@Eido: Thanks for the encouragement. I'm still trying to recover from their accents though. I will never be able to shake the fear of sounding like them
FrenchListening: My current routine is to listen to at least one longer podcast every day, so every evening, I pick one (or two) podcast episodes to listen to the next day and download them onto my phone. Then I listen to them whenever I find the time during the day, so for example 10 minutes while preparing in the morning, 15 minutes during lunch break, 15 minutes during grocery shopping etc..., so on most days I don't need to use any "study time" for listening and this also reduces the time I spend in front of screens.
This week, I've tried a couple of new podcasts:
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Sur les épaules de Darwin: Seems to be a mix of science, history, literature and culture; pretty diverse topics and an interesting approach. Not my cup of tea though.
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Varennes (La fuite): Retells the failed attempt of Louis XVI and his family to flee from the French Revolution and the aftermath. It's by the same presenter as Au coeur de l'histoire. I only listened to the first episode so far, but I liked the way it was presented. The French revolution is not a topic that has me screaming for more, since we studied and compared different revolutions for about two years back in high school. In every episode, the podcast's narrator takes the perspective of different characters (the king, the queen, a moderate revolutionary, a more radical one...), which sounds interesting. I think I'll listen to all of them.
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À la Hussarde: Recent changes in the political landscape of France, by Thomas Legrand (also presents L'édito politique). The podcasts mixes interviews, comments and editorial notes.
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Les braqueurs: Different robbers tell their story in long monologues. It took some getting used to, but now I like it.
Reading: I finished
le Roi de fer last week. I'm still fighting through
Germinal, I find it hard to read but still rewarding enough to stick to it. I'm somewhere in the middle of the story and therefore the miners' strike now, and all the bleakness, hunger and destitution are helping me to appreciate the easy comfortable life I live. Which definitely also applies to
Petit Pays, a short book by Ga:el Faye which I picked up at the library. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone. The main character is a 12-year-old half-french-half-rwandan kid who lives in a privileged area of Bujumbara (Burundi) with his family. The story is set during the early 90s, so you can kind of guess where it's going. Since it's all in the words of a 12-year-old, the language is not too hard. I'm also reading
Le soleil sous la soie, a historical fiction about a surgeon at the end of the 17th century. This book doesn't live up to the marketing ("Le meilleur roman historique depuis Les Piliers de la Terre"), but the language is mostly simple and after each chapter of Germinal reading this book feels almost relaxing. With 180 pages of Germinal and 600 pages of this one to go, I will probably finish them at the same time.
Actual studying: Much less of course. Shadowing some Assimil lessons to work on my pronunciation; more vocabulary in Anki; two grammar points in my Grammaire progressive; one italki lesson; and I write 5 sentences of incoherent French everyday in my notebook.
ItalianListening: I listened to all the episodes of
Veleno, and half of
Risciò (350min). Risciò is good, but Veleno is in a league of its own. It may be the best podcast series I've listened to so far, including Serial and Death in Ice Valley. I have four more episodes of Risciò to go, then I'll move on to
Lo stato dell'unione after which
Da costa a costa seems like the logical next step. I remember looking for good italian podcasts in 2014 or 15 and not finding any that interested me, but that has definitely changed.
Reading: None yet, but I have Cheryl Strayed's
Wild on my nightstand. I picked it up on a trip to Italy some time ago, but abandonned it because the first chapter hit a little too close to home. My plan is to finish this book before the end of the year.
JapaneseListening: Only one episode of
Midnight Diner so far. I had thought that there were a couple of good shows on Netflix, but other than
The Many Faces of Ito and Midnight Diner nothing looks interesting yet. I discovered a
Ronja Röversdottar/Räubertochter anime that the kid in me really wants to watch (first hero of just about every German girl maybe? Her or the Red Zora). I haven't looked at podcasts yet, but hopefully I'll find something interesting there.
Reading: Keeping it boring: I'm going to read
Harry Potter first. I only own 3 Japanese books, so I'll stick with them for now.
I'm trying to adhere to strict rules regarding time allocation to different languages, but with Veleno I've broken them several times becasue I got so addicted. I've set myself some intermediary goals for the Super Challenge, and I've calculated the amount of minutes and pages per day I need to reach these goals. I've also decided on a clear hierarchy among languages, which will change quaterly. For now until the end of 2018 (or the DALF exam at least) French always comes first. I won't listen to Italian before finishing my French minutes for the day, and I won't listen to Japanese before finishing Italian. For reading, the hierarchy is French - Japanese - Italian, because if I don't put Japanese before Italian, I'm worried that I might never read any Japanese, because it's much harder for me than reading Italian. But my Japanese goals are much lower than my goals for Italian to compensate for this. I want to finish Harry Potter in Japanese within the next 6 months, but Wild within the next 3 months (all the while reading about 30 pages of French each day).