3rd May 2020 / Day 124Well, in a turn of events that will come as a shock to no one, I didn't make it to 24 hours of reading. BUT, I did get a sweet, sweet
11 hours in (661 mins total), with a grand total of
267 pages.*
*Actual page count a bit higher but there was a decent amount of manga/children's books involved.
Here's my breakdown:
German 174 pages over 349 mins (5.82 hours); reading speed about 30 pages/hour. Finally finished
Das Licht der Phantasie (which I started in 2018!
); also read parts of
Der Kastanienmann,
Death Note Band 4, and some assorted fanfic.
Der Kastanienmann is pretty cool though I'm trying to avoid thinking about how long it is!
Mandarin 13 pages over 81 mins (1.35 hours); reading speed about 10 pages/hour. Consisted of reading two graded readers twice through, which has proved to be kind of useful, actually!
Spanish 68 pages over 196 mins (3.27 hours); reading speed about 21 pages/hour. A lot of this was manga; managed to read all of
Fullmetal Alchemist vol. 1 and also the first chapter of
Sailor Moon. Also read the first chapter of
Artemis Fowl.Scottish Gaelic 12 pages over 35 mins; reading speed about 21 pages/hour. This was two bilingual children's books; both are on Kindle Unlimited (KU). Nothing staggering in terms of vocabulary (and I read through them both twice) but quite nice for boosting self-esteem and picking up a few new words.
What was the point of this?So, I did this mostly as a boost for the beginning of the Super Challenge (and technically, I'm now three books down for my German SC, so it's nice to be that far ahead!) but it's helped me work out a kind of method I want to go forward with and also has identified some of my weak spots.
I've been seriously neglecting my German; not to the point where I'm going to have to go back and re-learn everything, but to the point where my reading speed is far slower than it's been for a while and so daily practice should get me back into the swing of things pretty quickly. I don't think my choice of book helped, since I've been chipping away at
Das Licht der Phantasie for aaaages (it's not my favourite Pratchett book but I kind of wanted to re-read them all in German, in order), so hopefully that'll also factor into it.
I'm impressed with how well I did with Spanish this weekend! But I did notice, when I switched from
Fullmetal Alchemist to
Sailor Moon, that the latter was much, much easier for me to understand. I'm definitely going to supplement my extensive reading with some intensive reading here; I looked up the odd word this weekend and saved it to a list on SpanishDict, so that's something to go through later. Maybe 10mins/day of extensive reading will provide a bit of a boost; I'll give it a try this week and see how it goes.
For Mandarin and Scottish Gaelic... characters have (obviously) always been an issue with Mandarin. I'm just not used to reading them! But then, that's why I went through the graded readers twice each and I could probably afford to do that a third time. Even if the Sinolingua site switches to paid tomorrow, I know I can get some readers through KU and that I have a couple around the house, too. For Scottish Gaelic, it's going to be a little difficult, and I might end up reading a few things around the web at first. LearnGaelic sends out a bilingual newsletter every Saturday and I don't think I've really read any of them, so that could be a useful tool. Can't wait to be able to read a full book in it, though!
So, that's
that. Also did a few minutes of Korean Memrise and my BSL time for the day, so am just gonna drop my overall times for the day before I go off to bed. I'll probably put a kind of Super Challenge set up post on this log tomorrow too, so I have something centralised here to track my progress!
Total: 366 mins (953 mins / 12,370 mins)