Yesterday I went to the gym in the evening. I had come home earlier so I did some Speakly.me sessions for Estonian (btw, they have Finnish too apart from the FIGS. I recommend them). My point is, I read one page from the wonderful Hebrew course and almost fell asleep. It's important to build this habit. Then one of the girls got a fever and couldn't get to sleep, waking every half hour until midnight. At least I got some proper sleep, then gym again in the morning. It could have been harder. They didn't go to school today, so that means I have some more minutes during the day for studying, and I'll try to go home earlier as well.
At a Facebook group, I found this Norwegian blog about Brasil:
Brasileira.no . I haven't figured out its political orientation yet.
I got home before lunch was ready, and so I took the chance and did two sessions of Clozemaster Hebrew with the TTS on. There's no better exercise at the moment.
Already a couple of weeks spent on the Intermediate level of Yabla Chinese. The videos are longer with more dialogues and at real speed. At first it was a shock, but now I'm used to that speed already. There's a synergy going on regarding the TV series as well - Yabla is meant as intensive reading/watching. There is also Clozemaster involved, so that means I'm working on my Mandarin in different levels from the sentence to the text. I'm not working on the hanzi level, on the word level, I'm not producing but I notice I'm on my way to fluency and there's no going back.
Thanks to Lemon Snicket's translation, I learned the Georgian for "speak of the devil...". In Portuguese it's a direct equivalent, "falando no diabo...", but in Georgian it's ძაღლი ახსენეო , which means something like "Remember the dog".
Russian is becoming so much easier now that I'm thinking about increasing my listening-reading daily quota, from 3 to 4 pages. This current book actually has shorter pages, but the risk is picking a new one with pages based on the A4 format. So far, I spend no longer than 8 minutes a day which is much less than I can take in Russian, but maybe it's not so wise to spoil the moment by forcing a longer session like the ones I used to have with much more boring novels.
Clozemaster was off for maintenance most of the afternoon, so I couldn't do the reps I was planning. Meanwhile, time to think about Duolingo. Indonesian and Hindi are on their way out, as well as Esperanto for Portuguese speakers. I'm thinking about resuming Spanish for Russian speakers, which is my idea of doing a reverse tree.
Third lesson over and I'm adapted to the format of Routledge's Course. It's mostly exercises. The dialogue and the grammar explanation altogether make less than half the lesson. Let's see how far I can go without vowel points. The videos themselves are very helpful because I'm having comprehensible input in small doses. Short lessons are a recipe for success in language learning, especially when combined: moving forward with Assimil and reviewing with the Routledge course, that also teaches grammar more gradedly and explicitly.
Now I feel guilty for going slowly with Indonesian, but I don't have similar resources for it. At least not half as fun. The only one I can think with short lessons is pod101, but I'm so fed up with the format of the lessons that I don't know if I'll be motivated to do something in Indonesian as yet another addition to my already busy schedule. What annoyes me the most are the random lessons that are inserted even at the Absolute Beginner lessons and that are usually way over the given level. They take a lot of time to decode when you don't know the grammar of the language yet (even with the translation - I mean decoding them syntactically so you can depict them as meaningful utterances and not just attempt to memorize them). I'll give it a second try after I'm some weeks into Assimil. I want to be at a point where it's easy to parse the sample sentences.
I could return to The Indonesian Way, but I find it even more boring at this stage. I could hope for Duolingo Indonesian to be released soon as well. Meanwhile, I should try Clozemaster but I went a bit too far during my dabbling stage, so now I've already seen all sentences in the first 2 lessons, and the sentences in the third one are still a bit over my current level.
All in all, a positive day in a positive week.