I've finished my IB exams. If anyone does the IB, then you would understand why this is a time of celebration. I now have lots of free time. I have about 4 months of summer holidays- although I plan on getting a part time job and I have some other non-language related goals/plans but I still have so much time that I can devote to language learning.
I want to use this summer to experiment with different language strategies that I've encountered and to focus on areas of my French that I am not satisfied with.
Currently my French is probably around a B1 with a B2 in reading and my perception of my listening ability is constantly changing- it could be anything from a B1 to a (low) B2. I learnt bits and bobs of Japanese once upon a time- I still remember most of the hiragana and katakana and some random phrases there and there.
Reflections on my past language language experiences
I've been reading some articles and watching some podcasts by Olly Richards on language learning which I'm finding to be very helpful. https://www.iwillteachyoualanguage.com/ ... d-japanese
Anyways, the one thing that stuck out to me was how it's easy to study a language without having a concrete idea of why you are doing what you are doing and if what you are doing is even helpful for what you want to achieve. One thing that resonated with me of the importance of having a clear short-term goal that you really want to achieve/make you the most happiest to be able to do and spend majority of your time working towards it.
For example, if you want to improve your speaking then you can set the target of being able to have a decent conversation in your target language for at least one hour. So you spend most of time preparing for things that will be relevant for a conversation that you want to have and spend 3-5 hours a week speaking to native speaker in that language and study the stuff that you wanted to stay but couldn't. It's nerve-racking but you can see the progress in a skill that you really wanted to be decent at.
I did something similar to that with my French last year- my speaking improved dramatically. Sadly I've barely spoken any French this year (not counting the occasional exchanges there and there) and it's very obvious.
With Japanese and French, there is an abundance of resources so it's easy to waste time trying to go through all of them and getting burnt out and seeing no tangible results.
Although I didn't do as much as I could, nearly everyday for the last couple of months, I have spent some time regularly listening to something in French for x amount of time whether it may be a podcast or an episode of a TV series as well as reading something in French and I was able to build a habit (although over the last two weeks when I was having exams nearly everyday put a dent to that).
Now I truly realise that my skill in x aspect of the language is proportional to the time I spend practising that skill. Quelle surprise! Reading is my strongest skill... as I've spend more time reading stuff in French than I've spoken in French or listen stuff in French.
In my case, I used to complain about how I struggled with listening French but thanks to some wonderful advice I got on this site. I realised that I spent very little time listening to the language and if I didn't understand something I would get frustrated and avoid listening to French for a period of time and the cycle would continue. Since I've made an effort to try to consistently listen to something in French, my listening has improved tremendously.
Japanese
In my old log, I had some really ambitious goals for my Japanese. Although I love to be able to read Japanese literature such as Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata by the end of the summer, I don't know if I could achieve this unless I spent over 12 hours every day over the next 4 months intensely focusing on being able to read Japanese literature.
What could make me the most happy is to able to watch a Studio Ghibli film (and to a lesser extent an episode of Terrace House). I need to acquire a large enough vocabulary to understand the dialogue and to be able to understand it when spoken, and I need to spend a lot of time intensively listening to the audio. The time-frame I'm giving myself to 45 days.
Additionally, my brother is learning Japanese at school and it would be nice to renforce the things I've learnt by going through it with him.
Now that I have no school, I can devote 6-8 hours a day on average for language learning.
Resources I have and what I'm planning on doing with
1. I will be using Japanesepod101 to help to do systematically learn common vocabulary and help to create a decent foundation. This is based on Ari's Chinesepod method.
1) To listen to the dialogue with the transcription (less than 3 minutes)
2) To read the lesson notes and add the key phrases to Anki to review (less than 5 minutes)
3) To review on Anki those phrases (15-25 minutes)
In total I will be spending 30-45 minutes on each lesson.
During the first two weeks, I want to go through 3-5 lessons each day and discuss some of the key things I've learnt with my brother. I plan on finishing all the episodes in Nihongo Dojo: Absolute Beginner by 24th-27th September. Hopefully by the time, I'm on 'Nihongo Dojo: Beginner' and 'The Path to Advanced Japanese', I should have developed a more efficient way to going through all the lessons. Ideally I have finished going through 200 episodes by the 3rd July.
2. Subs2rs deck of となりのトトロ (My Neighbour Totoro), Mushishi and Whisper of the Heart.
I want to focus on My Neighbour Totoro deck first as the vocabulary is a lot more simple and straightforward for the rest of May
Then focus on the Whisper of the Heart
I struggle with making my own subs2rs deck. I don't why it doesn't work for me. I want to make one of 'Only Yesterday' and 'The Secret World of Arrietty'.
Study time: To spend 1-3 hours working through it
3. Extensive listening with Terrace House, Haikyuu and other Studio Ghibli movies- which involves watching each episode/movie with English subtitles then with Japanese subtitles and without any subtitles. To add 25 unknown words to Anki. I want to have an activity that doesn't require intensive drilling of each word. I already enjoy these series so I can happily spend over 2 hours on this.
4. b) Potentially use Wasabi.jpn lessons as an extra resource to work with my brother on. But we shall see. Or maybe read Yotsuba together.
(30/05/18 This was taking time away from achieving my goal which involves near total focus on listening comprehension)
5. I have Japanese exchanges who I like talking to- to be completely honest we talk in mostly if not always in English but I use it as opportunity to ask questions about Japan, Japanese language and honestly to just have a chat. On Saturdays I want to practice the key dialogues that I've learnt with them to make my knowledge more active. I remember doing this a long time ago and it was really enjoyable and all the Japanese phrases that I remember are the ones that I practised with them.
French
I want to use this summer holidays to really work on my speaking and listening.
Speaking
Pronunciation/Phonetics/Intonation and all that fun
1. To work to fix my fossilised incorrect/unnatural pronunciation in some areas by working through Phonétique Progressive du Français (débutant). There's only 124 pages and 56 lessons. I want to power through this book as fast as possible. I want to go through 5-10 lessons per day. I will also be using https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... cR15l1ld60. (There's 484 videos. But I'd like to through at least 365 videos. Luckily there are less than 2 minutes long.) After I've finished all the lessons in the book, I'll use Golden Moustache for a source of shadowing.
Study time: 50-75 minutes
Getting comfortable with speaking
Ideally I want to have 3-5 hours of speaking in French. I've been able to do this for two weeks at a stretch but it's hard maintaining it week after week due to the availability of language exchanges. For now, I have two committed language exchange partners however one of them I find might be busy this month because of job related stuff and the other one is mostly reliable but she studies Medicine and that can be time-consuming.
I plan on getting a part-time job to help to pay to have 2-3 Italki lessons each week. I am going to be resuming my Italki lessons in June in the meanwhile I want to work on my pronunciation as much as possible.
1st- 24th September
To do a simultaneous interpretation challenge. I haven't decided yet how I'm going to structure this.
Listening
After having listened to a bunch of different podcasts, I'm sticking with https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/ ... -vous-leco. I don't know why I like listening to it so much.
I liked 'Noir is the New Black' but they haven't uploaded any new episodes.
I really liked the idea of Transfert by Slate.fr but I never really consistently listened to it as much. So I'm parking it on the beach for now. I like Frenchspin- I find it to be very accessible and a good confidence booster but it's so long.
But for now I'm sticking with Frenchspin and FranceCulture's 'Entendez-vous l'éco'
I've mentioned what TV series I will be/am watching in my previous log.
Steven Universe (I have 90 more episodes until I've finished with the series)
This is Us (I have 12 more episodes left to go). I should have finished this a while ago.
ATLA (I have 54 episodes left to go)
Le monde incroyable de Gumball (has 138 episodes in total so I have 135 left to go)
Les Revenants (16 episodes)
Le Bureau (30 episodes)
Breaking Bad (62 episodes)
Braquo (32 episodes)
Orange is the New Black in French (65 episodes)
Engrenages (64 episodes)
I don't know if I can finish all these series in 4 months. But it would be interesting to see how much I will end up watching.
I love movies. I want to finish all the films from the list of French submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. I've already watched some of them. They're not going to be my main focus and I have no illusions that it will magically boost my listening comprehension. This is mostly for fun. There's about 70 in total.
Other Skills
I'm not going to be actively adding new words to Readlang. I have 5800 words stored in Readlang! To be fair, lot of them I already know but I just haven't deleted yet. I'm not going to be doing much reading. I want to complete all the exercises in my French grammar book before September. I've done quite a lot already. But the book is so massive.
Korean subs2rs challenge. Somehow I am going to learn to how to subs2rs. I am going to be using only 'The Heirs' (which is my guilty pleasure). It would be interesting to see how far I can get.
6th August- 6th September
Spanish Netflix Challenge which is just a glorified L-R method but instead of being audio books with bilingual text instead I'm going to be using Spanish TV series/movies on Netflix that have Spanish and English subtitles. https://www.quora.com/Is-it-realistic-t ... y-studying. Judith Meyer mentions a friend who was able to understand everything she read and anything the radio by doing the L-R method for 10 hours. She also says that 150 hours should be enough in understanding the spoken language of languages such as Spanish, French and Russian. I want to commit 3-5 hours each day.
I plan on using the rest of the September to make my skills in the rest of my languages more well-rounded. I don't know if I should use that time to do a different type of challenge with Persian- something that I can use to review a particular product/course. Unfortunately my library doesn't have many language resources such as Pimsleur, Michel Thomas (and they are too expensive for me to buy directly). Funny enough, my library has the Benny Lewis' Hacking Spanish or was it German. I am not too sure. If his 'Hacking Spanish' is available in my library then I might use it while doing my Spanish Netflix challenge.
Post-Summer Plans
-I don't know when to introduce Persian and Chinese
-At some point in the next 2-3 years I want to take the DALF C1