Paso a paso, se va lejos

[1e4e5]

Ordered today the new Colloquial Russian for myself for Christmas. In such an interconnected world, it is especially important to know the big world languages with huge amounts of speakers, such as Mandarin, Spanish, French, etc.

[1e4e5]

Not sure if there is such a challenge, but there is, could not find one. Whatever it is, I can call it that Madness Challenge or the Glutton for Punishment Challenge. The goal is to sit and pass the Goethe Zertifikat C2 at any time in either 2024 or 2025. Shall see how this goes...

[1e4e5]

I can say now that by far the best way to discourage Dutch, Norwegians, Swedish, Danish and Finnish from switching to English is to pretend to not speak English, but also to pretend to speak a big language, like Spanish or French, plus pretend to have zero knowledge of English. The embarassment that it makes is too much for them, and they will stop acting dumb and thus stop speaking English to you.

[1e4e5]

I am saddened by the sickening atrocity that was committed by a ghastly beast at UK in Prague yesterday. Unfortunately all of my Czech language practise was reading the news on ČR24. It especially hurts knowing that this is one of the universities that interests me.

[1e4e5]

It took over 60 tries to log in and have the website load. Not sure why it is extremely slow lately.

Anyway, this was a nice little 'gift'.

[1e4e5]

Most do not take New Years' Resolutions seriously, but I do quite.

Spanish: Keep on keeping on with native content, e.g.: First Dates España
preparing specifically for the DELE C2, e.g.,


having a professor's knowledge of the innards of Spanish grammar, e.g., chándales or chándals
Catalan: idem
French: need to starkly forbetter auditory comprehension, work hard on pronunciation to at least sound more like natives
Italian: native content, keep going on with more advanced and fancier grammatical constructions, academic (especially medical science) writing, pushing past C1.2
Portuguese: focus on native content, academic (especially medical science) writing, push onwards past C1
Dutch: native content, e.g. First Dates NL, learn how to write more academically
German: Madness Challenge 2024/2025
Czech: Need to put everything together to finally nail all of the grammar and get into mostly native materials; this helps:

Swedish: forbetter speaking, native content, e.g., Första dejten
Norwegian: almost overall native content to help understand those with differing accents and dialects, e.g., Makta
Russian: get past A1
Finnish: idem
Persian: finally get past the bloody alphabet

Endly, a few things that I need (and promise myself) to do regard all of my languages:

⋅forbetter speaking, given that I rarely talk to people in general and thus talk to few people in my languages
⋅start writing things out physically, to really drill syntax and grammar into my head
⋅lessen social anxiety whilst speaking my languages
⋅better manage my time so that I can focus on all of these languages more efficiently instead of running out of time at midnight everyday
⋅sit and pass all of the CEFR exams that I sign up for

This is not really language-related, but the one thing that would help with all of these languages in an indirect way would be to lessen my self-hatred. I seem to be well-hated whitherever I go, but that seems to come with being autistic. Some things I just cannot control, and I must accept that.

2023 was fine, as I accomplished a lot. 2024 will be much harder; in fact, it will be the hardest year of my life, but it will also be the most fruitful. I can see a lot of good things coming.

[1e4e5]

I am in full-study mode. I often switch between my languages during work breaks, which helps a lot that I am remote. Then at night I shift between languages and revising biology, chemistry and physics.

I did a 'purge' of mistakes by doing a big review of grammar details in all of my languages to take out any hindrances of small/dumb mistakes to get me back on track. I dug out some grammar books from the basement to help therewith. This includes French, Dutch, Italian, German, Czech, Catalan and Portuguese. Spanish I have spent so much time in the past on grammar, that I could skip it for Spanish.

With that out of the way, I am back on schedule. I installed a scheduling app on my phone, as well as tied it with alams to go off on my phone as well. For example, my 'busy' mode sounds an alarm every fifteen minutes, making me switch from one language to the next, with the mindset that it is better to get a little done everyday than to slam one three-hour chunk of one language in one day and then do it again a few days later.

Running on all cylinders is quite tiring, but my body is shifting to the schedule. The problem that I have to solve is how to get rid of this combo of DSPS (Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder) and extreme insomnia, although it does help me stay up late and get things done...

One thing that helps is to visually imagine how you would look upon completing your goals as motivation to keep on the daily grind.

[1e4e5]

Today I bought French Mornings B2 on Teachable for my girlfriend, although it is good practise material/review for myself too. One thing that really irked me over the years (and still irks me) is the huge diglossia in French, something that never was a problem for me in other Romance languages, such as Spanish or Italian.

I learnt a new expression in Czech: Cestou necestou. It basically means 'however hard something may be and/or seem, you will accomplish it'. It matches my life perfectly.

[1e4e5]

Very tired. Three hours sleep last night, although that is due to my extreme insomnia again. But I am on page 455/560 of a German textbook, which I had started two months ago, so I am going at a steady pace.

I also won an award today for 2nd place for content creation in Spanish at the company. The prize is $1.500, which is not that much in the big scheme of things, but is something. I have been asked to do video lessons to go together with my e-books in not only English, but also German and Spanish. This would make the e-book package with video at least 100€ a piece, which would help to fund my dreams, especially as I have over 250 sales so far for Q1 2024. I am definitely nervous, since I am not used to filming myself online for 20+ hours and having tens or hundreds of thousands seeing me, but I can overcome the stage fright that I have always had. Oddly, though, I feel nervous about doing that but not at all nervous about talking to patients. In any case, I need to be coached on talking to a camera. I have been told that it is similar to movie acting, with outtakes, bloopers, retakes, etc., followed by heavy editing.

Needless to say, all of this would have been impossible had I not had the level that I have in Spanish. Same will be for German soon.

As I was thinking about all of this, I came across this video about new immigrants to Québec who try to learn French in six months:



Alright, time to try to sleep, as I do not want to end up having to take more Benadryl at 5 in the morning.

[1e4e5]

One thing that somehow has taken me far too long to see is learning style. In almost all of my languages, the easiest to the hardest things of the four skills in order, using the CEFR chart, are as such:

1) reading
2) writing
3) listening
4) speaking

There is a logical grounding herefore: I simply do not speak to people. I clearly cannot force random people to talk to me in my target languages. However, I can usually get limitless content for reading. For writing, I can write as much as I want, although I have no one to correct me. Listening, as always, is easy to get, especially by listening to course material audio, as well as native speaker content with TuneInRadio. My awkwardness also makes speaking the hardest of the four. This is especially taxing for those who are awkward, as writing shows nothing in terms of facial expressions, body language, etc., although none of these things really matter to me. Still, as I know that speaking is my weakness, I can put in more craft to better it.

One thing that helps me a lot, especially in the beginning levels, which many polyglots say is what you should not do, is to read as many detailed grammar books about the target language. This most likely confuses most, but for me, it is the opposite; reading grammar books lets me set a 'roadmap' in my head. This is not only for my target languages; as a child, I would read many grammar books about my native tongue, English. This helped me to get high marks in written English in school, whilst doing little admittedly in speaking. Still, without this heavy grammar input, I would be a huge hole where everything looks far too fuzzy. The main point is that often one should go against the grain of wisdom if said forethoughtly wisdom is not helping oneself, and instead go for one's own study plan.

I am gearing up to record myself in Spanish for work now. I am highly nervous, since, as said above, I barely speak to anyone in any language, but oddly I feel more comfortable recording myself in Spanish than in my native tongue, English.

Today marks exactly one year when I was flying to CDG with my mother's broken knee the day before, something that I cannot forget. However, I can use it to measure if my French and Italian are better. Yes on both counts.

In my spare time, I go slowly with Colloquial Finnish. I have heard about how the grammar can be a nightmare, but as grammar is my strong point, I look forward to the dare.

One last thing is doing a little bit everyday. However, sometimes a day is highly busy; in that case, I even set a time goal of five minutes if it gets that bad. Five minutes is still better than zero a day.