I've been giving my language goals some thought over the past few days and I think my focus for 2021 is going to be the following:
1. Maintain consistency by continuing to study for at least 30 minutes a day.
Having completed two years of the 365-challenge, I did give some serious thought as to whether I really wanted to commit myself for a third year. I don't want this challenge to become an obsession! But in the end I decided that I didn't really have anything to lose by attempting another year. I've signed up for a "generic" challenge to give myself the flexibility for my daily 30 minutes not to have to be Russian every single day, but in reality I wouldn't be surprised if I got to the end of the year with my study on all/most days being Russian. I enjoy consuming content in Croatian and I don't need a challenge to make me do it regularly, but with Russian I do still need some additional motivation. I feel like I have made progress with Russian over the past two years, but that I probably do need another year of keeping pushing at it to have a breakthrough. Really, I think my goal is to make enough progress in 2021 that I don't feel the need to do a 365-challenge in 2022
2. Complete my Russian Super Challenge.
As things currently stand, this will require reading another 3,053 pages (61 'books') and watching another 6,025 minutes of TV (67 'films'). I don't think the reading part of it will be a problem; although I am a bit behind where I should be at this point in the challenge, I do have a big pile of Russian books to start reading and I am at a stage where I can get some level of enjoyment from reading in Russian, despite it being difficult. Completing the films part of the challenge is going to be more of a struggle. I'm at that weird stage with listening where I can do pretty well at understanding a monologue from one individual speaker, whether that's on a podcast, a YouTube video or a news programme, but I struggle to understand dialogue between multiple speakers in a series or film. I went through exactly the same phase with Croatian in 2014/15 and I know the solution is to listen to hours and hours and hours of Russian TV and basically hammer myself over the head with it until one day it clicks and I magically understand
But despite knowing that's the solution I still find it difficult on any given day to force myself to sit through a TV episode of which my comprehension is miserable. I've been quite slack with this in the latter part of 2020 and so I really want to do better in 2021. I do actually question whether a single Super Challenge is sufficient for me to make the progress I want in Russian; the progress I made with Croatian was as a result of a Double Challenge. But I also question whether I have time to do more than a single challenge, so for now let's assume that's all I'm doing and anything else will be a bonus!3. Complete my Croatian Super Challenge.
This is more just for fun really. I need to read 3,012 pages (60 'books'), but I've had lots of Croatian novels for Christmas and my reading speed, while slower than German and English, is a lot faster than Russian. So I don't think this will be a problem. And I'm actually ahead on the films challenge, with 3,927 minutes (44 'films') remaining. I can't think of any reason why I wouldn't meet that target by the end of the year, although I am well into the second half of 'Drugo ime ljubavi' now so I will need to find a new series to get hooked on by the end of the year.
4. Continue to improve my grammar knowledge.
I have several textbooks I want to work through in Russian. First of all I want to get to the end of Schaum's Grammar (provisionally hoping to achieve this by the end of March) and then I have some B1-level textbooks which I received for Christmas in 2019 but haven't been able to work with yet. I'd like this to be the last year that I have to spend huge amounts of time studying Russian grammar, i.e. by next year I'd like to be in a position where the majority of my Russian time comes from reading/listening rather than textbooks.
I do also have several Croatian textbooks that I would like to re-visit. I was hoping to spend more time on this in 2020, but didn't.
5. Write short texts regularly in both Croatian and Russian.
I haven't signed up for the Output Challenge because I don't want to stretch myself too thinly on the challenge front (and also I have failed to complete the Output Challenge every time I've signed up previously!) but I do want to have more of a focus on writing output in 2021. I probably wrote close to zero words in both languages this year, so it won't be difficult to improve on that. I don't think 50,000 words per language is necessarily a realistic target to aim for, but I will keep track of how much I write and see what total I get to. I haven't done any significant writing in Russian up to this point, so even trying to string together 100 words is going to be horribly painful. I'm hoping that writing in Croatian will feel blissfully easy in comparison
6. Read 10 novels in German.
That's a fairly arbitrary number, just for the sake of being measurable. I read 8 novels in German in 2020 and I don't feel like 2020 was a great year for reading, so I'm hoping this is fairly achievable.
) and I don't remember the plot in detail.
