A language learners’ forum

Summary of week 30

Another week when I could study a lot!

• Daily ~15 minute Duolingo sessions in three languages (de/sp/ga) - for the time being, I'm heading for the end of German skill tree. I'm also reviewing Spanish and Irish to keep my skills "strong". 79 day streak.
• Daily trilingual Da Vinci Code sessions - I've now read more than 350 pages.
• I've read ~150 pages of An Leon, an Bandraoi agus an Prios Éadaigh, and will probably finish the book in a few days.
• More Anki, but no added Cantonese cards this week.
• More reading in Swedish and English.
• Vocabulary lesson 4 from Say Something in Welsh. Because it's been a while since I did lesson 3, I had a lot of difficulties with things I should otherwise have known, and moreover, not much from lesson 4 stuck. I'll review 1-4 before I go on.

Summary of week 31

And another week when I could study a lot!

• Daily ~15 minute Duolingo sessions in three languages (de/sp/ga). 86 day streak. At last I finished the German tree!
• Daily trilingual Da Vinci Code sessions - I've now read around 400 pages (the number of pages vary from translation to translation). I'll finish the book this week.
• I finished An Leon, an Bandraoi agus an Prios Éadaigh, and started Oileán an Órchiste (Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson).
• Some 20 added cards to my Cantonese deck. Daily Anki work in all languages.
• As if I didn't already have too much on my plate, I dug out my old study material for Ancient Greek AND Latin. (I didn't even take Latin in school but somehow got hold of the books). Declensions - here I come!
  
  • ΕΙΣΑΓΩΓΗ - I started reviewing the alphabet and then it was time for the short lessons - just a few lines of sentences, introducing a limited vocabulary and a few grammar points. There is an accompanying dictionary booklet and a mini grammar (plus a volume 2+dictionary). Θάλαττα! θάλαττα!
  • Via Nova (by the same author, Lars A. Larsson) - two volumes. Each lesson has realia, a short text, some grammar points, another short text, and some exercises.
    

<wanderlust alert>
Yesterday I started three new languages at Duolingo - Italian, French and Portuguese. From scratch (just to see how quickly I can progress). After ~15 minutes in each language, I had reached level 3. Today's session brought me to level 5 in Italian and Portuguese.

(I also reached lvl 16 in German)

Three "new" languages take ~45 minutes each day, so I just do one round of "Strengthen your skills" in my finished ones.
</wanderlust alert>

Why, Jeff? Why would you do that to me? D;
Reading your log already made me pick Dutch back up on Duolingo, but I have so far been able to keep the Duolingo wanderlust at bay... Must. Resist.

Sorry for that Yuurei!

Summary of week 32

And another week of semi-decent language activities.

• As I wrote above, I added three Romance language to my daily Duolingo workout (and moved the "finished" ones to maintenance only). Lvl 7 in French, lvl 6 in Italian and Portuguese. I haven't yet found the optimum way to go through the skill trees - three old and then three new, the opposite, a mix of new and old/new and old/new and old, the opposite, or spreading the languages from morning to midnight... At first it was rather easy since the languages go through (more or less) the same things in the same order, but some days it was just total chaos. And my wanting to speed things up resulted in a lot of misspellings and mixups. Anyway, I like Romance languages!
• I finished the Da Vinci Code.
• More Irish reading; Oileán an Órchiste (Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson).
• No new Cantonese cards. More and more words start getting teleported into the future (which is >20 days). Daily Anki work in all languages.
• More classical languages - I generally read the previous lesson aloud, go to next lesson, read that, skim the grammar, do the exercises (if any), and finish the session by reading either the old one or the current text again. Not set in stone, it depends on the content, if a lot of new grammar is introduced etc.
  
  Things covered in Greek so far are articles/nouns/adjectives in four cases and three genders, present tense, passive mode, past tense, future tense. Maybe more. For Latin, it's basically present tense (four groups of verbs), nom+acc for nouns in three declensions. As the texts are much longer (and almost prose-like), the basics are reviewed all the time.

Summary of week 33

This was a week when I didn't have so much time to study (there was a crime literature festival in town, and that took most of my time).

• Duolingo - lvl 8 in my new languages, lvl 16 in German, lvl 15 in Spanish and Irish.
• I started a new bilingual reading project - La cena secreta (Javier Sierra) - Swedish translation and Spanish original.
• No Irish reading (and no Welsh or Italian either).
• Daily Anki work in all languages. Several hundreds of mature cards now in my Cantonese deck.
• The Greek and Latin adventures continue. Greek is hard to read - partly because I'm using my old study material and the space between the lines are filled with my translations...

Summary of week 34

Another week when I didn't have so much time to study.

• Duolingo - level up in my new languages - lvl 9. Still lvl 16 in German, lvl 15 in Spanish and Irish.
  Things start to even out between the Romance languages. During the first week(s) I could blaze through +10 lessons in one language, and then only half the amount in another, due to confusion and/or relative complexity, and possibly lack of optimum sequence (see one of my posts above). Which language it was didn't seem to matter. Anyway, now it's better.
• I finished Oileán an Órchiste (Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson) last Monday (or if it was the day before).
• Daily Anki work in all languages. Several hundreds of mature cards now in my Cantonese deck.
• Greek and Latin are starting to make sense, i.e. the patterns fall into place. Especially the Greek endings which I had down pat some 22 years ago, and Latin, well, I'm on a journey through the Romance languages right now, so nothing too extraordinary.

Plans for week 35:
Start another book in Irish (don't know which one), keep reading La Cena Secreta, embark the "Finnish with extra pain" train...

Summary of week 35

Another hell week.

Duolingo+Anki were the only activites I managed to squeeze in apart from the Finnish PainTrain (which has worked fine under the circumstances). It's not an entirely new language - I skimmed through "Finska för nybörjare" (Eeva Haapalehto) many years ago, and on September 1st last year, I started with "Finskan - lättare än du tror" which I aimed to finish just before my trip to Finland. Two weekends disappeared and I had no chance to catch up in time, but eventually I did "finish" it, to the point where I could read the content and also understand what I read. Sometimes I did the exercises. I also added relevant sentences to Anki (and much later, imported a Tatoeba deck of I-don't-know-how-many cards).

Right now, I'm using Le Finnois sans Peine. I've also found a resource with Russian translations, so it's a fairly functioning trilingual learning session. I actually find the French instructions very easy to follow - probably thanks to a combination of my Da Vinci Code project this summer and my current Duolingo craze.

I'll be out of town this upcoming weekend, which means that I'll lose three days of study (yes, that's what it feels like at the moment).

Summary of week 36

As I wrote in the previous post, three days without any study. So I thought. I managed to do some Duolingo each day, I even reached level 11 in my Romance languages. But nothing else. I went to an Irish music festival and listened to concerts on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, played in sessions every day (two on the Saturday), and also participated in a fiddle/concertina workshop one day. Gosh, was I exhausted when I came back on Sunday evening. I'm still doing my best to recover from the weekend. As if this wasn't enough, yesterday I booked everything for the upcoming Irish Festival of Oulu (early October). Another three days of music and culture, but not much language studying.

Anyway!

• Duolingo - daily sessions for the Romance languages, and maintaining the old languages. Things are falling into place.
• Anki - more than 700 mature cards in my Cantonese deck (~50% of the cards). I haven't added anything new since early August.
• No Welsh/Greek/Latin, and no reading in Irish.
• I've done a full Assimil week of Finnish lessons.

Plans for week 37:
Doing my best to catch up! Since I'll travel to Finland in a month, I'd better focus.

jeff_lindqvist wrote:<wanderlust alert>
Yesterday I started three new languages at Duolingo - Italian, French and Portuguese. From scratch (just to see how quickly I can progress). After ~15 minutes in each language, I had reached level 3. Today's session brought me to level 5 in Italian and Portuguese.

(I also reached lvl 16 in German)

Three "new" languages take ~45 minutes each day, so I just do one round of "Strengthen your skills" in my finished ones.
</wanderlust alert>

You're some kind of Duolingo savant. I've been messing around with Norwegian on duolingo for about three weeks and I'm only at level 6. I only do like ten minutes a day and I've re-done each lesson at least 3 times, so that's probably why. Are you actually retaining these new languages when going through them this way?