
I don't think I can come up with a measurable goal for what I want to achieve with Croatian this year, but I'm planning to track my time spent on all languages this year (in 2019 I only religiously tracked Russian time) and so hopefully by the end of 2020 I can at least see that I have spent a reasonable amount of time on Croatian. Obviously I want to continue reading in Croatian, and I have a pile of novels to get through, both translated and original. I want to finish watching the second series of 'Na granici', which I'm partway through, and then find another series to get hooked on. But I think I also want to do some proper "studying"; perhaps revise some textbooks, work through some of the Croatian-language grammar books I have, maybe even deal with the 2000+ outstanding vocab reviews that I've had pending in Memrise all year
Once I've done all that I should probably try to start writing in Croatian again (but I am definitely not signing up for an Output Challenge!)
I've spent 116 hours on Croatian so far this year. I haven't got figures from last year to compare, but it feels like more. So far I've read four novels in Croatian this year, one of which was a translation from English, while the others were original literature. I did indeed get to the end of 'Na granici' (41 episodes watched this year) and got successfully hooked on a new series, 'Drugo ime ljubavi' (55 episodes). I have been slowly revising grammar using the 'BCS - A Grammar' and will hopefully get to the end of this within the next month or so, so that I can move on to other books. I still have 2000+ outstanding vocab reviews in Memrise
And I've done zero Croatian writing.
I want to continue reading in German, which is something I really enjoy. My active German is rusty at the moment, but the fact that I continue to be able to read in German with a level of ease that I could only dream of achieving in Croatian (or even in Esperanto!) reassures me that I haven't lost it.
I've only read four novels in German so far and most of those were in Jan/Feb. I was planning to do lots of German reading in April and May in preparation for a trip to Liechtenstein at the end of May but yeah, that didn't happen!
I also received three novels in Esperanto for Christmas and they are all things which I genuinely want to read, so I guess I have a goal of reading at least three books in Esperanto this year
I've read one of them but I wasn't very impressed. I don't think it passed the "Could this have got published if it had been written in a language other than Esperanto?" test. The other two books I've got are translations so they should be fine, I just need to make time to read them.
I would like to have time to start learning Bulgarian, but I'm not sure how realistic this will turn out to be in 2020. I'm not planning to do anything in the first quarter of 2020 anyway; it will be later in the year, if I do start.
Unfortunately I think Bulgarian is off my to-do list for this year. I was hoping to plan another holiday to Bulgaria in 2021, but if it's possible to travel normally again in 2021 I want to prioritise re-booking all the trips I had planned for 2020. So I can't see that I'll be going to Bulgaria before 2022 at the earliest.
So overall I seem to be doing surprisingly well against my goals, despite everything. I think my main focus for the next six months will be getting stuck into my Super Challenges and progressing through my more advanced Russian textbooks. And who knows, perhaps at some point my "location" column will start to regain a bit of variety