Summary of 2017This thread has been quiet for a while but for good reason; I began my new job in the beginning of October. A great job which I really enjoy but it involves 90 minutes of daily commuting and afterwards I spend most of my spare time completing work projects or doing research for the next day. Not ideal but that's how I function whenever I find a new passion project.
What did I accomplish in 2017 then? I rediscovered
MediathekView and began recording German TV series such as Tatort and Die Rosenheim-Cops. I also signed up for Netflix to access subtitles for Der Tatortreiniger, Stromberg and Türkisch für Anfänger. All in all, I completed 109 hours of German TV (9 hours above my goal) and as long as I keep using MediathekView, I'll have more material than I can consume.
The main drawback of using public service is that you rely on their schedule and it can take years to collect a full show. So I went out and found a French version named
rePlay.fr long before I knew a word of French. It didn't take long before I struck gold and found Avatar le dernier maître de l'air (1403 min), La légende de Korra (1196 min), Les aventures de Tintin (858 min) and Les grands mythes (520 min) with subtitles. Sadly I'm missing a handful episodes but that's roughly 66 hours of TV I can create flashcards from!
Speaking of French, I went out and bought
Assimil Französisch ohne Mühe which turned out to be a painful experience. I made sure to buy the sliced MP3 version and expected it would take me a few hours to turn it into Anki flashcards but the book and audio didn't match. It took me days to figure out but apparently they ship the same CD with all the books, yet
every publisher is allowed to create their own book version. As a result, I have a book often claiming 19 lines of dialogs in a chapter but only 12 audio files. So I began slicing MP3s and manually entering translations into their meta information but sadly lost interest and time. I guess I'm halfway through with many hours left.
I did write a
complete plan for my French endeavour though and still reckon it to be a great plan.
I also went through my old
Spanish notes. Not much to learn there but I was genuinely surprised by how little we were supposed to know to complete the final exam. Mostly vocabulary.
Lingvist also released their German course so I spent about 14 hours there. Some days were alright but others it just felt like I was going through the same words over and over again without learning them. I liked typing the word because then you really had to know the answer but there's no coherent story and I lost interest so it quickly became a daily chore.
One of the main things this year was
my purchase of a Kindle Paperwhite. In contrast to my iPad, it doesn't impact my sleep so I often read a few pages in bed before falling asleep. I completed both Tintenherz and Harry Potter while abandoning LWT. All in all, I read a total of 5126 pages this year but more on the stats below.
StatsHours watchedDanish: 11
English: 245
German: 109
Norwegian: 1
Swedish: 2
Total: 367 hours
Pages readEnglish: 2634
German: 1215
Swedish: 1277
Total: 5126 pages
I tracked dedicated hours watching TV (not Swedish) and book pages read but this system is deeply flawed because it excludes a lot of content. I read hundreds if not over a thousand articles on
Pocket. One of them being
We’re the Only Plane in the Sky spanning over 16k words which is said to equal 50 book pages but I didn't count a single one. I'm also excluding hundreds of hours on YouTube and podcasts because it's so tricky to measure. Then there's all the time I spent on Reddit...
Takeaways from 2017The one thing that really stood out is how little time I spend with Swedish content. I began 2017 by reading a book I was given for Christmas and two other books from my book shelf so I could give them away. Then it was basically all English and German. I watched
one Swedish movie (
En man som heter Ove). Podcasts, YouTube, songs and video games are almost all in English...
Overall I reckon it to be a decent year despite the Assimil failure. I accomplished my original goals and have my resources sorted for 2018.