A rather late summary...
March 2018 StatisticsFrenchLearned 430 words.
Consumed 1,485 minutes of AV material.
GermanRead 575 pages.
JapaneseLearned 124 on'yomi compounds.
I've had to take another time out from daily life stuff for a few weeks and am returning to find a horrific tally of cards due in Anki, naturally. I'm not as unhappy about that as I might've been in the past, however. I will get through it all eventually. I regret that I didn't quite hit any of my goals again this month, but it wouldn't have been possible. I haven't been well enough to do much but rest, and for once, I'm listening to myself on that. I generally feel so foggy that I find I am having trouble recalling very basic things, whether it comes to kanji stroke order or the name of family members (!).
I'm surprised at how well the first half of the month went, in any case. The nearly 600 pages of German reading were all practically accidental. I decided I wanted to plow through several shorter books on my shelves, some of which I had bought up to four years ago. I read:
Abschalten, Martin Suter
Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
Die Physiker, Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Die Inszenierung, Martin Walser
I regret to say that I wasn't particularly struck by any of them. I mean, I'm glad to have gotten through them, but nothing really stuck with me. But it was smooth sailing, and I've made room for more books (which are, of course, on their way via post).
No French reading in March except for brief newspaper and magazine articles. I have material, but I would prefer to save it for the prospect of the Super Challenge. I doubled down on listening and feel quite comfortable with the pace of speech in France Culture recordings, or with YouTubers, even if I don't always understand the slang of the latter. I also completed watching
La Légende de Korra and am genuinely sad to bid farewell to this universe! It was a really wonderful show. Out of curiosity, I watched some clips of it in English for the first time, and -- I swear it's not just my bias from having watched it entirely in French -- I honestly feel like so many of the English voices just aren't right for the characters, especially compared to the French voice actors. Like, it feels frequently as if the American voice actor doesn't approach the character with the proper gravitas. In short, I'm glad that my roundabout path led me to this series via French first and not English. And, actually, I still have a season and a half of
Avatar to go, so I am looking forward to that continuation.
Learning on'yomi gets easier and easier, especially because I recognize many of the compounds out in the wild now. I'm not thrilled about my progress; I would have liked to be learning more like 200 compounds per month. But again, it's not a sprint. I will probably finish
RTK 2 about a year from now, realistically, given that I cannot anticipate further necessary interruptions to my learning schedule.
A little side project for mid-April to mid-May: I bought Assimil's digital download of
Guide Indonésien and will practice with it for about a month. No pressure, no goals, no deadlines. I just want to see where I would be with things after roughly 30 days. I have no prior exposure to languages from this family, except for hearing lots of Tagalog throughout my life and picking out words in Malay from Singaporean street signs. I'm interested to see where it takes me.
Well, I guess that's it! I'm excited for what lies ahead, even if I don't always know if I can tackle it to the extent I'd like.