Michelle's 2022-24 Log (Spanish, French, German, Korean, and Italian)

[brokenrecord]

March 5-11

Spanish:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 135
-PMP Intermediate Spanish Grammar: exercises 8.06-8.09

French:
-Duolingo: finished unit 101
-PMP French Verbs: exercises R39-R40

German:
-Duolingo: finished unit 29
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lesson 73

Korean:
-Drops: 7/7 days
-Duolingo: worked on unit 6
-KGIU Beginning: lessons 19.03-19.04, 20.01-20.03, 21.01-21.02
-Vitamin Korean 2: finished review of unit 1
-Yumi's Cells: chapters 17-23
-intensive work with Vincenzo: episode 1.02

Italian:
-Duolingo: practiced 7/7 days
-PMP Italian Verbs: exercises 7.11-7.15
-Orgoglio e Pregiudizio: chapters 35-41

Another week similar to the last few. Korean is still my focus above everything else. I've kept up my spreadsheet method of acquiring small amounts of vocab which I think has been working all right so far. Obviously it's not as effective or efficient as using Anki would be, but it's way easier on my mental load. There is also some vocab that I've acquired (or at least have a vague kind of, "Wait, that word means something like [X], right?" reaction when I see the word and then get it confirmed when I look it up) through repeated exposure. I only had about an hour a night to spend on Vincenzo this week so my progress through the series is very slow at the moment. At this rate I won't be done with the show for several months, and knowing me, that means I will get distracted at some point and once again fail to finish the series. Hopefully that's not the case.

With grammar, I usually rotate through each language each day, so I'll do a few exercises (roughly 10-15 min) of PMP Intermediate Spanish one day, then a few in PMP Verb Tenses for French the next day, etc., but I would end up doing two days in a row for Korean, with KGIU one day and then either Vitamin Korean or Master Korean the next. However, the KGIU lessons are very quick for me (each one takes less than 5 min) since there's usually only one exercises per lesson, and most of the grammar I've been introduced to previously so I don't need a ton of time to read through the explanations. So for the past week or so I've just been doing one KGIU lesson every day in addition to whatever other grammar I've been doing rather than having a separate day for KGIU. As a result, I am getting very close to being finished with KGIU – I think I'm just a couple weeks away. I'm also a few weeks away from being done with PMP French Verbs (although I said this like 2 years ago and even bought my next French grammar workbook in preparation and still haven't cracked it open yet) and Grammatik aktiv A2-B1 (this will be more like a little over a month, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel), so that's also keeping me motivated now, since I always enjoy finishing one resource and getting to jump into another. All of this is of course assuming I can stick to my current language-learning schedule for at least a few more weeks.

[brokenrecord]

March 12-18

Spanish:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 135
-PMP Intermediate Spanish Grammar: exercises 8.10-8.11, 9.01-9.04

French:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 102
-PMP French Verbs: exercises R41-R47

German:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 30
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lesson 74

Korean:
-Drops: 7/7 days
-Duolingo: finished unit 6
-KGIU Beginning: lessons 22.01-22.02, 23.01-23.03, 24.01-24.02
-Master Korean 2-2: started unit 6-3
-Yumi's Cells: chapters 24-32
-intensive work with Vincenzo: episode 1.03

Italian:
-Duolingo: practiced 7/7 days
-PMP Italian Verbs: exercises 8.01-8.03
-Orgoglio e Pregiudizio: chapters 42-46

I discovered this week that I can read two chapters of Yumi's Cells per day rather than 1 (I swear when I first started it, it said only 1 per 24 hours after the first 10 chapters), so I've been doing 2 per day for the past few days. My goal will still be 1 per day, but if I have the time and the energy, I may do two. When I started reading it, it would typically take me 30 min per chapter to get through, but now it's usually more like 22-25 min, and occasionally I'll get a chapter where there's less dialogue and/or the dialogue uses more vocab/grammar that I already know, so there have been some chapters I've gotten through in like 12-15 min, which helps. I can tell my vocab has been increasing over the past month with everything I've been doing, and it helps getting exposed to the same words in different contexts, so the combo of Yumi's Cells, Drops, Vincenzo, and occasionally even vocab in Vitamin Korean/Master Korean has also helped me pick up vocab more quickly.

I haven't finished any of the grammar workbooks I mentioned I was close to finishing last week, but I'm on track to finish both KGIU Beginning and PMP French Verbs this week. I already have PMP Intermediate French to go to next, but I ended up buying KGIU Intermediate this week. I was debating whether to hold off on it or not since I'm still working through both Master Korean and Vitamin Korean, so it's not like I'm lacking for Korean grammar workbooks, but I've been enjoying doing 1 KGIU lesson per day, and I like the way it's structured, so I figured I might as well get it now.

I've also been thinking recently about going back and doing some grammar review from the workbooks I've already gone through as well as picking up How to Study Korean again, but I haven't figured out exactly how to incorporate that into my current schedule, so I haven't gone forward with that yet. In general I have had a little less time for languages this week, and I've already had to make peace with the fact that I'm probably only going to have enough time to get through 1 episode of Vincenzo per week (I'm just hoping I can keep consistent with it for long enough to finish the season), so I'm hesitant to add a lot more to what I'm already doing right now.

[brokenrecord]

March 19-25

Spanish:
-Duolingo: finished unit 135
-PMP Intermediate Spanish Grammar: exercises 9.05-9.07, 10.01

French:
-Duolingo: finished unit 102
-PMP French Verbs: exercises R48-R49 (done!)

German:
-Duolingo: finished unit 30
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lessons 75-76

Korean:
-Drops: 7/7 days
-Duolingo: worked on unit 7
-KGIU Beginning: lessons 24.03-24.07 (done!)
-KGIU Intermediate: lessons 1.01-1.02
-Master Korean 2-2: worked on unit 6-3
-Yumi's Cells: chapters 33-43
-Jojo Comics: chapters 1-11
-intensive work with Vincenzo: episodes 1.04-1.05

Italian:
-Duolingo: practiced 7/7 days
-PMP Italian Verbs: exercises 8.04-8.05
-Orgoglio e Pregiudizio: chapters 47-52

I finished both PMP Verb Tenses for French and KGIU Beginning this week! On the same day, as it so happens. I've used a lot of the PMP workbooks, and have previously completed PMP Spanish Verbs and am still working on PMP Italian Verbs, and I think the French Verbs book is the best of them all. It's much thicker than most of the others, and it seems like it includes more explanation and exercises. I don't think there are many (if any) exercises that are free response or would need the help of an instructor/native speaker to correct, which is something that's very important to me for self-study. I also like that there's a lengthy review section at the end (which highlighted the fact that I still need more work on a lot of the concepts as I found a number of the review exercises challenging). Next up for French will be PMP Intermediate French, which I purchased awhile back, so hopefully I'll be as satisfied with that as PMP Verb Tenses.

KGIU Beginning is also a really great resource. It's not really meant to be worked through from start to finish like I did, and ideally I'd like it to have more exercises to practice the grammar concepts, but it worked really well for me as a way to review grammar concepts I had already been introduced to elsewhere and get some extra practice. The explanations were all really clear, and I liked how the book was laid out. I am also sure it's something I'll refer back to in the future when I need a refresher.

I started on KGIU Intermediate after finishing KGIU Beginning, and I'm enjoying it a lot so far. Obviously it's very similar to how KGIU Beginning is laid out, but it seems like there's even more explanation. The explanations are still in English (which is necessary for me at this point), but they're also given in Korean, and in general it uses less English and more Korean (for example, the review exercises are all in Korean). The downside is that, while I was able to fit in one KGIU Beginning lesson a day because it was mostly review and they were shorter, so far it seems like that might be more difficult to do with the Intermediate lessons. The one I did yesterday took me ~20 minutes, and I was able to fit it in because it was the weekend, but I don't know if I'll be able to do that every day. So I might need to put KGIU Intermediate on pause for a bit, or at least not do a lesson every day. I'll have to see what I'm able to manage. I always get excited by new workbooks, though, so I'm eager to keep diving into it.

I had a fair amount of downtime this week, so I ended up doing a ton of Korean reading. I mostly kept up with 2 chapters of Yumi's Cells per day, although my timing got screwed up a little — basically, you're given 2 free chapters per 24 hours, but the 24 hour clock doesn't start until you've used up the 2nd chapter. So if I started the 2nd chapter late in the afternoon, I wouldn't be able to start another chapter the next morning — I'd have to wait until late in the afternoon the next day, and then I wouldn't have a ton of time for a second chapter the same day. So I didn't quite get in 2 chapters every day, but pretty close. I figured out I can just open two chapters first thing in the morning and then read them whenever I want during the day. If I can't get to them that day, I can still read them in the future. But since I was constrained in the timing of reading Yumi's Cells this week, I ended up starting another webcomic, Jojo Comics (조조코믹스). It's very similar to Yumi's Cells (even made by the same creator), but all the episodes are free, so I haven't been restricted in how much reading I can do. I've gotten into a habit of just fitting in a couple panels whenever I have a few minutes, and it's added up. I probably won't be able to keep this level of reading up consistently in the future, but I've really been feeling like I've been making a lot of progress which has been very motivating. And it's a lot easier to fit reading a couple panels of a webcomic into my schedule whenever I have free moments vs. watching Vincenzo intensively or working on grammar.

[brokenrecord]

March 26-April 1

Spanish:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 136
-PMP Intermediate Spanish Grammar: exercises 10.02-10.06

French:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 103
-PMP Intermediate French Grammar: exercises 1.01-1.03

German:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 31
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lesson 77

Korean:
-Drops: 7/7 days
-Duolingo: finished unit 7
-KGIU Intermediate: lessons 1.03-1.06
-Master Korean 2-2: worked on unit 6-3
-Yumi's Cells: chapters 44-57
-Jojo Comics: chapters 12-35
-intensive work with Vincenzo: episode 1.06

Italian:
-Duolingo: practiced 7/7 days
-PMP Italian Verbs: exercises 8.06-8.07, 9.01-9.03
-Orgoglio e Pregiudizio: chapters 44-57

This week ended up being much busier at work than the last few have been, and I had a lot less downtime, but somehow I increased the amount of Korean reading I did. I got kind of hooked on Jojo Comics, and I wasn't constricted to how many chapters I was able to read per day, unlike with Yumi's Cells, so I'd just read a few panels whenever I'd have spare time throughout the day and in the evening, and it really added up.

I started PMP Intermediate French Grammar this week, and so far I like it, although I've only done a few exercises so far. I also continued with KGIU Intermediate. I wasn't able to fit in a lesson every day because they're just more time-consuming than the KGIU Beginning lessons were for me, but I was able to fit it in at least a few days this week, so that's what I'm going to try to continue to do. Even though they are taking longer for me to get through, I'm enjoying them a lot.

I am only a couple chapters away from finishing Orgoglio e Pregiudizio this week, which is exciting. It'll be the first book I've finished in Italian (although I did get through ~100 pages of HP7 in Italian before). I've already decided the next Italian book I want to read is L'amica geniale by Elena Ferrante, which I've never read, but I've heard great things about, and I want to move to native Italian content at this point. I was thinking about jumping straight into it after Orgoglio e Pregiudizio, but I feel like I've been neglecting my other three languages, and I did get like 20% of the way into Der Totengräbersohn before my last 2 month language break, so I think I'll return to that next.

This week is probably going to be very busy at work like last week was, and in addition to that, I have family members coming to stay with me for several days starting next weekend, so it's unlikely I'll make any kind of update next week, and I know I won't be able to get very much language learning done during that time. I'm hoping to at least keep up Drops and a little Duolingo. I'll probably also try to make a little time for reading Yumi's Cells and Jojo Comics, but I doubt I'll have the time to get quite as much reading in as this past week. I'm less concerned with how much I get done during those few days and more with getting back to my normal routine once it's been disrupted. That's always been my struggle — I'll get into a good routine with language learning, then something will come up to disrupt that routine, and it just completely throws me off and takes me awhile to get back to languages. Hopefully that's not the case this time!

Anyways, now that March is over, here are my hours for March:

Screenshot 2023-04-02 at 8.19.17 AM.png

Screenshot 2023-04-02 at 7.58.34 AM.png

Very similar to February in terms of the proportion of time spent on Korean vs. everything else, but more than twice as many total hours (which makes sense since I didn't really get back to language learning until halfway through February).

[brokenrecord]

April 2-May13

Spanish:
-Duolingo: units 136-137
-PMP Intermediate Spanish Grammar: exercises 11.01-11.04
-Youtube: 1 video

French:
-Duolingo: units 103-105
-PMP Intermediate French Grammar: exercises 1.04-1.07, 2.01
-Youtube: 1 video

German:
-Duolingo: units 31-32
-Grammatik aktiv A1-B1: lessons 78-80 (done!)
-Der Tötengräbersohn: chapter 5
-Kleo: episode 1.02
-Youtube: 1 video

Korean:
-Drops: 42/42 days
-Duolingo: unit 8
-KGIU Intermediate: lessons 1.07, unit 1 review, 2.01-2.03, unit 2 review, 3.01-3.02
-Master Korean 2-2: unit 6.03
-Yumi's Cells: chapters 58-113
-Jojo Comics: chapters 36-101 (done!)
-Swimming Lessons for a Mermaid: chapter 1
-intensive work with Vincenzo: worked on episode 1.07

Italian:
-Duolingo: practiced 41/42 days
-PMP Italian Verbs: exercises 9.04-9.06
-Orgoglio e Pregiudizio: chapters 59-61 (done!)

I was hoping that having my regular routine/schedule interrupted wouldn't throw off my language learning, but of course that's exactly what happened. I don't know why I have such a hard time getting back to a regular language learning routine when it's interrupted for just a few days. On the plus side, I did keep up with Drops, Duolingo, and Korean webtoons. Everything else went on a break for most of the past 6 weeks. I'm finally getting back to normal, though, and even doing a little listening again, which I hadn't really been doing before the break.

Most of my time has been focused on Korean. I did very little work with Vincenzo during my break, but I think the work I've been doing with webtoons is really helping, because when I started back with Vincenzo this week, it felt like I was having to look up less than I used to. I'm so glad I started reading webcomics this year because it's definitely helped my vocab progress much faster than when I was only working with kdramas, and it's so much easier to keep up with consistently since each chapter doesn't take too long to complete (at first it took me around 30 min per chapter, but now it's more like 10-15 min, at least for Yumi's Cells and Jojo Comics, which typically have 30 panels per chapter), the art helps me figure out context for the vocabulary (unlike a book/news article), and I think they were originally released with one chapter per week, so each chapter is meant to be somewhat self-contained.

I finished Jojo Comics, which was pretty cute. It consists of two seasons that each focus on a different main couple, and I liked the main characters and romance in the first season more, but it kept me entertained throughout. It probably helped that I was reading two webcomics by the same author about the same subject matter (workplace romances), so I was getting exposed to a lot of the same vocab. I'm still working on Yumi's Cells. It's a much longer webcomic (I think over 500 chapters), and I'm still limited to 2 chapters per day, so yesterday I started a new webcomic, Swimming Lessons for a Mermaid (인어를 위한 수영교실), to fill in when I want extra reading practice. It's another one where I get the first 9 or so chapters for free, and then I'm limited to only 1 per day, so if I get to that point and feel like I need even more practice, I'll have to find another webtoon to rotate in. I'm wary of starting too many at the same time, though. So far the chapters in Swimming Lessons for a Mermaid seem a bit longer, so maybe I won't feel the need to add more.

I finished Orgoglio e Pregiudizio right before the start of my break. During the break, I only really read webtoons, but this past week I picked up Der Tötengräbersohn again, which I had started late last year. The vocab is generally still pretty challenging for me, so I decided to try doing something similar to what I've been doing with Korean. For every word I look up, I add it and the translation to an Excel file and then keep track of how many times I've looked up the word. The downside of this is that it takes me a lot more time vs. just looking up each word quickly, so I've only been getting through a couple of pages a day. It should pick up a little as I continue with it, though. It's also good that I wrote up a summary of each chapter as I was reading it before so I could refresh my memory of the plot after many months away from the book. I also started watching Kleo intensively again, which I had been doing sometime last fall but then dropped, and I'm adding any unknown vocab from it to the Excel spreadsheet. I'm hoping since this has been working so well for me with Korean, it'll also be a good way to boost my German vocab more quickly.

I finally finished Grammatik aktiv A1-B1 this week, which I've been working through for a couple years now. I already have another workbook I had been working through at the same time as Grammatik Aktiv but took a break from awhile back so I could focus solely on Grammatik aktiv, so now I can finally get back and finish that. I like Grammatik aktiv quite a bit — it's one of the better language workbooks I've used — so I plan on continuing with the B2-CI book in the future.

For the moment, Korean continues to be my primary focus, and then German. I've been doing small amounts of listening with Youtube videos as well this week, so I'm hoping to keep up with that a little more consistently.

Here are my hours for April:

Screenshot 2023-05-14 at 11.41.42 AM.jpeg

Screenshot 2023-05-14 at 11.42.13 AM.jpg

Similar to March with the focus on Korean, but less time overall spent on languages, and much more on reading than on kdramas. Hopefully this month will end up a little more varied than the past few.

[brokenrecord]

May 14-June 10

Spanish:
-Duolingo: unit 138
-PMP Intermediate Spanish Grammar: exercises 11.05-11.06
-Youtube: 2 videos

French:
-Duolingo: unit 106
-PMP Intermediate French Grammar: exercises 2.02-2.03
-Youtube: 3 videos

German:
-Duolingo: unit 33
-A-Grammatik: lesson 5.01
-Der Tötengräbersohn: chapter 6
-Kleo: episode 1.03
-Youtube: 2 videos

Korean:
-Drops: 26/28 days
-Duolingo: units 9-10
-KGIU Intermediate: unit 3 review, 4.01-4.04
-Master Korean 2-2: unit 6.03
-Yumi's Cells: chapters 114-152
-Swimming Class for Mermaids: chapters 2-20
-See You in My 19th Life: chapters 1-27
-intensive work with Vincenzo: episodes 1.07-1.08

Italian:
-Duolingo: practiced 18/28 days
-PMP Italian Verbs: exercises 9.07, 10.01-10.04, 11.01-11.03, 12.01-12.06
-PMP Complete Italian Grammar: exercises 10.01-10.04
-Nuova grammatica pratica della lingua italiana: lesson 11
-Coffee Break Italian Magazine: 1.01-1.09
-Easy Italian: 7 videos
-The Law According to Lidia Poët: episodes 1.01-1.03
-L'amica geniale: prologue, chapters 1-3; part 1, chapters 1-18
-newspaper: 2 articles

I didn't mean to go a whole month without posting, but at least it wasn't because I took another break from languages (well, not entirely). I just had a lot of things going on the last month, including going out of town from a week and suffering from a cold (which is when I did take a break from pretty much everything except Drops and webcomics). I might aim to update monthly instead of weekly going forward unless I have a lot to say and feel the need to update more frequently.

You may notice I've suddenly started doing a lot more work in Italian. There's a very good chance I'll be taking a trip to Italy in October, so I decided I should try to improve my Italian as much as possible beforehand. The trip was only decided upon last week, so pretty much everything I have listed up there is what I got done this week, and I've already noticed a lot of progress. I doubt I'll be able to keep up this pace through October, but whatever I can accomplish in that time will still be beneficial.

Since I started working on Italian several years ago, I've done almost no listening practice — my main resources have been Duolingo (where I normally turn off the sound and listening exercises), grammar workbooks, and reading. I watched some videos at the beginning to get a feel for the pronunciation, but otherwise I've done essentially no listening practice over 3 years, so that's obviously the area I've been choosing to make my priority. First, I'm using Coffee Break Italian Magazine, which, even though it has the word "magazine" in the name, is a podcast. In each episode, they read through a short text, and then go back through it line by line, highlighting interesting grammar and vocab. There are also sections where they answer a listener question about a grammar point/vocab, and the Italian native speaker on the podcast will choose a phrase/saying to explain. The first section has been the most useful to me as a kind of intensive listening practice, and I'm enjoying it a lot. I'm also using Easy Italian videos as extensive listening practice. I'm trying to avoid reading the subtitles and absorb as much as I can without them, but when I start struggling with comprehension, I find my eyes flicking down to check the subtitles periodically. Hopefully that will become less frequent with time.

I started a show on Netflix called The Law According to Lidia Poët (La legge di Lidia Poët) and going through it as I've been doing with Kleo using Language Reactor. I have it set up to obscure both the English and Italian subtitles and stop after each line of dialogue. If I don't understand the line the first time through without subtitles, I play the line of dialogue a second time, which I listen to while looking at the Italian subtitles. I add any words I have to look up to a vocab spreadsheet that I've started keeping, which is like the Korean vocab spreadsheet I started a few months ago, and I keep track of words I've looked up and how many times. I haven't looked up any words 5 or more times yet, but once I get to that point, I'll probably start reviewing the words that have been coming up most frequently. After just three episodes, I'm already finding an improvement in how much I can understand the first time through, although I still have a long way to go before I can watch Italian TV shows without any subtitles and not feel like I'm missing too much. The show itself is more enjoyable than I was expecting, and I'm disappointed that there are only 6 episodes total. It looks like there will be a second season, but it's just starting production, so it probably won't come out until next year. Unfortunately there aren't a ton of options for Italian shows on Netflix (I always feel so spoiled when I look for shows in Spanish/Korean because those languages have a plethora of choices in comparison), so I don't know what I'll watch after finishing the show, but I'll figure something out. I've been thinking of watching Disney/Pixar movies dubbed in Italian with no subtitles at all. I generally prefer native content to dubbed content since dubbed content tends to be easier to understand, so I prefer to work with native content to challenge myself more (especially with languages like Spanish, French, and German, where my listening comprehension is much better, and I don't get as much out of dubbed content), but with Italian my listening comprehension is still pretty weak so it would probably be helpful, and I don't feel like I can be as picky with the content I'm using.

I started reading L'amica geniale this week to help with vocab acquisition, which is something I mentioned I had been thinking of reading a couple months ago, but had decided to focus on German reading at that time. It's been very time-consuming because I borrowed it from the library, and it takes longer to look up unknown words while reading a paperback vs. looking them up in an ebook. There is also just a lot more unfamiliar vocab than in Orgoglio e Pregiudizio, the last Italian book I read, so I'm having to look up more words. I'm also adding the words I look up to my Italian vocab spreadsheet, so that increases how much time it takes to get through a chapter. I have a month to finish the book before it's due back at the library, so I've been aiming for roughly 10 pages a day in order to finish it in time, which didn't sound like a lot to me at first, but there have been days where it's taken me almost an hour to get through the 10 pages. I'm hoping that goes down as I continue through the book and theoretically have fewer words to look up. Since there are four books in this series and four months until my planned trip, I think it would be a good goal to try to finish all 4 before I leave, although I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep up this pace for that long.

Finally, I've added more Italian grammar practice. I already owned the workbooks but had paused working on them because I wanted to focus on just one at a time. But I wanted more grammar practice than just working on verbs with PMP Italian Verbs, so I decided to add back in PMP Complete Italian Grammar and Nuova grammatica pratica della lingua italiana and alternate between the three workbooks rather than alternating between workbooks in my five languages. I might try to fit in some KGIU Intermediate from time to time, but grammar practice in Spanish, French, and Grammar is on hold for the moment.

Italian will definitely be my focus for the time being, but I don't want to lose all the progress I've been making in Korean, so I'm planning to continue with my Korean webcomics. I've been progressing with Yumi's Cells pretty consistently, and I added another webcomic, See You in My 19th Life (이번 생도 잘 부탁해). I've gotten really hooked on it, and it's become the first one I read each day. I'm limited to only one chapter a day, but luckily the chapters are fairly long, and the dialogue tends to be more complex than the other webcomics I've read, so it takes me longer to get through them, usually around 30-45 minutes (in comparison to Yumi's Cells, which typically takes me less than 10 minutes to get through). There's also going to be a kdrama adaptation of it coming to Netflix pretty shortly, so assuming I continue to enjoy the webcomic, I plan on going through the show as well. Between See You in My 19th Life and Yumi's Cells, I've felt like I have enough Korean reading material, and I was getting a little tired of Swimming Class for Mermaids (I found the beginning interesting, but the later chapters focused too much on teenage love triangle drama for my liking), so I've put that on pause and may or may not return to it.

I'm also trying to continue with Vincenzo and Kleo. Italian listening is my focus, but I've been trying to alternate between doing 10-15 minutes of Vincenzo one day and then Kleo the next. When I finish with Kleo, I don't plan on starting another German show (or French/Spanish show, for that matter), but since it's a show I already started once and took several months off from, I'd like to finish it, and there aren't too many episodes. Vincenzo, on the other hand, will take me much longer to get through, and I don't want to lose the progress I've made in Korean, so I'm going to try to continue with that while also focusing on Italian. Der Tötengräbersohn will have to go on hold again because, as I said, L'amica geniale is already very time-consuming, and I just don't have the time for both books.

So that's the plan at the moment — as much Italian as possible, while also fitting in enough Korean so I don't waste all the progress I've made this year, plus a little bit of German. French and Spanish will have to continue in maintenance mode, with just Duolingo to keep things fresh. Hopefully I can devote more time to them after my trip.

Finally, my hours for May:

Screenshot 2023-06-11 at 10.17.17 AM.jpg

Screenshot 2023-06-11 at 10.17.41 AM.jpg

Very similar to the past couple months, with the bulk of my time going to Korean, and a little German from Kleo and Der Tötengräbersohn, but I expect June will end up looking a lot different.

[Christi]

Maybe you've already seen it, but Netflix has this Italian show called Luna Park. I really liked it and I heard that they are working on a second season too.
Season 1 sadly only has 6 episodes though, so really hope it won't get cancelled.

[brokenrecord]

Maybe you've already seen it, but Netflix has this Italian show called Luna Park. I really liked it and I heard that they are working on a second season too.
Season 1 sadly only has 6 episodes though, so really hope it won't get cancelled.

Yes, I have! I've been bad at updating, but I finished The Law According to Lidia Poët in June and started working through the first episode of Luna Park in July. I took a break from languages at that point and am just getting back to the show now. I enjoyed the first episode a lot, so it's unfortunate there are only 6 episodes; hopefully it will end up getting another season!

[brokenrecord]

Once again I have gone longer than intended without updating. I did pretty well for a couple weeks in June focusing on Italian, but then I started falling off language learning and did very little in July or August. I'm only four weeks away from my trip to Italy, though, so I figured I should get back to things.

Since my last post, I've been focusing primarily on Italian with some time spent on reading See You in My 19th Life as well. I'm about 80% through See You in My 19th Life, but I've been taking a break from it recently. I enjoyed most of it quite a bit, but I got to a point where it felt like the comic should have ended since the main plotlines had wrapped up, and I just don't care about what's going on in the plot very much anymore. I'll probably still finish it, but at the moment I'd rather spend my time on Italian.

In terms of Italian, I finished The Law According to Lidia Poët, which I liked a lot, although I think I enjoyed the first few episodes more than the last few. As I mentioned to Christi, I started working through the first episode of Luna Park in July but then took a break from most language learning, so I only got back to the show this week. I've also been watching a lot of Easy Italian videos and using Duolingo. I had completed the Duolingo tree previously and had just been using the review feature, but I guess they updated the tree again, because now I've been placed around unit 48 (which is actually not too far from the end of the tree), so I've gone back to working through the individual lessons.

My plans for the rest of this month are to keep up with Easy Italian and Duolingo and to hopefully finish Luna Park (there are only 6 episodes total and I just finished the first one, so that should be doable). I want to continue with Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, but near the end of L'amica geniale, I was starting to forget who some of the characters were and how they related to one another (especially all the teenage boys), so I think I'm going to watch the first season of the TV series (with English subtitles) to make sure I understood what happened in the book and to get a refresher on who everyone is, and then I'll move on to Storia del nuovo cognome. In the meantime, I'll probably pick out another book in Italian to read.

Here's the breakdown of how I spent June:

june.png

I won't bother posting July and August because I did so little comparatively in those months, but this is what my year looks like so far overall:

yearsofar.png

Obviously September is still in progress, but you can see how much I dropped off the past couple months. Hopefully I can keep up working on Italian for the next few weeks so it's somewhat fresh in my mind when I'm on vacation.

[brokenrecord]

September 10-16

Italian:
-Duolingo: worked on unit 29
-PMP Italian Verbs: exercises 12.19-12.23
-PMP Complete Italian Grammar: exercises 11.04-11.06
-Nuova grammatica pratica della lingua italiana: unit 12
-Easy Italian: 7 videos
-Learn Italian with Lucrezia: 1 video
-Luna Park: episode 1.02
-Il bar sotto il mare: prologue, chapters 1-3

I started a new book this week, Il bar sotto il mare, by Stefano Benni. It's not too long (170 pages on Kindle), and it's essentially a collection of short stories, but with a framing device (all the stories are stories being told to a man who has stumbled into this bar). Some of the stories are very short, just a couple pages maximum, and other are lengthier. The first of the lengthier stories was a bit challenging for me since it was being told by a chef, and there was a lot of food/animal vocab that was unfamiliar for me, so I was having to look up a ton of words. I'm in the middle of the second more lengthy story, which is being told by a sailor, and I'm find it easier to understand, and also very enjoyable. There's a section where the ship's captain is trying to explain to a whale who has fallen in love with him why a relationship between them would never work out which I found incredibly funny. Anyways, the book is short enough that I'm going to try to finish it before I leave for my trip.

I also started watching the first season of L'amica geniale (with English subtitles, since I'm watching it on HBO Max, which has hardcoded English subs). Like I said in my last post, I'm using it more just to help with my comprehension of what happened in the first book and less for language purposes, although I do occasionally pick out words/phrases while I'm watching. I'm going through it pretty quickly, and I only have one episode left before I finish the first season. Part of why I wanted to watch the show was to help distinguish between some of the characters, but even in the show, a lot of characters are thrown at you at once in the first episode, and there are only 2 episodes with the characters as children before it flashes forward into teens, so you then have to quickly figure which of the young versions of the characters correspond to the teenage characters. I ended up having to do some googling and then sketched out some family trees for reference, and now I think I finally have a decent handle on who everyone is and how they relate. After watching most of the first season, I can tell that my comprehension of what was happening in individual scenes was good, as most of the scenes in the show feel familiar to me, but a lot of the time when reading the book I was focused solely on what was happening in each scene and wasn't really connecting it back to the overall story being told. There are also definitely a number of details that I missed. Once I've finished this season, I think I'll probably just go forward and watch season 2 so I have a good idea of the plot, and then I'll go ahead and read the second book.

Otherwise, I've been keeping up with Duolingo, Easy Italian (plus I'm going to occasionally add videos from Learn Italian with Lucrezia), workbook exercises, and (slowly) working through Luna park, which I'm still enjoying. I found myself missing French a little bit this week, but I really want to keep my focus solely on Italian for the next few weeks before my trip. Hopefully the urge to get back to French will still be there at the end of October.