In this initial post, I'm going to give an overview of what my plans are for this year, though since my plans tend to follow the university, it will mostly be about the first half year for now.
French
The essential thing with French is that my speaking really sucks compared to the other skills, and that has to be my main focus. This term I'll do one course in literature and one in history, both taught in French and with oral exams. The literature course is one I have done before, but the curriculum is slightly changed, so I get to read some new stuff and some old. One good thing about reading French classics is that the books are really cheap - I downloaded Dom Juan (Molière) to my new kindle yesterday, and the price was just 2 euro, which means I can have a kindle book AND a physical book if I want.
I've registered for the Output Challenge in French, and my plan for writing is to write regular summaries of what I read in these two courses. For speaking I'm going to start with reading aloud (from B1 easy readers, which I have a whole bunch of), but hopefully I'll get to talking about the curriculum eventually, beecause that's what I'll have to do when I get to the exams.
I also want to work on grammar, where my main challenge is learning the forms (verbs especially) and putting them to use. As so soften, I found a suitable book on my own bookshelf - The Grammaire progressive du français (niveau intermédiaire).
Russian
Last term, I did an introductory course in Russian at the university (although I had been studying on my own for a year or so already). Although there wasn't much entirey new stuff, I still benefitted a lot from it - I hate memorizing morphology (or anything else, or that matter), and Russian has a lot of endings to learn, so that's something I know a lot better now that I've been forced to do the hard work.... We did the full case system, finite forms of verbs, aspect and verbs of motion last year. This year it seems we are starting out with the participles, followed by the subjunctive. The pace of these courses is really high, so I'm impressed by those who got through it with no previous knowledge.
Apart from following the course, I'd like to try to read a little bit. I've also registered for half an Output Challenge in Russian.
Sami
I'm learning Northern Sami together with a friend, we're working through a course book with audio, and also trying to read a little bit (so far, we've tried Mari Boine lyrics and children's books). I hope we'll finish the first course by summer, and that we both will feel ready for more. There are four courses in the series, and the last one is at B1 level.
My main issue with this course we're using is that it doesn't focus enough on pronunciation. I've therefore started taking the audio apart using Audacity, so I have audio files with only Sami speech, and some space in between for me to repeat, instead of having to listen to all that Norwegian speaking every time.
I also got the uTalk app a few days ago. It's pretty basic, but as long as I'm at a pretty basic level, that's fine. It will teach me a basic vocabulary, and it has audio all the way. The two things I want more than anything right now.
I'm also reading a book I found at the university library, Parlons Lapon - Les Sames: Langue et culture by M. M. Jocelyne Fernandez. the book gives an overview of Northeern Sami grammar, vocabulary, and culture, and is a perfect read-through introduction.
Norwegian/Swedish/Danish
My exam in Nordic literature didn't go very well, so I've registered for a new attempt in the spring. This means I'll be reading more Swedish and Danish and Nynorsk this term, but I'm probably done writing Nynorsk for now.
My new Norwegian courses this term are 1) discourse analysis and 2) norwegian language structure in a comparative light. This last one is partly a course in language typology, partly a study of Nowegian compared with some common immigrant languages. It looks like the languages in question this year will be Vietnamese, Turkish and Tigrinya. We are not supposed to learn these languages, only about them, but I'd like to learn a little bit anyway - I've studied linguistics before, and I know that a practical knowledge of a language will deepen the understanding of the theory. I'd be very happy for any recommendations on resources for Tigrinya.
Vietnamese
As a consequence of the above, I've started learning Vietnamese. I actually started a little bit about a year ago, with the Duolingo course, but found it very challenging (it has since become available on android, which is a big plus). I'm now using Duo, Mondly, and the Teach Yourself Getting started with Vietnamese, which has an excellent introduction to the phonological system, with lots of pronunciation practice.
Turkish
I've studied a little bit of Turkish before, and will probably want to look at it again some time this spring. Probably whenever I feel I could use a break from Vietnamese. My resources for Turkish are the usual: Duo, Mondly, and a textbook (made for use in Norwegian schools).
English
I learned (or aquired) English living in the US, and it has never occured to me since that learning English might be good for anyting. However, a lot of my vocabulary comes from extensive reading, and I've hardly ever used an English dictionary at all, and as a consequence, I know a lot of words in a slightly inaccurate way. As an example, someone once asked what "garrulous" means and I immediately answered that it means "quarrelsome" - meanwhile, someone else looked it up and found that it means "talkative". The scary thing is that it would never occur to me to look it up... I use dictionaries all the time for languages i learn, but never or Norwegian or English. Anyway, I got a Kindle for Christmas, so I thought that would be the perfect way to work a little more actively on vocabulary. I started out getting "Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie, and I picked that one because my mother once told me she had tried reading the book in English, but gave up after a few pages because of the vocabulary was too heavy for her. After that, she has only read Rushdie in translation - and so have I, because I have mostly borrowed the books from her. "Satanic Verses", however, is a book I haven't read at all before. So I started reading a few pages (the pages in question, presumably), and my verdict so far is that my English vocabulary is probably better than my mother's, and that the difficulty of the passage comes not so much from the vocabulary itself as its usage by the author - but you do need to know the words, because you can't possibly guess their meaning from the context. Anyway, whatever else I will get out of this, at least I'll get to read "Satanic Verses".
German, Italian, Latin, Greek
I really should try to find the time for some easy maintenance of these languages. And that's about all I have to say about that for now
