Week 23
1st June - 7th JuneGERMAN 1h45'Apart from watching
Drei Türker und ein Baby on Netflix and some Anki flashcard review,
leider nichts mehr.
Ach nein! I also discovered a nice Youtube channel about travelling,
WDR Reisen, and watched a short episode about the former capital of West Germany, Bonn. OK I knew it was the birthplace of Beethoven, but I wasn't aware it was also the city of
Bärgummis!
ENGLISH 8h'I finally finished
Reign on Netflix: how am I now supposed to go on with my life without the unbelievable plots and subplots of this epic (and totally historically inaccurate) series? I'll have to browse for a new one, I assume.
Apart from that, some videos on Youtube, and a couple of hours reading polyglot Richard Macpherson's nice booklet
How to Maintain Foreign Languages cover to cover.
FRENCH 4h45'Reading a few articles from
Le Monde and having a nice chat with my italki tutor Marie from Paris: we mainly talked about the end of the coronavirus lockdown in France,
chômage partiel and the economic repercussions of the virus, and finally the French language in Russia (she used to be a teacher there).
I also went through lesson 7 in my Assimil
Perfezionamento del Francese, with a revision of pronominal verbs and how to conjugate their past participles (I already know the rules, but it's always nice to review them, since they are sometimes different from Italian), as well as listening to
France Culture podcasts while driving to work.
ITALIANI'm just adding my native language (but I'm not counting the time I spend on it!) because I've been reading Ludovico Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso. Even if it's written in sixteenth-century Italian, it's so spellbinding that I could go on for hours.
JAPANESE 6h50'For the conversation lesson with my
sensei, I had to prepare beforehand by reading the articles he suggested to me. One that I found particularly amusing was about a common problem during lockdown, コロナ太り(
korona-futori), i.e. putting on weight due to physical inactivity and eating a bit too much out of boredom. So we discussed the figures and data in Japan, as well as some firsthand evidence from our own experience
By the way, am I the only one who actually lost weight because I couldn't hit the gym?
I also finished lesson 66 from Assimil, where an elderly couple is planning their new house to be built: too bad the husband is not getting his long-awaited garden to grow his
bonsai trees!
Kanji in Context: exercises from lesson 4 + characters revised: 多、少、明、暗.
SWEDISH 3h20'I listened to a couple of episodes of my favourite history podcast in Swedish,
Historiepodden. I love this podcast, since it is aimed at native speakers (so no abridged or easy language), the episodes are long enough and treat very interesting themes from Swedish and world history. I may not seize every sentence, but I can now follow along and this has boosted my confidence in understanding the spoken language.
I also went through lesson 49 from Assimil, a review lesson and its crazy
repetitionsdialog.
This week was very important for me as I decided to steer back to my focus language, i.e. Swedish. I have been studying it regularly over the past five months, but without fully concentrating on it (as I did in the past). I quickly re-read Belgian polyglot Lukas Van Vyve's notes about learning and maintaining languages, and decided to follow his guidelines again. Basically, you have to group your languages into three categories:
low-maintenance languages (the ones you know at C1-C2 level plus your native language, especially if you live abroad - English, French, and Italian in my case),
high-maintenance languages (the ones at B2 level, German and Japanese for me), and then concentrating just on one single
focus language, your new or weakest one, so as to bring it up to a B2 level at least. So no evil plans to dabble in another Scandinavian language or in Dutch, or bring my dormant Spanish back to life for the moment, but just build up my Swedish to an acceptable intermediate level.
Heja heja friskt humör, det är det som susen gör!