This last week has been pretty good (though could be improved). I have printed off a calendar month and have set myself a number of tasks I want to do regularly: Russian reading, writing, translation, memrise, grammar, focused French study, any kind of Spanish, knee exercises. Each goal has a different colour, and when I do them I draw a box onto that day in that colour. It's a useful way of seeing what I'm managing to do (which it has to be said, is never translation...) and providing me with a small reminder. I'm going to see how it goes for the rest of the month and then I my narrow down and change my goals for next month.
Russian- 8.5 hours of Russian
- Read: 12 pages of 'The History of the US'. I am finding a lot of new vocabulary here, so that seems very useful.
- Watched: 1 episode of the Romanovs on Star Media. I have been watching quite a lot in French and Spanish and this just hasn't really made it in.
- Wrote: 539 words. It's a start!
- Grammar: I have finished every module in Schaum's grammar (several of them before last week) and I now just have to work through Verbs and Numbers. It's definitely been useful and I want to keep up this kind of grammar work.
- 1 italki lesson
French- 5.5 hours of French
- Read: 25 pages of 'Suite Francaise' by Irene Nemirovsky and a few pages of 'L'élégance des veuves'by Alice Ferney. Both are excellent, but deserve intensive reading I feel so are taking me a while.
- Watched: I made my parents start watching Jane the Virgin in French, so there's been a few episodes of that.
- 1 italki lesson
I have started doing the TV5 Monde
exercises. They generally involve watching a short news video and then answering 4 questions. In the past I did a DELF preparation course and found that while I understood the texts very well, I often didn't understand the questions or couldn't work out what the answer they were looking for was. So this seems like a good way to help boost my listening comprehension and vocabulary, while easing me into those kind of questions very gently.
I have also signed up for two French courses at my local adult education college (both short term) - one is DELF preparation and the other is in French on cinema. So I am looking forward to those. Courses are flawed and it depends a lot on your teacher and the other students, but I have always found them very useful personally, as they provide a different insight as well as structure.
Spanish- 4 hours of Spanish. This has been almost entirely watching 'Daredevil' in Spanish, which is not the greatest task, but is at least getting me back into the swing of things. I'm not taking Spanish seriously for the time being, I'm just trying to keep it a small part of my life, so this works really well. (And gives me a good excuse to watch terrible TV and attractive actors!). Until I graduate, Spanish isn't my priority, but I do really love it, so this seems like a good way to manage that.
Corrections appreciated.