2018 SummaryI know there is going to be a lot of other summaries coming so I will try to be brief. All the stats concern German if not stated otherwise.
Listening: approx. 310 hours of audiobooks mostly while commuting.
I haven’t logged other things like podcasts but there were a lot of them too. I could observe a significant improvement in that area, but was still not enough to understand a middle class Endlose-Serie without problems… More about it below.
Reading: approx. 4400 pages since April—I should have started it much earlier. Shoulda coulda woulda—story of my language learning in 3 words
I rediscovered reading so to speak. I used to be an avid reader as a teenager but for the last couple of years the number of books read by me in any language was close to zero. In the process I’ve found out that I like genres I didn’t really expect to like and have never read in Polish. In addition to that I sometimes flick in one or two short articles from “Der Postillon”.
Writing: Not much writing up until June when I became a PM here from a native speaker. We are still exchanging PMs in German for what I’m extremely grateful. It was arguably the best thing that has happened to my German. And it seems I’m not that bad at it. Of course Google and dictionaries help a lot. But I was forced to use more complicated constructions than “I+verb+rest of sentence” not to bore my conversation partner to death.
Speaking: Not much to talk about here…(pun intended) By far the worst of my skills… I really have to make something to improve it if just a little bit. The most obvious thing to do would be finding a conversational partner/teacher on italki. The problem is finding the time and place where I could have an hour-long undisturbed conversation. One other idea is talking to myself about the series I watch and recording it. That way I could also actively use the new vocabulary from the watched episode. I will probably start slowly with that.
Oh, I did finish a phonetics course: Praxisbuch Phonetik. Aussprachetraining für Deutsch als Fremdsprache by Daniela Niebisch
Grammar: Finished grammar books for B1 and B2 levels: “Niemiecki w tłumaczeniach”. I still use it as reference when I don’t remember some constructions and so on. Now two volumes of “Sag’s besser” are looking at me impatiently from the shelf.
Dialang tests: They placed me on more or less B2 level.(C1 in two tests)
Achieving without goals attitude: I only started applying it in September.( Shoulda coulda woulda…) That really helps to achieve more, at least for me. I have other things in life I have to worry about. It takes what it takes, no need to stress out I’m not moving fast enough. I certainly won’t claim I always succeed in that battle. I’ve always been keen on numbers, so I sometimes catch myself calculating how many pages a day I would have to read to finish the book in a X number of days. Well, it’s a process.
SRS-- Anki and Supermemo: It was a great refresher for more common words at the beginning of the year. I’ve reached the point where more and more obscure words are cropping up in the Supermemo (B1-B2) course. I don’t predict to encounter them anytime soon nor do I think they were very useful so I decided to set the number on new words to zero. Instead of that discovering new idioms and
Redewendungen seems to be more beneficial.
Transcription: I’ve discovered it only recently as a method but put my hopes in it. (It was of course recommended here quite a while ago by iguanamon, and mentioned to me by Kat 2-3 months ago) Quite exhausting, frustrating, the series I use “Lindenstraße” is not great, but if it will help me to reach another level I’m willing to stick with it. The pace will not be great. With the current speed of work I could probably do about 2 episodes a month. I really don’t like to write what I would like to do. I prefer to write about something I’ve already done. I will keep you posted.
Another language(?): I’m considering adding Russian to the mix this year(I resisted the temptation in 2018), but if so I will probably just be dabbling in it à la Expugnator. Seeing how much time studying/maintain two languages takes, I don’t see me adding a L5 in any foreseeable future.
English: Re-launch of working on English started in October I think. I‘m mostly trying to fill in the gaps in my grammar but my vocabulary is also in need of refreshing. I want it to stay SRS-free though.
Persistency: 364 study days up to this point of 2018. On particularly busy days it meant just doing SRS, to keep me in the game. I’m fairly optimistic about reaching a perfect 365/365 tomorrow.
Hmm, it didn’t end up that brief after all.
All in all a good year
See you in 2019!