MandarinI told everyone that I'm not doing any LE for the next two weeks or so. In fact, I'll probably stop Mandarin all together just because I have too much on my plate.
ItalianStill reading but I'm not enjoying this book. I've read it before, and I very rarely re-read books. I'm seriously considering just throwing out all the books I'm not interested in rather than forcing myself to read books I don't want too. Also, I could simply replace them in Italy with new books that I want to read. We'll see.
FrenchMy regular French partner is actually going to be in the UK, but she will not be anywhere near me until the week I go to Italy. So I'll miss her.
KoreanSigh... Korean. I really miss having weekly lessons, and it doesn't look like my tutor will be returning. So I have started to look for someone else. Meanwhile, I continue with Anki. I have two decks, one from words I got during my lessons and another which is a premade deck from AnkiWeb. I'm getting about 500 cards per day, and I'm seriously approaching burnout on anki, so I'm going to put a cap on reviews for a little while on the first deck, and reduce the amount of new cards on the second. I've also been watching a lot of mnemonics and memorisation tips for languages, and I'll plan to trial some of those out.
I have managed to get my LE partners to teach me some new grammar. Conjugation of future tense, etc. I continue to generate random sentences and try to translate them into Korean. I get these checked by my LE partners and also get them to help me pronounce the corrected sentences. One thing I have noticed is that I need to look up a lot of nouns. Nouns and verbs are normally the most used parts of speech (in English, and anecdotal for me Korean also)
So to that end I really need to learn more nouns and then work on the verbs. This is why I searched around to find a corpus for Korean and
started a thread. But alas the comprehensive corpus I found, doesn't list the PoS!
So I'm going to ignore that and try to memorise words from the Lonely Planet Guidebook that I have, which has a small 14 page dictionary at the back.
I have to admit that I'm floundering a lot here. I haven't been reading my book because it is exhausting to look up each and every word. I watch some k-dramas or comprehensible input channels on YT. I really do feel like I'm hammering my head against a wall.
General StuffI've done better at reading English books (for obvious reasons) than Italian or Korean. I've managed to get about 50% of the way through my first Discrete Mathematics book. I decided that I'm not going to do the exercises in these books just yet. I'm not getting rid of the maths books, so I can always go back and do the exercises. I thought I would read them first, then go back and do exercises. This is probably a mistake, I know, but I'm going to go ahead and make it.
I have made some
progress with memorisation and I have had some advice about using mnemonics for languages. What I was doing was attempting to use a giant thematic city as a memory palace. But I've been reliably informed this is suboptimal simply because of the huge number of words in a natural language. A better method is simply word association type stuff where you imagine the thing, or action like: butterfly, which in Korean is 나비 which sounds like "nabi". So if you picture a butterfly landing on your arm and some guy with a cockney accent saying "na a bee!" (not a bee).
The idea here is that you can do this with any word (depending on your imagination) and there is no need for premade gigantic memory palaces. I'm going to try this. I did try Iversen's 3 column page thing, but it takes too much effort for a lazy git like me.