Hi, it's been a while.
I've been focusing on settling in at my new job and also getting into a new hobby (Latin dance). I've still been doing language stuff but haven't had time to log it.
Interaction, not "output"I've come to the conclusion that for a number of languages I've been procrastinating when it comes to production. It seems pretty clear that experience with interaction has a positive effect on comprehension, it's quite easy to miss nuances in pragmatics or avoid learning how to "listen quickly" if all you're doing is raw input. That's not really output though, because interaction contains both input and output.
Lately I've been doing a lot of 1-1 online classes for Portuguese, which I've been enjoying a lot. It helps that my tutor is fun to talk to. I would like to work on my French the same way but I'm not sure when I'll be able to fit it in.
I'm thinking that even for some of my weaker/more difficult languages I could benefit from some more interaction. I think talking to people in the language definitely helped my comprehension levels in Hungarian and Urdu and got me to the point I am now where input is relatively pleasant to consume (less so with written Urdu sources), and I didn't necessarily do
that much input (and definitely not mass audio input) to get to that level. I'm not convinced anymore that "mass input" is the most efficient way to go about this.
Then again, it's hard to find the energy and motivation to talk in languages that you're bad at. It'd be more fun to do group classes but it's hard to find good ones, as I mention in the
German section below.
What source of input?I think I've been forcing myself to read novels a bit too much. There are a couple of subreddits and Facebook groups in certain languages that I enjoy reading so I'll try to do a bit more of that, I find it easier to get lost in the material and do 3 hours straight.
As for audiovisual material, I think I'll not force myself to do too much listening or TV watching because I enjoy reading much more. I think I can mostly get away with a combination of reading, flashcards and interaction; I won't worry about listening that much unless I have a compelling reason to do so.
If I watch any TV shows, I'll do it in Urdu (just because it's a harder language with a lot more "different" ways of expressing things, so it'd be good to drill some of those common expressions in by watching simple dramas; when listening to Turkish dramas dubbed in Urdu I understand upwards of 95% of the dialogue). I won't force myself to binge any shows because I don't like doing that, a lot of the time 20-30 minutes is enough. Who cares how long it takes me to finish watching some stupid drama.
I might have to get into listening to more German at some point, though.
GermanI have a pretty compelling reason to get better at German, so that's been my main focus. I should probably do more for it but I also want to spend time in the Romance and Slavic languages because I enjoy it a lot. Oh well. I guess I can still ease myself into it.
I've been reading Rafik Shami's
Der ehrliche Lügner fairly slowly (and re-read the first 30 or so pages several times). I also re-read the first 70 pages of Blutwette a while back.
I'm also taking German classes at a language school but they're lower intermediate and I feel like I'm a bit above the level. I have been learning some new words of course and I'm definitely benefiting from speaking to the teacher in German... I do feel like I would get more mileage out of 1-1 classes, but then again they can be more tiring at times. It's a shame that group classes so often seem pointlessly basic, they can be very hit-or-miss; I'm glad I managed to take classes at university (for say Hungarian, Polish, Hebrew) which were generally of very good quality and often with fairly motivated and dedicated students.
FlashcardsI've pretty much given up on Memrise. I can't sign in anymore for some reason, and it's not too good anyway (reviews pile up too fast).
I have found that I can get away with single word cards (which is what I was using Memrise for anyway) in Anki, as long as there's another card that has a sentence with that word in it.
I also tend to add multiple cards with the same word and then click the option to randomise the order so they don't come up on the same day in the deck.
- For languages where I can't find many sentences with only one new word, I'll add all the words from a bunch of sentences as single word cards, randomise them, and have the sentences come in later in the order.
- For languages where I can use monolingual dictionaries, I'll have one card with the original sentence I found + monolingual definition, and another one with a translated example sentence from glosbe or bab.la.
- Sometimes I'll have two monolingual cards.
For Punjabi unfortunately most pdfs aren't searchable and it's hard to find example sentences on the internet (not much presence on glosbe, tatoeba; no bab.la), so there I guess I'll just have to add single word cards only and then re-read passages. Or type out sentences straight from books? Could work, but it seems like a bit of a hassle. Either way I'm not expecting to progress too fast.
Maybe I should just buckle down and buy one Punjabi book and expect to finish in ~12 months (I'm not in any rush anyway so why not?), rereading lots of passages. I can't do that with the books I've been reading in Punjabi recently since they're from the local library, so I just end up reading/studying the first handful of pages and then returning them.