While I haven't been checking in, I've managed to be a lot better at maintaining a consistent trickle of practice, however menial it feels. This has meant about 200 new French words per month, 10 French idioms per month, and a little over a hundred kanji and a hundred on'yomi compounds per month. Oh, and then there's been the three-month effort to dig myself out of the backlog in German flash cards that I created for myself by not consistently reviewing for nearly two years straight. That's been humbling, but after starting with nearly 4000 overdue cards (!), I am down to fewer than 200. I guess this is why people don't like Anki.
I stalled for months at learning new on'yomi compounds and realized that I had such a poor retention rate -- and therefore only a middling desire to practice -- because I wasn't incorporating writing into my reviews. I did that, and my retention rate increased dramatically, and it became fun again. I'd been planning to dangle RTK3 like a treat in front of myself only for after I had finished RTK2, but I realized that, above all, I really like learning to write new kanji. ("They're my Pokemon," I told my sister the other day.) So why martyr myself? I bought RTK3 in September and have been learning roughly four per day with great happiness. And the RTK2 learning continues in parallel.
It's clear to me now that I've been comfortable in the C levels of French for some months. I think I will be ready to sit the C2 by late Spring of 2019, to my surprise. No matter how ready I may feel, though, I plan to wait until the end of 2019 (I could sit it in November abroad, or December near home). I figure that if I have no particular time constraints, it makes more sense to wait until I am wrapping up my Super Challenge in French so that I have all the more pages and hours under my belt. That has been going pretty well, too, fortunately. I have found a pretty rich offering of French literature through the network of local and regional libraries. I am less caught up in audio-visual material (see any of my previous posts complaining about how it's like pulling teeth to get me to watch anything in any language!), but I realize the importance of it and have been trying to get back on the wagon. I have been glued to Francophone radio these last few nights in the wake of the sad events in Strasbourg, a place that I particularly miss at this time of year (when I was living in Germany, I lived right nearby).
The Super Challenge actually got me thinking about its future iterations. I stressed needlessly for several weeks about what language I should select for the Super Challenge in *2020*. But it's fair to begin thinking of it now, I believe, because I would like to begin paving the way as early as possible. I would much rather begin extensive reading in a language once I am at A2 or above. I know from experience that I am not someone who can train her attention on literary resources, no matter how elementary, in tandem with acquiring the rudiments of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. I realized while my head spun that I was actually confounding three related matters: (1) In what languages do I stand a fighting chance of getting up to A2-B2 by mid-2020? (2) What languages are already well represented in my collection of learning resources? (3) In what languages can I acquire thousands of pages' worth of books as inexpensively as possible? There are different emphases in the answers to each of these questions, but I guess that the common ground for all of them has got to be Japanese, even if my excitement about acquiring Japanese is on the lower end of my list. So, for the sake of practicality, I will probably do the next Super Challenge in Japanese. If I really could do anything, though? Probably Basque or Provençal. But these fall far short of being suitable for (3).
(I will probably at least toy with Basque in the coming couple of years. As I stood around at Thanksgiving recently with over twenty family members, nearly all of whom share my Basque surname, I realized that none of us has the slightest knowledge of the language. "Somebody's got to do it," I said to my uncle.)
Well, that's about it for now. Back to tonight's kanji. I look forward to catching up with everybody's logs in the coming few weeks!