Of course, yes, lots of people contribute to the success of a place like this, but it certainly makes a difference when you believe that something which takes some of our precious time to think and write about won't just disappear because of the lack of interest from someone else. Besides, it's also a relief to be confident that annoying trolls will be gently taken care by a mature and experienced group of moderators.
That said, I'm back to language learning. Indeed, I've never stopped, but during 2015 I was deeply involved on some other projects. Anyway, I've learned hiragana and katakana (not yet to perfection), continue to (slowly) improve my knowledge of German and that's all I did this year about language learning.
Now my projects are very ambitious, but let's see how much of it I'll be able to handle. Two years ago, I went back to judo. At that time, I was learning Mandarin but it was soon very clear that it would be much more important if I could learn Japanese, in order to profit from lots of judo stuff that exist only in Japanese.
As already said, so far hiragana and katakana (and some japanese phonetics) are almost all that I've learned. At this time, my first, more important and long term project is to learn Japanese. I'll start using Genki as a textbook, "The Key to Kanji" to aid kanji learning, plus Anki and Memrise.
By pure chance, during the last month I was introduced to the Georgian music and I'm completely fascinated about it. I'm proud about the very rich and wonderful brazilian music, I'm a jazz, blues and caribbean rhythms fan, I've been listening to baroque and other old european genres since my teens, I enjoy folk music from Russia and various african regions but I've seldom been as much impressed as by the music from Georgia that so far I've been able to listen to (without understanding a single word, of course!!).
The Georgian language sounds great as well, they have one of the most beautiful writing systems of the world, their food seems delicious, their landscape is amazing and they have a great judo team. That's enough to want to learn this language. I'll start with "Beginner's Georgian" by Dodona Kiziria, plus Anki and Memrise
This would already be enough and even unfeasible. However, in 2016 Rio de Janeiro will host Olympics, I've already bought tickets for three days (judo, of course) and it would be nice to talk to people. The main language I'll try to improve is German, but all other languages that I've already learned, at least to A1 level, will receive some attention. I'll call this my Olympics Project. My goal is to study 500 hours till the first day of the games.
To improve my stronger languages, I'll have a "passive" and an "active" phase. During the "passive" phase, I'll mostly listen to interesting stuff. During the "active" phase I'll write on Lang-8 and try to speak somewhere, maybe through SharedLingo, not yet sure.
To study Russian and Mandarin I'll start listening to Michel Thomas, way faster than the first time, then continue with "Basic Spoken Chinese" for Mandarin and, possibly, Princeton course for Russian.
I want to be able to speak to people, as much as what I've learned so far for each language would possibly allow me to do. It goes from almost everything in Spanish and French to almost nothing in Russian and Mandarin.
My idea is to set aside a weekday for each language, Mondays for German, Tuesdays for Spanish and Esperanto, Wednesdays for Italian, Thursdays for French, Fridays for Catalan, Saturdays for Mandarin, and Sundays for Russian. Missing days for German and Italian may be compensated on next day. German will be studied at other moments as well.
How much of this I'll really be able to accomplish? I don't mind, for progress in any of these directions will certainly make my life better in many ways.
Any corrections, comments, suggestions, criticisms, support and nice words will be welcome!!
