SC bookkeeping and other language learning whimsy
Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2020 2:01 am
I wanted to start a log again mainly to help me keep track of my SC progress since we still do not have a bot, as far as I know. This is not to put pressure on whoever is working on the bot--I completely understand that life in the year 2020 is weird and challenging and there's just too much stuff going on everywhere. This is simply for my own accounting. It's going to take me a bit to record everything I've been doing since the challenge started so this initial post is just to get things rolling and put pressure on myself to actually follow through before we're several months into 2021 and I've forgotten half the things I've done.
But since I am easily distracted and diverted, there will be other things, I'm sure.
As for the state of things, I decided to just blow off any pretense of being a disciplined, focused language learner for most of this year. Spending so much of this 2020 at home has allowed me to indulge in far more languages than is ever advisable for anyone, and to say I have too much on my plate right now is a charmingly amusing understatement.
For starters, I have my "California Project" which is focusing on languages spoken in California other than English. My main foci are Spanish, Russian, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Hawaiian, with some less intensive foundational study in Japanese, Mandarin and Arabic. I started this project before the pandemic showed up in the US, and that I managed to keep at it, with all the distraction and anxiety and chaos on this year, has been amazing. Around April or so I decided I wanted to dabble in a bunch of Romance languages, and so I did. That impulse now has mostly waned, but I'm still keeping up my streaks in several Romance languages on Clozemaster because why not? It wasn't a complete waste of time, I must say: I know can read articles online in Catalan, Portuguese and Galician with significantly less effort. (Wish I could say the same for Occitan, which just seems much harder than most of the Western Romance family.) More recently I wanted to dabble a bit in Estonian, Finnish and Dutch, and now that I got that mostly out of my system as well, I feel I need cut back on my dabbling and detours so to focus back on my SC languages and my California Project.
This is not to say I've neglected my SC over this time. For one, I've watched A LOT of Ros na Rún, telenovelas and whatever Netflix has had in German and Russian, thanks to many sleepless quarantine nights. And I've taken up cross-stitch again after many years so I can do something with my hands while I listen to my French audiobooks. And our local library started curb-side check-out a couple months back, so I'm back to reading Spanish books again, as well as re-reading some of the French and German books I have. I'm currently on my 3rd Welsh book and after that I have a backlog of Irish e-books that I collected over the summer that I need to get on.
So, yeah, my SC is happening. I'm just not really recording my progress anywhere. Next update I'll start doing that.
But since I am easily distracted and diverted, there will be other things, I'm sure.
As for the state of things, I decided to just blow off any pretense of being a disciplined, focused language learner for most of this year. Spending so much of this 2020 at home has allowed me to indulge in far more languages than is ever advisable for anyone, and to say I have too much on my plate right now is a charmingly amusing understatement.
For starters, I have my "California Project" which is focusing on languages spoken in California other than English. My main foci are Spanish, Russian, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Hawaiian, with some less intensive foundational study in Japanese, Mandarin and Arabic. I started this project before the pandemic showed up in the US, and that I managed to keep at it, with all the distraction and anxiety and chaos on this year, has been amazing. Around April or so I decided I wanted to dabble in a bunch of Romance languages, and so I did. That impulse now has mostly waned, but I'm still keeping up my streaks in several Romance languages on Clozemaster because why not? It wasn't a complete waste of time, I must say: I know can read articles online in Catalan, Portuguese and Galician with significantly less effort. (Wish I could say the same for Occitan, which just seems much harder than most of the Western Romance family.) More recently I wanted to dabble a bit in Estonian, Finnish and Dutch, and now that I got that mostly out of my system as well, I feel I need cut back on my dabbling and detours so to focus back on my SC languages and my California Project.
This is not to say I've neglected my SC over this time. For one, I've watched A LOT of Ros na Rún, telenovelas and whatever Netflix has had in German and Russian, thanks to many sleepless quarantine nights. And I've taken up cross-stitch again after many years so I can do something with my hands while I listen to my French audiobooks. And our local library started curb-side check-out a couple months back, so I'm back to reading Spanish books again, as well as re-reading some of the French and German books I have. I'm currently on my 3rd Welsh book and after that I have a backlog of Irish e-books that I collected over the summer that I need to get on.
So, yeah, my SC is happening. I'm just not really recording my progress anywhere. Next update I'll start doing that.