Michelle's 2020 Log (Spanish, French, Korean, German, Italian)

[brokenrecord]

Previous logs: 2018 | 2019

New log for a new year! I decided not to make any specific goals for the year like X number of books read or hours of TV watched because those kind of goals end up feeling like too much pressure for me, and it's never a good thing when something that's supposed to be a fun hobby starts feeling like work. I do have some things I'd like to get done in each language this year, but I'm thinking about them more as general hopes/wishes. So here are those hopes/wishes, along with a quick summary of the progress I feel like I made in each language last year:

Spanish: I probably spent more time on Spanish than any other language last year, and it's also probably the language where I made the least progress (okay, maybe Italian was less), just because I'm at that intermediate level where progress feels very slow and gradual. But I do feel a noticeable difference in my comprehension from a year ago. Reading feels a bit easier than it did at the start of last year, and my listening also feels stronger. I feel like it takes less time for me to adjust to new Spanish TV shows before I'm able to understand them well, and there basically hasn't been any show recently where I've started it and felt like I had no idea what was going on. I also feel more comfortable with the subjunctive now (although I still need to work on it more). It's also nice that I'm at a level where I can take like a 6 week break from doing anything with Spanish and come back and not feel like I've lost a step.

I mentioned last year wanting to watch more movies in Spanish, but I really only ended up watching 2, and 1 was with Spanish subtitles. I do feel a bit intimidated still by checking out movies, and I haven't watched very many Spanish films in my life that I can rewatch and not have to worry about following the plot (unlike French, where I watched a bunch in high school/college that I could go back and rewatch. I've even seen more Japanese films in my life, although mostly due to an interest in Kurosawa's and Miyazaki's filmographies). Anyways, I'd like to get over that intimidation and try to watch more Spanish films this year. I think that would be kind of the next level up for me with Spanish. I'd also like to get to GdUdE C1-C2 this year, but there are a couple of other grammar workbooks I was planning on tackling first, so that might not be a realistic hope. And finally, I'd like to finish FSI Basic Spanish this year. I had the same goal last year and clearly didn't accomplish it, but I was making good progress with it at the end of the year, so I'm hoping I can finally manage to finish it this year.

French: Probably the language I improved the most in last year, although I was a false beginner. I'm starting to feel like I'm at the point where I could call myself a low intermediate. My listening comprehension has definitely improved, and reading now is much easier than it was a year ago. I still have a long way to go (which is true of all these languages, of course!), but I'm very happy with my progress. I had been kind of disappointed for awhile how far behind my French was vs. my Spanish considering I did spend 5 years of school in French classes and got to a decent level and then abandoned it and forgot everything, but it's coming back steadily. It's possible my Spanish will always be a bit stronger (unless I take a complete break from Spanish and just focus on improving French, which isn't happening), but that's okay. At least it's not as far behind as it was. This year I'd like to finish Buffy season 5 (only 5 episodes away now, so if I can't manage that, then I have truly failed), and then move on to native French TV/movies. And I'd like to finish the Duolingo tree.

Korean: Korean is up there with French as one of my most improved languages, mostly because I started the year only knowing Hangul (and even then, there were a few characters I would get confused) and Korean sounded completely incomprehensible to me, and now I can construct some basic sentences and pick out words when watching kdramas. I also can read Hangul much faster than I could when I started out. My vocab is still incredibly weak and I obviously have a lot left to learn, but when I started Korean there was a part of me that didn't think I'd ever be able to learn it, and now I feel like there may come a day when I can watch a kdrama without subtitles and understand it pretty well. Sometime this year I'd like to feel comfortable enough to start Korean Grammar in Use Beginning, which means both starting and finishing Integrated Korean Beginning 2 first. I also would like to work with an episode or two of a kdrama going line by line with subtitles in Korean and English and use it for learning purposes, but I'm not sure if I'll get to a point where I'm advanced enough this year where that'll be more useful than frustrating, so it may have to wait for next year.

German: I didn't spend a lot of time with German this year, but I have made improvements. I remember at the start of last year my active German was so bad that I found Duolingo frustrating and ended up taking a break from it, but now I'm back to it and I'm not having a problem. When I first started Dark, I understood almost nothing, but after just 10 episodes, my comprehension has improved considerably. In 2020, I'd like to finish Dark (I'm halfway through) and Harry Potter 6 so I can move on to native German books.

Italian: I barely did anything in Italian this year since I didn't start it until late in the year and then took a break for almost 2 months. Still, it's fun to be back at Italian again, and at the start of last year I basically remembered no Italian from the little I had done previously, and now I can say some very, very basic sentences, so that's still progress. After I finish HP6 in German, I'd like to try HP7 in Italian. I probably won't be advanced enough for HP this year, but I read the first Harry Potter book in Spanish during my first year of learning Spanish, and while it was challenging, I was able to muscle through it with my previous background in French and knowledge of the plot, so I'm hoping to be able to do something similar with Italian.

[brokenrecord]

Spanish
-El indiano: chapters 13-15
-Spanish newspapers: 2 articles
-FSI Basic Spanish: unit 38
-Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Subjunctive Up Close: unit 7 (done!)
-Hache: episodes 1-3

French
-Le cœur de la terre: chapters 4-7
-French newspapers: 2 articles
-Buffy the Vampire Slayer: episodes 96-98
-Practice Makes Perfect French Verbs: finished unit 4, 5.01-5.08
-Duolingo: 599 -> 618 crowns (7/7 days)

Korean
-Talk to Me in Korean: level 3.14
-Talk to Me in Korean Level 3 Memrise: 6/7 days (123/173 items)
-Integrated Korean Beginning 2: started chapter 9
-Anki: my sentence deck: 6/7 days
-Anki: Evita's sentence deck: 6/7 days
-Anki: Evita's vocab deck: 6/7 days
-Come and Hug Me (이리와 안아줘): episodes 23-26
-Today's Korean by Naver: 6/7 days

German
-Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz: chapters 10-11
-Dark: episode 11
-Duolingo: 252 -> 256 crowns (6/7 days)

Italian
-Duolingo: 40 -> 42 crowns (6/7 days)
-Practice Makes Perfect Complete Italian: 1.01-1.02
-Italian Grammar Drills: exercises 1-4

Most of the above is everything I've done in the past week and a half (since New Year's) except the activities I track on a daily basis (Duolingo/Anki/Memrise/Naver), which are just the past week. I've started the year fairly productively! I've been trying 1 weekday devoted to each language, and then weekends I have free, so I can take a break if I need it, but it also gives me the opportunity to catch up on things if I felt too tired/busy during the week or if I want to make a little more progress. The schedule has worked okay so far, but it's only been one week and I've been feeling fairly motivated, so we'll see how I feel in a couple months. Anyways, sorry in advance for how long this post is going to be, but apparently when I don't post for several months, I end up having a lot to say!

Spanish:
I started a new-ish Netflix show, Hache. I'm not a huge fan of it so far, but it's only 8 episodes so I'm nearly halfway through, and I like the two main actors a lot (Adriana Ugarte, who I know from El tiempo entre costuras, and Javier Rey, from Velvet), so I'm planning on finishing it. If there's a second season, I doubt I'll keep watching, though, unless the show gets much better by the end of the season. It's made in Spain, which is my comfort zone accent-wise, so my comprehension has been pretty good so far (although my attention has been wandering while watching the episodes, which doesn't help).

I also finally finished Practice Makes Perfect Subjunctive Up Close! I talked about it a bit in my old log, but now that I've finished it, I have to emphasize just how much I hated this workbook. I've used a couple different Practice Make Perfect workbooks before (the French Verb Tenses has been my favorite so far, but the Complete Spanish and Spanish Verb Tenses were pretty decent), but this is easily my least favorite. I feel like the way they explain the subjunctive and when it's used is overly confusing, and I absolutely would not recommend this book if you haven't been exposed to the subjunctive at all before. I figured I could at least work through the exercises to get some extra practice, but I found so many of the exercises to be completely unhelpful in actually practicing when to use the subjunctive. There are some that just ask you to translate Spanish sentences that use the subjunctive into English, and I'm not really sure what the point of it is? I guess to demonstrate how the Spanish subjunctive translates to English. But it didn't seem to be very helpful in learning when to use the subjunctive, so I ended up not even bothering to do the last few of them.

However, my least favorite exercises (which seemed to be the most abundant) were these paragraphs with blanks where you'd be given a word bank and have to choose the correct verb and decide how to conjugate it (subjunctive vs. indicative and past vs. present, essentially). And that sounds like it would be very useful, but the problem was that they'd tell you that some verbs could be used multiple times, but they wouldn't tell you which ones/how many times, so it ended up being more a test of general comprehension of vocab and other grammar structures rather than the subjunctive specifically. And there were so many blanks that I found it difficult to get an idea of what was trying to be expressed. I'd get so focused on trying to figure out the intended meaning and what verbs fit that I'd end up getting frustrated and not even filling in all the blanks for some of them. And when I'd read the solutions, it'd make sense, but I feel like it would've taken me an eternity to work out the right choices myself. In any case, I definitely feel like I learned much more from the subjunctive lessons in GdUdE B1-B2, and even in PMP Verb Tenses.

I haven't seen anyone else use the PMP Subjunctive book, so maybe I'm just dense and other people would get some use out of it, but for me it felt like a total waste of time and money (thankfully only $10, but still). I think I'm going to try Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive next. It's by the same authors who made Perfecting the Past (mostly about the imperfect vs. preterite), which I remembering finding to be very helpful, so hopefully that'll be better.

French:
I started Le cœur de la terre last fall, which is the third book in the Autre-Monde series that I've been reading. I like the series, but I don't feel incredibly invested in it. I'm starting to get to a point where the books are feeling much easier for me, so after I finish this one, I might take a break from the series and move on from YA to adult books. That probably will be a while from now, though.

I'm also very, very close to finishing season 5 of Buffy; I only have 2 episodes left, and then I plan on leaving Buffy behind. It was a show I loved as a teenager, but it hasn't aged as well for me, and while it's been enjoyable enough to rewatch, I feel ready to move on. I'm definitely excited to start using native French content.

Korean
I started Come and Hug Me (이리와 안아줘) last fall and am getting close to the end. I really liked it at the beginning, but I've gotten increasingly tired of the main plot as I've continued through the series. But I also only have 6 half-hour episodes left to go, so I've resigned myself to just finishing it. I have such a problem leaving things unfinished, but I really need to get more comfortable dropping kdramas when they're not capturing me, because there are always so many more waiting to be watched. It's a lesson I have repeatedly tried and failed to learn.

I mentioned I was planning on taking a break from HTSK, and I realized that meant I can also take a break from the HTSK Memrise course, which is helping keeping the SRS down a bit, which is especially needed considering how many Anki reviews I had. The first couple days back at it I felt like I had forgotten all the Korean vocab I had learned over the past year, but over the past week it's been coming back. I still have a number of reviews for the vocab deck, but I'm almost through them. Once the reviews get to a manageable level, I'll start adding new words/sentences again, but for now I'm holding off on that.

I also started doing Today's Korean by Naver each day, starting from the very first one in December of 2017. I saw ロータス mention it in AnneL's log (I'm always lurking in people's logs looking for more resources to try out!) and checked it out, and it seemed like a quick thing I could do every day to get some extra practice. And I figured since I've cut out HTSK and some of the Memrise courses I was doing, I have a little extra time to devote to something else. Granted, part of the motivation of cutting things out was to give myself extra free time, not to immediately replace it with something else. But it really only takes a couple minutes every morning, and I'm enjoying it so far. They're supposed to get progressively harder, so if I get to a point where I'm finding the sentences too challenging to understand, then I'll either pause or drop it.

German:
So I know back in the fall I said my plan with German was to try a pure entertainment-focused approach and not do any grammar, but… I may have bought 2 grammar workbooks this week. It's not that I actually feel like my grammar is lagging and my German wouldn't be able to progress continuing purely with reading and watching TV (really, my vocab has been the biggest hurdle, and it would probably be more helpful if I added a Memrise or Anki frequency deck for German, but I just can't bring myself to right now). But the issue is… I like grammar! Honestly, part of the fun of learning languages for me is learning new grammar structures and seeing how things are expressed in different languages and learning the rules and all of that stuff. So I ended up buying both Grammatik aktiv A1/B1 and Übungsgrammatiken Deutsch A B C A-Grammatik. They won't arrive for another week or two, so no grammar yet, but I plan on incorporating both of them once they come.

Italian:
As with German, I ended up buying some grammar workbooks. PMP Complete Italian and Italian Grammar Drills already came and I've started working through them. I'm liking them so far and plan on alternating between them. I also bought Nuova Grammatica Pratica Della Lingua Italiana which will be coming in a week or two. I probably won't start on that one right away since it seems like it might be a little above my difficulty level right now, but once I've made some progress in the other two, I'll add it in. Since all I was doing in Italian was Duolingo, I really felt like I needed to add something in, and I don't feel ready to try reading or watching TV quite yet.

[lingua]

Are the articles you read from newspapers or magazines? Do you just read or do you look up any unknown words? I'm thinking this is something I should incorporate into my studies.

[brokenrecord]

Are the articles you read from newspapers or magazines? Do you just read or do you look up any unknown words? I'm thinking this is something I should incorporate into my studies.

They're from newspapers. I follow the accounts of a couple different French and Spanish newspapers on Twitter and aim to read at least one article per weekday for each language during my commute. I also try to make sure I'm reading a variety of articles, so if I read a political article one day, the next I'll read one on sports, or something, so I'm getting exposure to different vocab. I look up any unknown words (although these days there usually aren't many, especially for Spanish). I have French and Spanish dictionaries on my phone, so it's easy to just highlight the word, look it up quickly, and continue. I definitely recommend it! Particularly early on, I found it to be really helpful for vocab acquisition and getting more comfortable reading, and it doesn't take long. I've only been doing it for Spanish and French, but I'm probably going to start doing it for German and Italian as well soon.

[brokenrecord]

Spanish
-El indiano: chapters 16-18
-Spanish newspapers: 3 articles
-FSI Basic Spanish: unit 39
-Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive: exercises 1-3
-Hache: episodes 4-5

French
-Le cœur de la terre: chapters 8-10
-French newspapers: 4 articles
-Buffy the Vampire Slayer: episodes 99-100 (done!)
-Nailed It! France: episode 1
-Practice Makes Perfect French Verbs: 5.09-5.19
-Duolingo: 618 -> 639 crowns (7/7 days)

Korean
-Talk to Me in Korean: levels 3.15-3.16
-Talk to Me in Korean Level 3 Memrise: 7/7 days (123/173 items)
-Integrated Korean Beginning 2: chapter 9
-Anki: my sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's vocab deck: 7/7 days
-Come and Hug Me (이리와 안아줘): episodes 27-30
-Today's Korean by Naver: 7/7 days

German
-Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz: chapter 12
-German newspapers: 1 article
-Dark: episode 12
-Duolingo: 256 -> 260 crowns (7/7 days)

Italian
-Duolingo: 42 -> 46 crowns (7/7 days)
-Practice Makes Perfect Complete Italian: 1.03-1.06
-Italian Grammar Drills: exercises 5-7

Spanish
I started Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive this week. I like it so far, but I've only gotten through the parts where they review the subunctive conjugations, which I feel pretty comfortable with at this point (especially since that's been the focus of the past couple FSI units). This week I'll be moving on to lessons where they actually teach how it's used, so I'll see how that goes.

French:
The biggest accomplishment this week: I finally finished Buffy! Well, season 5, but I had been intending to stop at the end of season 5 for awhile now. In part because at this point, it's taken me a year to watch 100 episodes, and I'm ready to move on, and in part because even as a teenager when Buffy was one of my favorite shows, I didn't care for seasons 6-7, besides a handful of episodes. My comprehension definitely improved over the course of watching the show. When I started it, I had to rely more on context and my memory of the plot to follow the story, but by the end I didn't need to do that as frequently. My comprehension still has a ways to go (I'd say it's around 70-80%, and that's for a dubbed show, so native speech would be lower), but I'm happy with the progress I've made, and I'm definitely ready to move forward.

After I finished Buffy, I started Nailed It! France as my first non-dubbed show. I figured it would be a good option since it's a baking competition show, so it's not hard to follow what's going on even if I don't catch every word, and even if I don't fully follow what's going on, it won't affect my comprehension of other episodes since there's no on-going narrative to follow. And there are only 6 episodes that are around 30 minutes each, which is appealing to me after being stuck watching the same show for a year. I've only watched 1 episode, and it was definitely more difficult to understand than Buffy for me — I'd say my comprehension is around 50%? Hopefully it'll be a good challenge and stepping stone for me to move on to other native French content.

Korean:
I managed to catch up on my Anki reviews this week! I'm probably going to keep holding off on learning new cards for a few days. For my Korean sentences deck, I don't have any new cards to learn since it's 99% sentences taken from HTSK, and I'm not using HTSK for the moment. I may start adding sentences to it from Integrated Korean. I had avoided doing so before because it was a lot easier to copy and paste sentences from HTSK than type them manually from Integrated Korean. But I've had to type in (short) answers to the Today's Naver Korean quizzes, and I'm starting to get a feel for the Korean keyboard layout. With more practice I should get better at it. Plus, I've been finding that while Integrated Beginning 1 was mostly grammar I had already learned and vocab I was familiar with, Beginning 2 already has a lot more unfamiliar vocab and new grammar, and I had been thinking I need to slow down my pace and focus more on absorbing the info. So adding sentences to Anki would probably help with that.

German/Italian:
I started following a bunch of Italian and German newspapers on Twitter with the intention of incorporating news articles like I have with French and Spanish. I don't think I'm quite ready for Italian news articles yet (my knowledge is still too basic for it not to be frustrating), but even just reading the headlines has been helpful. I can usually figure out unknown words through context and similarities to Spanish and French words. I do want to make more of an effort to read German articles, though, since vocab is really the area of my German that needs the most work, and I think the best way to do that (outside of SRS) is reading a ton. I'm still waiting on my German grammar books. Hopefully they'll come this week, but the delivery date range extends through next week, so I may have a bit longer to wait.

[brokenrecord]

Spanish
-El indiano: chapters 19-22
-Spanish newspapers: 2 articles
-FSI Basic Spanish: units 40-41
-Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive: exercises 4-6
-Hache: episodes 6-7

French
-Le cœur de la terre: chapters 11-14
-French newspapers: 3 articles
-Nailed It! France: episodes 2-4
-Practice Makes Perfect French Verbs: 6.01-6.07
-Duolingo: 639 -> 660 crowns (7/7 days)

Korean
-Talk to Me in Korean: levels 3.17-3.18
-Talk to Me in Korean Level 3 Memrise: 7/7 days (123/173 items)
-Integrated Korean Beginning 2: started chapter 10
-Anki: my sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's vocab deck: 7/7 days
-Come and Hug Me (이리와 안아줘): episodes 31-32 (done!)
-When the Camellia Blooms (동백꽃 필 무렵): episodes 1-5
-Today's Korean by Naver: 7/7 days

German
-Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz: chapter 13
-German newspapers: 5 articles
-Dark: episode 13
-Duolingo: 260 -> 265 crowns (7/7 days)
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lesson 1
-A-Grammatik: lesson 1.1.1

Italian
-Duolingo: 46 -> 50 crowns (7/7 days)
-Practice Makes Perfect Complete Italian: 2.01-2.04
-Italian Grammar Drills: exercises 8-12

Not much to discuss this week, just plugging away at everything, but I did get my German grammar workbooks! It's always fun starting new grammar workbooks (for me, anyways), although after a couple months I'll be ready for something shiny and new. I think I'd struggle with them both if I had absolutely no background in German and was trying to learn everything from scratch, but they seem pretty perfect for my purposes. I also got Nuovo Grammatica Practica della Lingua Italiana, but I'll hold off on starting that for awhile, since it seems a bit above my Italian level at the moment.

Besides that, this week I finished Come and Hug Me, which is one of my least favorite kdramas I've watched so far (it's not horrible, but I just got so bored after the first 10 episodes or so). I then started When the Camellia Blooms, which is a lot different from what I expected, and I'm not entirely sure if I like it, but I keep feeling compelled to watch more, so I guess that's something. It's on Netflix, but I installed the Language Learning with Netflix extension so I can watch it with English and Korean subtitles at the same time. In the past I've tried to choose kdramas on Viki to watch so I could use learn mode to have both English and Korean subtitles simultaneously (although learn mode isn't available for all their shows), so I'm happy to be able to do the same with shows on Netflix now, too.

This week may end up being a bit light on language learning. I have some stuff at work that's going to take some of my focus, so in my spare time I'm probably not going to be up for much that's mentally challenging. I do want to finish Hache and Nailed It! France this week, though, since I only have 1 episode of Hache and 2 of Nailed It remaining, so hopefully I can manage that.

[brokenrecord]

Spanish
-El indiano: chapters 23-28
-Spanish newspapers: 2 articles
-FSI Basic Spanish: unit 42
-Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive: exercises 6a-c, 7-10
-Hache: episode 8 (done!)
-Alta mar (season 2): episode 1

French
-Le cœur de la terre: chapters 15-22
-French newspapers: 3 articles
-Nailed It: France: episodes 5-6 (done!)
-Plan cœur: episode 1
-Practice Makes Perfect French Verbs: 6.08-6.13
-Duolingo: 660 -> 681 crowns (7/7 days)

Korean
-Talk to Me in Korean: levels 3.19-3.20
-Talk to Me in Korean Level 3 Memrise: 7/7 days (131/173 items)
-Integrated Korean Beginning 2: part of chapter 10
-Anki: my sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's vocab deck: 7/7 days
-When the Camellia Blooms (동백꽃 필 무렵): episodes 6-7
-Today's Korean by Naver: 7/7 days

German
-Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz: chapters 14-15
-German newspapers: 5 articles
-Dark: episode 14
-Duolingo: 265 -> 272 crowns (7/7 days)
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lessons 2-3
-A-Grammatik: started lesson 1.1.2

Italian
-Duolingo: 50 -> 52 crowns (7/7 days)
-Practice Makes Perfect Complete Italian: 2.05-2.06, 3.01-3.02
-Italian Grammar Drills: exercises 13-18

Got a little busy near the end of the week, but was able to catch up on things yesterday. I've definitely been feeling the challenge in learning 5 languages. I may need to take the next couple weeks easy. I just keep wanting to get more done each week, but there are only so many hours in the day, and it's probably better to just progress at a slow and steady pace rather than try to do too much and burn out.

Spanish:
I finished Hache this week. It wasn't terrible, but I never cared that much for it. It felt like my comprehension was a little lower than normal for me, but I think that was in part because I kept losing focus and ended up having no idea what was going on in the plot, so I didn't know the context for what was happening in each scene. After I finished it I started the second season of Alta mar. I watched the first season last summer and thought it was decent, and I hadn't decided for sure if I wanted to continue with the second season, which was released last fall, but nothing else seemed really appealing to me, so I figured it would be simplest to pick up a show I was already familiar with. The one bad thing is that it's been long enough since I watched the first season that I don't remember how it ended or who like half the characters are, so once again I'm not 100% sure what's going on.

French:
I finished Nailed It: France this week. It wasn't too challenging to follow considering it's just a baking competition show, so it's not like the plot can go in too many different directions, and it follows a formula so even if I would miss a sentence or two, it was easy to understand what was happening. After I finished it, I started Plan cœur. My comprehension of just the first episode wasn't great. Maybe around 40%? Definitely much lower than Buffy, which I would've said was around 70% by the point I stopped. Those are completely made up numbers, but it should give a sense of the drop-off. I'm thinking I'll watch each episode once without subtitles and then rewatch with both English and French subtitles simultaneously, using the Language Learning with Netflix extension. I started doing that with Dark (originally I would watch each episode once without subtitles and then once with German subtitles, looking up any unfamiliar vocab, but I switched to both German and English subtitles when rewatching the past couple episodes), so hopefully that should help. The plot at least wasn't too challenging to follow, even if I didn't always understand exactly what was being said.

Korean:
I finally got to a reasonable place with my SRS reviews, so I've started allowing new cards for my Anki decks. Still only 2 per day to keep things low for now, but better than nothing. When I first went back to Anki after my break, there were a ton of Korean words that I didn't remember having ever seen before despite being in my reviews, and I was struggling with remembering a good chunk of them, but now most of them are sticking, thankfully. I've also massively slowed down my pace with Integrated Korean, and I think that's helping me a lot, too, even if I'd like to progress a little faster. I feel like I'm absorbing new vocab/grammar a bit better, though, so I think it's the right choice to keep at a slower pace.

German:
My goal recently has been to up the amount of reading I'm doing in German. I really think that vocab is my biggest hurdle to improving my German comprehension right now, and for me the best way to acquire vocab is massive amounts of input (specifically written things, since I have difficulty acquiring new vocab aurally). I've switched from aiming to read 1 article per day in Spanish and French each on my commute to work to reading 1 article in German each day and then alternating between Spanish and French for the second article. I could probably drop Spanish entirely since I only rarely ever get new vocab from Spanish articles these days, but I'll probably wait until I decide I'm ready to start reading in Italian, and then I'll replace Spanish articles with Italian ones. I also had been aiming to read 1 chapter of Harry Potter per week, mostly just because my reading speed in German is still really slow, and I definitely have to look up a lot more vocab than when I'm reading in French/Spanish, but I'm going to try for 2 chapters per week. That'll get it closer to the amount of Spanish and French reading I typically do (the chapters in the French and Spanish books I'm reading are much shorter than the average Harry Potter chapter, so it may not look comparable, but it is). It's a little challenging now just because of how much I have to look up, but I was at a similar place in French a year ago (and I can remember feeling the same way about Spanish a couple years ago), and I know the only way to get past that hurdle is just continue to read as much as possible.

[brokenrecord]

Spanish
-El indiano: chapters 29-34
-Spanish newspapers: 2 articles
-FSI Basic Spanish: unit 43
-Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive: exercises 11-14
-Alta mar (season 2): episodes 2-3

French
-Le cœur de la terre: chapters 23-27
-French newspapers: 3 articles
-Plan de cœur: episodes 2-3
-Practice Makes Perfect French Verbs: 6.14-6.19, 7.01
-Duolingo: 681 -> 702 crowns (7/7 days)

Korean
-Talk to Me in Korean: levels 3.21-3.22
-Talk to Me in Korean Level 3 Memrise: 6/7 days (141/173 items)
-Integrated Korean Beginning 2: worked on chapter 10
-Anki: my sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's vocab deck: 7/7 days
-When the Camellia Blooms (동백꽃 필 무렵): episode 8
-Today's Korean by Naver: 7/7 days

German
-Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz: chapters 16-17
-German newspapers: 5 articles
-Dark: episode 15
-Duolingo: 272 -> 278 crowns (7/7 days)
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lessons 4-5
-A-Grammatik: finished lesson 1.1.2

Italian
-Duolingo: 52 -> 56 crowns (7/7 days)
-Practice Makes Perfect Complete Italian: 3.03-3.05, 4.01
-Italian Grammar Drills: exercises 19-21

Not much to discuss this week. Plan de cœur is still very difficult to understand, but I think rewatching each episode with both English and French subtitles is helping. My main issue is just there's so much slang that I haven't been exposed to before in French. In Spanish the main way I learned a bunch of slang was translating each episode of Estoy vivo from Spanish to English, but I don't know if I want to commit to anything that time-intensive at the moment. So I think I'll just keep doing what I've been doing and hopefully gradually I'll pick things up.

I also managed to hit a 365 day Duolingo streak this week! I've never kept up with Duolingo this regularly before. Even during the periods in the past year where I took a break from languages, I managed to keep up with Duolingo. I know Duolingo has its issues, but I do thing it's a good way to keep up practicing my languages even when I'm taking a break from everything else.

[brokenrecord]

Spanish
-El indiano: chapters 35-38
-Spanish newspapers: 2 articles
-FSI Basic Spanish: unit 44
-Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive: exercises 14A, 15
-Alta mar (season 2): episodes 4-5

French
-Le cœur de la terre: chapters 28-30
-French newspapers: 3 articles
-Plan cœur: episodes 4-5
-Practice Makes Perfect French Verbs: 7.02-7.07
-Duolingo: 702 -> 723 crowns (7/7 days)

Korean
-Talk to Me in Korean: levels 3.23-3.24
-Talk to Me in Korean Level 3 Memrise: 5/7 days (148/173 items)
-Integrated Korean Beginning 2: finished chapter 10
-Anki: my sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's vocab deck: 7/7 days
-When the Camellia Blooms (동백꽃 필 무렵): episode 9
-Mother (마더)
-Today's Korean by Naver: 7/7 days

German
-Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz: chapters 18-19
-German newspapers: 5 articles
-Dark: episode 16
-Duolingo: 278 -> 288 crowns (7/7 days)
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lessons 6-7
-A-Grammatik: started lesson 1.1.3

Italian
-Duolingo: 56 -> 63 crowns (7/7 days)
-Practice Makes Perfect Complete Italian: 4.02-4.05
-Italian Grammar Drills: nothing

French:
Plan cœur continues to be fairly difficult for me to understand, primarily because of slang. I'm considering going through one of the episodes and converting all the dialogue into Anki cards with the French sentence on one side and English translation on the other to help me absorb it more quickly.

Korean:
My interest in When the Camellia Blooms has been waning. I often find with kdramas that I'll get sucked in at the beginning but then start to lose interest midway through, but at that point I feel obligated to keep going. I might check something else out this week because I really want to make an effort to look for shows I actually like rather than stick to ones I'm not interested in just for the sake of completion. I did end up watching the film Mother this week just for fun, not language purposes. I had seen Parasite twice and loved it, was thrilled it won Best Picture at the Oscars last week, and had been meaning to watch more of Bong Joon-ho's films (I'd already seen Okja, Snowpiercer, and Memories for Murder). It wasn't on Netflix so I watched it only with English subs, but I figured I'd mention it anyways.

Italian
I'm thinking of putting Italian Grammar Drills on hold for awhile. I think it's a bit above my level. It just seems to require way more previous knowledge of grammar/vocab than I have. PMP Complete Italian also requires a little previous knowledge, but it doesn't feel quite as challenging. I was actually looking at Nuova Grammatica Pratica Della Lingua Italiana and thinking I might switch to that. When I first glanced through it, it looked intimidating because it's all in Italian and it supposedly covers A1-B2, but the first few lessons don't look too bad and appear more manageable than the Italian Grammar Drills exercises I've been doing. So I think I'll switch to that for a bit, and if I start finding it too challenging as well, then I can focus solely on PMP Complete Italian.

[brokenrecord]

Spanish
-El indiano: chapters 39-40
-Spanish newspapers: 2 articles
-FSI Basic Spanish: unit 45
-Demystifying the Spanish Subjunctive: exercises 16-17
-Alta mar (season 2): episodes 7-8 (done!)
-Élite (season 3): episodes 1-2

French
-Le cœur de la terre: chapter 31
-French newspapers: 3 articles
-Plan cœur: episodes 7-8
-Practice Makes Perfect French Verbs: 8.01-8.02
-Duolingo: 771 -> 792 crowns (7/7 days)

Korean
-Talk to Me in Korean: levels 3.25-3.26
-Talk to Me in Korean Level 3 Memrise: 6/7 days (173/173 items)
-Integrated Korean Beginning 2: started chapter 11
-Anki: my sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's sentence deck: 7/7 days
-Anki: Evita's vocab deck: 7/7 days
-Crash Landing on You (사랑의 불시착): episodes 1-16 (done!)
-Today's Korean by Naver: 4/7 days

German
-Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz: nothing
-German newspapers: 5 articles
-Dark: episode 17
-Duolingo: 297 -> 301 crowns (7/7 days)
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lessons 8-9
-A-Grammatik: lesson 1.1.3

Italian
-Duolingo: 68 -> 70 crowns (7/7 days)
-Practice Makes Perfect Complete Italian: 5.01
-Nuova Grammatica Pratica Della Lingua Italiana: started lesson 1

So it's been about a month since my last post, which I wasn't intending, but I needed a break. I didn't take a complete break – for the first 2 weeks, I kept up my normal Duolingo/Anki/Memrise/Naver daily tasks (no FSI or articles, though) and I got in an episode or two of Spanish/French TV, but the third I just did 1 crown on Duolingo French per day. I just had several really busy weeks at work plus a couple of things outside of work to deal with (nothing serious/bad, just things that took a little time away from everything else) and I just didn't have the focus or attention for doing anything with languages. I was a bit of a zombie, really — I wasn't even doing fun things in English. I did a whole lot of zoning out and not thinking about anything in my spare time, which I needed. This past week I got back into things, so the above is just what I did last week (I didn't bother tracking the other weeks and don't feel like making an effort to figure it out).

Spanish:
I finished Alta mar. It's not a great show, but I found myself getting sucked in, even though I had forgotten most of the plot of the first season, and it was easy enough to get through. Élite season 3 went up on Netflix on Friday, so I started watching that and will probably finish it this week. I think it's still the toughest Spanish show for me to follow, although it's still much easier now than it was when I first watched season 1 over a year ago. It's definitely more challenging than Alta mar, at least, so it should be good practice for me.

Korean:
I had been watching When the Camellia Blooms (동백꽃 필 무렵) before my break, but I just wasn't feeling that interested in it, and it was hurting my motivatoin. I think part of the issue with me and kdrramas I'm not fully invested in is that they are often so long (60-70 minutes usually) that it really feels like a commitment to watch an episode, in comparison to French/Spanish (Alta mar has episiodes around 40-45 minutes, and Plan cœur only 25-30 minutes). And then the other thing is that I'm still watching Korean with both Korean and English subtitles, and with my other languages, I'm watching episodes without any subtitles (and then rewatching them with subtitles, as needed), so even if I'm not in love with whatever I'm watching, I get enough enjoyment from the intellectual stimulation of trying to understand a different language. But I'm not there with Korean just yet.

So that's all to say that I decided to pause watching When the Camellia Blooms for now. I might return to it some day. But instead, I started watching Crash Landing on You (사랑의 불시착), which was a great choice, since I absolutely loved it and finished the entire show this week. It's not a show that has a very realistic premise (a woman from South Korea accidentally crash lands in North Korea, meets a North Korean soldier and they fall in love while trying to get her back home), but it was the kind of cheesy romance I often enjoy, and I really enjoyed a lot of the side characters as well. I also noticed at times I would look away from the screen and miss a subtitle, but I would occasionally still be able to pick up the gist of what was being said based on understanding a couple words, or even the entire sentence if it was really short. I still don't feel anywhere near ready to try watching kdramas without English subtitles, even with only Korean ones, but at the very least it was nice feeling like, even though I had taken off a couple weeks from Korean, I hadn't lost any progress from before my break. And as usual with me getting super invested in a kdrama, I am now feeling extra motivated to progress more quickly with Korean. Which is a good reminder that if I'm not invested in a kdrama, it's better to take a break and try to find something else, because there are so many good ones out there that I haven't watched yet, and it's better for my motivation with Korean when I'm watching something I really enjoy.


I was supposed to go on vacation in 2 weeks, which I have been sorely needing, but of course it's now been canceled due to coronavirus. So I don't expect much to change with my language-learning plans for the next few weeks. I'm probably going to switch to working from home this week, but that won't change things too much, other than giving me back around an hour today that won't be taken up by my commute, and allowing me to do some things during my lunch break that I wouldn't normally be able to do, like working on my grammar workbooks. But otherwise things should be pretty normal for me.