Re: SC bookkeeping and other language learning whimsy
Posted: Sun Nov 15, 2020 1:41 am
tangleweeds wrote:I loved your comments on typing in different languages--isn't it funny how we develop these odd preferences/aversions? My downfall was the Russian alphabet. Hiragana, katakana, kanji? Cool! Nifty! Crazy Gaeilge spelling/pronunciation? OK, fine, looks familiar but everything behaves uniformly weirdly. New different letters in the Russian alphabet? Cool! But a handful of my familiar roman sounding as I feel others should instead? My brain broke and noped out on that one entirely, no matter how many clever little apps I played with
Learning Cyrillic has been a challenge for me, and remembering the keyboard is even worse. So I understand. I think if I could drop everything else and just focus on Russian it would be a lot easier, but I don't want to do that. So I just slowly plug away at that. In past 6WC challenges, I worked on learning Russian cursive which was very helpful in getting me to write by hand in Russian, although I admit my Russian handwriting is a sloppy mess of cursive and my own style of writing block letters that I suspect no native Russian speaker could read without getting a headache. As for typing in Russian it's one of those things that I feel if I push myself too hard, I'll just discourage myself. So I just do a little typing practice on Clozemaster when I review mastered sentences, just maybe 20 at a time, a couple times a week, and I'm slowly getting better.
But I actually had an entirely unrelated question. What exactly do you do (or skip doing) in a "speedrun"? (as for Colloquial Dutch)
Usually when I go through a textbook like a Colloquial text, I tend not to go through them very linearly or quickly, and I'll spend different amounts of time on different things and I like to write some, if not all, exercises out. I'm not doing that with the Dutch course, because a lot of the basic grammar is recognizable to me and I don't want to spend too much time it. So I'm making myself just go straight through the text. I'll read the grammar and dialogues, listening to the audio files, read through the exercises (but not write any of them out) then at the end of the chapter I go back over the vocabulary very quickly and I move on to the next chapter. The idea is I want to get through both volumes first and if there are weaknesses or things I need to go back over, I'll do it later.
I've done something similar to this before with the Assimil Breton course because I had already completed Buan hag aes--very painstakingly I would like to add, and I still have the notebooks where I wrote out all those exercises and sentences, which make me grimace in haunting memory when I look at them --and so with the Assimil textbook, I didn't want to get bogged down on grammar and vocabulary I already knew, so I just rushed through the first 20 or so chapters (aka the "first wave" per the Assimil method).