Postby David27 » Sun Jan 01, 2023 8:12 pm
2023 Goals
This won't be exciting, as I don't have many new goals, but I wish to refocus my study.
Mandarin/Japanese: Last year, I read wo jia de da yan fei zou le, which is ~500 Chinese vocabulary book, but 40-50 pages of only Chinese text which was good for me. It also comes with a CD which I listened to for audio practice. I thought it was great practice, so I bought two more similar books at the same level. For Japanese since I liked it, I got a japanese graded reader series, 5 short stories for vocabulary level 400-1500 with audio, which I found too easy and the books had too many pictures, and a lot less text than the Chinese, so not as good practice, but I think useful for getting used to sitting down and reading Japanese. I got 2 more at the next level, which is 1500+ vocabulary, so we'll see how that goes.
Overall, my plan is the same as I have been doing, 20 minutes each as a goal, but I'm not religious about it, if I get busy and miss a day I don't sweat it, I'm not in too much of a hurry.
Slavic: next as far as time investment is probably Slavic languages. I didn't read anything last year in Russian, but still listened to Russian with Max podcast and would read different Russian news sources. I also started Ukrainian, and completed Pimsleur Ukrainian I, 30 lessons. I have Teach Yourself Ukrainian which I went through the first 4 lessons so far. I had started learning Polish 2-3 times before, In the past I've done Pimsleur level I twice, and the first 20 lessons of Assimil le polonais sans peine in the past, which I tried again last year... and got just about as far as I did last time (~20 lessons). I do follow different content creators on Twitter who post exclusively in Polish, so I do have some Polish reading. My interest in Polish always goes up the more Ukrainian I study to see the Slavic family differences between these 3 languages.
Germanic: In November-December, I watched Deutschland 83 TV show which I liked, I also read Kafka-Rilke Dual Language book of short stories (111 pages of German reading). I needed English translation of the dual-language book, as a lot of the short stories were tough to understand even reading in English (particularly some of the Kafka stories). Dutch, I haven't done much recently, just watching Easy Dutch videos on Youtube when they're posted. My goal to try a book in Dutch flopped, too much to do and I de-prioritized that. I am surprised with how much German I ended up doing last year, hopefully I will keep up a similar pace, as I enjoy the language.
Romance: No major updates. For next year I plan to refocus my first 3 months of next year on Italian, dabble in Latin, then after that maybe I'll back off romance language study. Spanish I use daily and am always looking things up or small ways to better my Spanish, so I don't feel the need to prioritize that.
Other: outside of language learning, I plan on improving my reading. My goal is to read at least one page daily (English or foreign language, so my graded readers for Chinese/Japanese will count), even if busy, I can sit down and read one page. I love reading, but getting busy and with so much going on in life I have often pushed off reading to just when on vacation, or have a long weekend, I want to have it be a more routine part of my life again. As far as exercise, last year I started running a lot more, so I plan on keeping that up, and I would like to do 2-3 5K races (I did one last summer and enjoyed it).
12 x