2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

[Ccaesar]

JANUARY REVIEW
Days studied: 31/31
Total hours: 44.8 (50.17 inc. all langs)

Here's my overall stats for January:



I'm not surprised I did well with Scottish Gaelic/Ainu, as they were both languages I was using for my 366-day challenge. German's done well, though it's proven to me that I can just start switching my entertainment to German now (and after a few months to keep me on track, I doubt I'll really have to track that time at all). As for Spanish, Mandarin and Korean—although I didn't hit my targets in any of those languages, I'm glad that I was over halfway there for Spanish, which is a language I often neglect.

As for my overall goals, I've been working on those, though I didn't end up going to any language exchanges in January. Not that surprising, since I don't like to go outside in winter! Will try and improve on this in February/March.

I added Italian, Catalan, Maltese and Sicilian to my languages after being told I could go on the Polyglot Cruise (27th Jan); I have a target on these languages of fifteen minutes a day, which I've managed to hit so far. I'm counting these numbers separately because they're not languages I'm likely to carry on with past April and I don't want my spreadsheet to become too unwieldy!

FEBRUARY TARGETS

I've set individual goals for my main languages in February. The main one is that Scottish Gaelic is my 6WC target language so I want to make sure I'm studying that every day. Aside from this, though, they vary a little:

• Clear all my reviews on Memrise (~2,500).
• Be in the top 5 6WC participants for total language time.
• German: Finish reading Das Licht der Phantasie and another book.
• Mandarin: Complete up to lesson 42 of NPCR 4.
• Spanish: Complete up to lesson 15 of Living Language Ultimate Spanish.
• Korean: Complete up to lesson 4 of Living Language Korean.
• Scottish Gaelic: Complete up to lesson 6 of Teach Yourelf Complete Gaelic.

I've also only got today and tomorrow left with Ainu, so I'll be moving onto a new language for that challenge come Thursday! Not like I've got enough to do...

Is your table ordered in hours spent? Since the value of those numbers are unclear Sorry for messing with your table!

[LunaMoonsilver]

Is your table ordered in hours spent? Since the value of those numbers are unclear Sorry for messing with your table!

Ah, no, sorry! I've been looking at it so often this month I forgot that it's probably not super clear to other people!

Basically all the numbers are in minutes until the very final row (44.8 and 49.75), where I've divided the totals above (time spent / goal time) by 60 to get the hours. It's easier for me to track minutes day-to-day because it's rare I'll spend, like, an hour on an app or something.

Let me know if there's anything else that doesn't make sense!

[LunaMoonsilver]

1st Feb 2020 / Day 32

It's so nice when a new month starts on a weekend! Although I actually didn't get around to doing something in every language, I did spend a lot of time with German today (played some more Stardew Valley; I forgot how much time you can sink into that game but it's so fun!) and started listening to a new podcast. It's called Pen & Paper and is a group of guys playing TTRPG (not Dungeons and Dragons, but similar), so pretty challenging for my listening skills. I did forget, when I started it, that I'd left the speed on x1.2 on Spotify (for the English podcasts I'd been listening to) so did have to change that back—but otherwise it was a lot of fun.

Also, after having watched the last ever episode of The Good Place, I started it again in Spanish today. Well, started from Season 2 anyway, as I've seen Season 1 a bunch of times. I also spent some time on other languages; it's interesting that the 6WC bot has no tag for Sicilian. Or, of course, Ainu, so I've had to resort to tagging them both as multilingual instead!

German
64 mins YouTube
167 mins Stardew Valley
66 mins podcast - Pen & Paper

Mandarin
15 mins Memrise

Spanish
67 mins The Good Place S02E01-02

Scottish Gaelic
9 mins Memrise
5 mins Duolingo
17 mins Teach Yourself (Aonad 3)

Ainu
16 mins Memrise
9 mins Unilang
7 min YouTube - Shito Channel

Total: 459 mins (459 mins / 3,147 mins)

Other Languages
69 mins (528 / 3,538 total)

2nd Feb 2020 / Day 33

One thing I've got to work on is getting up early at the weekend—my sleep schedule is so much worse since starting this (9-5) job and I kind of low-key hate it.

But anyway, still got a bunch of language stuff done today. Watched some YouTube Let's Play videos (mostly Dead by Daylight because that game looks fun but also v v stressful for me) in German, did a bunch of Memrise reviews—and ditched some decks I know I'm not going to work through—and spent some time with Anki for Scottish Gaelic. Watched Picard (in English) as my Sunday evening chill (like I was so stressed!) and was enjoying it so much that I was surprised the episode ended because I thought it had only been on for ten minutes! Oops!

German
131 mins YouTube
66 mins Podcast - Pen & Paper

Spanish
21 mins Memrise

Korean
17 mins Memrise

Scottish Gaelic
25 mins Anki
4 mins Duolingo
4 mins Glossika

Ainu
18 mins Memrise
13 mins Unilang

Total: 299 mins (758 mins / 3,446 mins)

Other Languages
46 mins (804 / 3,883 total)

3rd Feb 2020 / Day 34

Back to work eating up most of my day (:lol:) so it's been useful to have a German podcast to listen to—I listened on my way to the gym at the morning, then at the gym; the guys are exploring Morriton Manor, and there's some kind of secret and sometimes I don't really catch what's going on but I'm hearing lots of description and the fun thing about these kinds of podcasts is that they all try different voices. (So one is speaking German with a reallllly bad French accent! )

Managed my half an hour of Scottish Gaelic in the evening—I'm trying to learn my numbers, which is... going. Also another half an hour of Ainu, which I'm less pumped about now. I just don't know if I've learnt all that much and that's pretty disappointing (obviously). I'll get into it more later but I'm kind of glad I'm nearing the end of my time with Ainu.

(Don't worry, I'll meet a harder language in a couple of months and be wishing I had Ainu back!)

German
79 mins Podcast - Pen & Paper

Scottish Gaelic
11 mins Memrise
4 mins Duolingo
8 mins uTalk
8 mins Teach Yourself

Ainu
15 mins Memrise
10 mins Unilang
7 mins YouTube (Shito Channel)

Total: 142 mins (900 mins / 3,588 mins)

Other Languages
0 mins (946 / 4,025 total)

4th Feb 2020 / Day 35

Worked from home today and got a lot of things done that I didn't plan to do (so the sum is neutral, I think, which is annoying) and then had a headache strike after dinner, so had a two-hour nap. Still, managed to get some language stuff in when I woke up and watched a couple of things on my lunch break/through the day.

German
56 mins YouTube

Spanish
67 mins The Good Place S02E03-05

Scottish Gaelic
9 mins Glossika
7 mins Memrise
2 mins Duolingo
12 mins Teach Yourself

Ainu
20 mins Unilang
13 mins YouTube - Shito Channel

Total: 186 mins (1,086 mins / 3,774 mins)

Other Languages
0 mins (1,132 / 4,211 total)

5th Feb 2020 / Day 36

My final day with Ainu! So I spent some time working through the final lesson on Unilang, which was in fact a series of conversations, then started putting together some stuff for the (very) short video I'm going to make on the 6th. It's kind of frustrating to me that a lot of the resources for Ainu cover different dialects and that, without any knowledge of Japanese, I'm a bit stuck when it comes to knowing more about the language—but that's part and parcel of learning endangered languages, so hopefully something can be done about it at some point.

I don't feel like I learnt and really internalised all that much during the last eighteen days—unlike with Scottish Gaelic. And sure, some of that could have been down to the fact that I'd learnt some Gaelic before, but I think the lack of transparency with Ainu made it more difficult. Plus, I spent some time learning the katakana (and had to, to get anywhere with the Memrise course!) but that was essentially wasted when everything is written with romanisation (and Ainu katakana usually can't be displayed well).

Still, it was an interesting language; nice to see that, like Gaelic, French and some other languages, it uses 20 as a base for counting. The next one I'll be moving onto is Guernésiais!

German
19 mins YouTube

Spanish
22 mins The Good Place S02E06

Scottish Gaelic
4 mins Memrise
3 mins Duolingo
32 mins Teach Yourself

Ainu
58 mins Unilang

Total: 138 mins (1,224 mins / 3,912 mins)

Other Languages
33 mins (1,303 / 4,382 total)

(And wow, I am not doing five days' worth of updates again for a while! This will teach me to come back more often! )

[LunaMoonsilver]

me: I'm never going to leave five days between updates again!

also me: ...

well, it's been a full uh 16 days since I last updated but I have been using/studying my languages the whole time! I'm not going to run through everything I did, just the time I spent and the major highlights:

German
Time spent: 1,216 minutes. (20.27hrs)

Highlights: I'm progressing at a good pace with Stardew Valley, which is a lot of fun. I also tried some other games, but I'm going to stick with the virtual farming for now. Upped my goal to two hours a day for this month as well (did I mention that already??) and I'm slightly off track for that at this point, but am sure I can pull it back around. Definitely need to spend some focused time on vocabulary.

Mandarin
Time spent: 599 minutes. (9.98hrs)

Highlights: I've been studying off and on and had kind of been avoiding TV... and then I watched Netflix's The Ghost Bride last weekend. It's only six episodes long and I loved it; it felt really modern, even though it was set in 1890. I really hope they make another series! After that, I got back into The Princess Weiyoung which is a great revenge story (and appropriately dramatic!).

Spanish
Time spent: 328 minutes. (5.47hrs)

Highlights: I've watched an episode of The Good Place most days, usually when I've been eating dinner. It's started to pay off—I was doing some exercises from my coursebook last week and some of the answers just felt wrong and the rhythm is starting to come to me a little. Also realised I really have to focus on Spanish before going on the Polyglot Cruise (we're hitting Barcelona and Mallorca) and before I go to Madrid in May, so I'm hoping to get some more reading in over the next few weeks.

Korean
Time spent: 249 minutes. (4.15hrs)

Highlights: I've finally finished the first lesson of the Living Language book! I think, overall, it's taken several years but it's done! And I remember stuff! I also went to see Parasite... I'd written about the film for our blog at work so I knew the plot going in, but still, w o w. That was an incredible piece of work; I was sucked straight in and still went through all the emotions I think I was expected to. Also started carrying on with A Korean Odyssey; my only problem with that show is that each ep is about 90 mins long, so I really have to put some time aside for it.

Scottish Gaelic
Time spent: 6 minutes. (0.1hrs)

Highlights: Well, not many, since I've spent practically no time with the language. I just keep updating my Duolingo streak here and there. Definitely need to get on with it—and find something to watch or read, tbh.

Guernésiais
Time spent: 490 minutes. (8.17hrs)

Highlights: It's been a good couple of weeks with Guernsey French! I'm starting to get a grasp of the pronunciation; the main danger of all of it, at this beginner's stage, is getting it mixed up with standard French. Also had a lot of helpful advice from the people who promote Jerrais after they saw me posting about my blog on Twitter, so that was nice! I'll be done with Guernésiais in a few days and moving onto Nahuatl, which poses a different challenge in that I'll likely have to use Spanish as my base language pretty often.

Time spent: 2,888 minutes (48.13hrs)

Total time (Feb): 4,112 minutes (68.53hrs)
Total time (2020): 6,800 minutes (113.3hrs)

Other Languages
Time spent: 35 minutes.

Overall total time (2020): 7,305 minutes (121.75hrs)

[guyome]

Highlights: Well, not many, since I've spent practically no time with the language. I just keep updating my Duolingo streak here and there. Definitely need to get on with it—and find something to watch or read, tbh.

Have you tried watching Machair? Soaps are definitely not my thing but I found it strangely addictive (maybe because of the gorgeous Lewis scenery?).

[LunaMoonsilver]

Yeah, things kind of fell apart after my last update. Well, actually, February was a pretty good month for me, at least with regards to language learning, but then by March every day at work seemed to be a discussion about if we were going on lockdown, when we might go on lockdown, and I lost a lot of interest in doing anything. I left London mid-March; the government said on the Monday night we should start working from home where possible and my brother came down and picked me up the evening after.

Since then, I've had some time just to try and get used to the new situation, but it's been almost a month now so I'm ready to pick things back up again. I've still been studying my endangered language every day (I'm on Māori now!) but, other than that, I've neglected the rest of them.

BUT, I am super excited for the Super Challenge starting again in May so I decided it was time to drag myself back to the forum. Gonna start trying to do daily updates again from this evening and hopefully I'll get my mojo back!

[guyome]

Welcome back!

What resources do you use for Maori (if you don't mind my asking)?

[LunaMoonsilver]

Welcome back!

What resources do you use for Maori (if you don't mind my asking)?

Thanks!

And of course, I don't mind! I've been using:

• uTalk (has about 2,500 Māori words/phrases; I'm finding it useful for pronunciation)
• Memrise, mostly this one: Top 1000 Māori words
• Drops (useful for reinforcing vocab I've seen before)
• Tipu (an app for learning Māori; you can find its website here or download it from the App Store/Play Store—it's free and really useful but sometimes a little slow)
• This blog, Springston Te Reo (Seems to have notes etc. from where they've done teacher training for Māori, so there's some helpful grammar stuff)
• I also found this: First Lessons in Māori, but it's from 1930 so not exactly up to date!

What I've found, for Māori, is that there's lots of scraps of resources around but finding a textbook or course is kind of tricky. The textbooks are £30+ (and almost impossible to get right now regardless) and then there's courses that look like they're free at first glance, but only actually are if you're from NZ or live there. There's a few good study groups on Facebook too, though, if you happen to use the site at all!

[LunaMoonsilver]

15th April 2020 / Day 106

Haven't done a lot—same as I have been doing, about—but I have set up my spreadsheet in preparation for the Super Challenge and have also decided (since 1st May 2020 is a Friday) that I'm going to try a 24 in 48-esque readathon that first weekend. Last time I did this was last July, and I read over 1,300 pages in about 15 hours (99% of them were not in English).

So, it might be a nice kickstart!

However, I am planning, as usual, to maybe push it a little hard with this SC—potentially, I'll do at least a half in all my languages, though I may be cautious and not sign up with them all at first. That means I need to get some super-serious study time in during the next two weeks!

Anyhow, onto today's learning:

Spanish
5 mins Duolingo

Māori
10 mins Memrise
6 mins Drops
23 mins Tipu

Total: 44 mins (667 mins / 10,016 mins for 2020*)

*167 hours; not including the languages I was doing for the Polyglot Cruise because 1) I'm not doing them as it's obviously been postponed and therefore 2) it was kind of annoying to keep tracking that time separately

[LunaMoonsilver]

16th April 2020 / Day 107

Offered to help with some translation QA today at work so ended up working on that until about 9 pm. Which on the one hand, boo, but on the other, it really drilled in (again) how the German du imperative works!

Anyway, did a tiny bit of language study today. I do really like the Tipu app for Māori; there seems to be a lot of cycling of drills involved, which is fun. I can also finally spell TV! (Pouaka whakaata... I think!)

Mandarin
5 mins Memrise

Spanish
4 mins Duolingo

Māori
16 mins uTalk
30 mins Tipu

Total: 55 minutes (722 mins / 10,071 mins)