rpg learns Spanish, French, German

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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Mon Mar 09, 2020 5:11 pm

A week has passed! Let's see...

My French feels like it's improving. I finally started noticing this week that I am appreciably better at it than I was when I arrived (end of January). Still have a long ways to go, but nice that I'm making progress. As for my methods, well, I'm a little mixed on them right now. I'm feeling less and less positive about my classes at my language school and am thinking of dropping them after this week to try something else. My Chatterbug experience has been mixed but fairly positive; I've had some good lessons with some tutors I really liked, and a few lessons I didn't enjoy as much. The non-lesson parts are okay but at the same time a little limited: I really dislike their writing practice sessions (boring and feels pointless if nobody is going to correct my work), and I'm pretty negative on vocabulary flashcards too, at least of the type on Chatterbug with one side a single word in the target language and the other side a single English word (or vice-versa).

In Chinese, well, my summer program has been relocated to NJ. I have to decide this week if I still want to attend or not. I'm not sure; I do want to learn Chinese, but spending a summer in NJ sounds dire, and the opportunity cost is time I would be spending in Paris. Hmm....
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French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Wed Mar 18, 2020 9:35 pm

Updates from Paris...

Well, my French study has changed. As I mentioned above, I was planning on last week being my last week at my language school. As it happens, that would've been by force anyway, since the French government has pretty much shut everything down besides food stores and pharmacies and has forbidden people from going outside otherwise, so the language school didn't open this week.

I'm pretty bummed since it's really ruined this trip, though I shouldn't complain too much since I'm young and healthy and a lot of people are going to die from this. But allowing myself to be sorry for myself in this space, it sucks a lot. There's so much in Paris that I haven't done yet... a lot of attractions I haven't visited yet, restaurants I haven't tried, trips to other parts of France I haven't taken. I must have at least a dozen opera tickets that are going to be cancelled, both in Paris and elsewhere in Europe. I quit my job to do all these things, and now the timing is ruining it all.

Regardless... on French, I'm trying to use Chatterbug to make up for not having classes any more. I've been doing 3-4 live lessons a day the past couple days. It's a lot; I think 4 especially is a little much for one day, if for no other reason than because I'm running low on exercises to do during them! I have to keep unlocking new exercises every day by grinding flashcards. I'm going to try scaling back to 2-3 lessons a day next week.

Beyond Chatterbug, I started watching Dix pour cent on Netflix, though I'm still at the beginning. I'm watching with French captions and finding it survivable. I don't always manage to match the captions with what the people are saying, though! I don't remember having this much trouble with Spanish; I always felt like with Spanish it was mainly a question of speed, and once you get used to processing natural-speed language it wasn't so bad. There's some elision, but it feels like French has way more, with the e caduc disappearing all over the place and the consequent assimilation that takes place.

I want to watch Bref in French-- I watched all of it way back in the day with English subs-- but I think I could really use subtitles, especially to catch all the argot. If anyone reads this and knows where to find French subs for it, let me know!

Beyond that, I'm trying to pick up French in Action to fill some more time. It's definitely easier for me now than it was when I was doing it regularly a few months ago, but I think it's still useful even if the amount I'm learning is a little less dense. I haven't been learning things super systematically, and I think there's a lot of stuff I could stand to have solidified. Plus, the vocab is mostly spot on in terms of usefulness, minus the occasional outdated piece of slang, so I appreciate that.

With Mandarin, I'm slowly getting caught up on my Skritter cards. My plan is to catch up on those for the Integrated Chinese books that I studied last summer, and then to start working more seriously on Assimil. I've listened to the first 15 or so dialogues of Assimil Le Chinois a bunch now but I haven't been studying it super seriously, in part because I'd like to study it concurrently with Skritter to learn the characters for new vocab words. I'm optimistic about this over the next couple weeks, though.
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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Fri Mar 20, 2020 7:49 pm

On a total whim, I just signed up for the Language Jam next weekend, getting Dutch. Normally I'm not much of a dabbler, but for some reason this caught my eye as looking fun. Dutch isn't a language I would normally plan on studying (which I guess is the point), but it's not one I'm that opposed to either.

I'm currently planning on going pretty intensely for the full 72 hours (after all, I have nothing else to do), minus sleeping and so on. Over the next week, I plan on studying up a bit on pronunciation (just learning to produce the phonemes correctly) and gathering resources (quite challenging since I'm quarantined here in Paris and can't even get Amazon deliveries next week).

I want to take the opportunity to experiment a bit with language learning methodology: I want to study without formal coursework, with maximal amounts of target language audio, and with a minimum of grammar study. Currently thinking about L-R, which I've never done before-- this type of intense challenge seems like the perfect opportunity to try it out. It remains to find a good book to do this with-- maybe a Hemingway novel or something, if I can find the materials, because of his austere writing style.

I think I'll also try to get the latest Assimil Dutch.

Finally, I'll want some video materials. I found some videos on https://www.netinnederland.nl/ which look like informational videos for people new to the Netherlands, with English and Dutch subs available. Looks like there's a Dutch TV show called Toon on Netflix that could be interesting too.
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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Sun Mar 22, 2020 11:54 pm

Been thinking about trying to remember to make end-of-week updates on Sunday evenings, to add some regularity to my log, so let's start here.

First, for the language jam next weekend with Dutch, I think I'm going to do L-R with the first Harry Potter book. The audiobook is something like 9 hours, so I can probably get through it once per day or so. Normally I'm not that eager to consume Harry Potter for language learning, but it was surprisingly difficult finding good quality audiobooks; seems like the place to find them is Storytel, and they won't take my credit card, so... And I don't think there are nearly so many audiobooks in Dutch as I had been assuming. I'm a little used to studying languages with 100m+ speakers, it seems... For the other time, I'm thinking of trying the Assimil e-methode, since I can't seem to get the new Dutch version any other way (legally or otherwise).

With French, I spent the first week of quarantine doing a whopping 19 live lessons on Chatterbug, and I think another 10 or so hours of self-study on top of that on their platform. This week I'm cutting back a bit to only around 9-10 live lessons; we'll see how that goes. I'm currently at section 3.8.1, which means I'm actually pretty close to finishing their B1 syllabus. Some grains of salt are required, since their vocabulary selection really is remarkably shit, but nonetheless I think I will feel comfortable calling myself B1 at the end of the month. I blitzed through a DELF B1 listening section yesterday and got 19/25, and I think I would have picked up another point or two if I had been more careful about reading the questions. My speaking is still bad, but it's slowly getting better, and I'm starting to transition over to consuming more native content.

On native content, I'm going through Bref now without subtitles and while I'm missing a lot of words and even whole sentences I'm overall managing to follow along. I finished episode 1 of Dix pour cent with French subs and am planning on watching all of it. Both of them are teaching me a lot of (informal) vocab, so much so that it's starting to get on my nerves how little French learning materials focus on this stuff. If I ever create a language learning product, it's going to be based around the spoken language as it actually exists. I'd teach English learners to say "I'm gonna" right from the start, dammit!

On Spanish, I have done zilch besides feel worried that I'm losing my oral skills because of French interference.

On Mandarin, my goal for this week I think is to clear my Skritter queue, because without a goal I haven't been making consistent progress. But I've been spending a ton of time with French so I can't complain too much.

Onwards and upwards!
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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Sun Mar 29, 2020 10:11 pm

Time for another weekly update...

This was really only a half-week for my regular language learning, because Friday through Sunday I was participating in the Language Jam for Dutch. More on that in the next post.

For French, in the four days, I did 9 lessons on Chatterbug and about 4 hours of other study on the platform, for a combined total of a bit over 2.5 hours a day in total. I'm on the very last section of level 3 (their B1 level), so I expect I'll finish that vocab tomorrow or Tuesday, and then I'll officially be off to their B2 section. At this rate I'll probably finish around early May.

Beyond Chatterbug, I watched some more Bref (seen the first 45 episodes now-- they're like 1-2 minutes each, so it's not as much as it sounds like). Aaand... is that really it? Not sure where all the time has been going, then...

I have nothing to report for Spanish or Mandarin. I didn't manage to clear my Skritter queue like I wanted to. Next week, I guess?

Poor work ethic aside, I've been feeling optimistic lately about my French and the progress I've been making. I hit two months in Paris as of a few days ago, and I think I've made great progress in that time. I'm increasingly confident that I'll be able to hit B2 in good time. If we assume I'm around 200 hours away, 20h/week gets me there in mid-June, and if I can do more (not that crazy since I have nothing else to do!) it could be faster yet.

I've started thinking of my next steps in my language learning journey. I've been increasingly thinking about targeting a C1 level, for Spanish and maybe eventually French. I've been feeling more confident in my general language abilities lately, and the C levels are starting to loom high in my imagination. I'm thinking about signing up for the Super Challenge when it starts in a month, possibly a single challenge for each of Spanish and French. Reading 5000 pages and watching 150 hours of TV/movies should do wonders for both.

The other thing I've been thinking about is starting another language-- this ties in with the Language Jam, so I'll talk about it more tomorrow.
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Mon Mar 30, 2020 3:53 pm

So I did the Language Jam this past weekend (Friday through Sunday), with Dutch as my language. It was fun! A few LJ thoughts above the break, and some generalized navel-gazing below it.

The main thing I did was some L-R with the first Harry Potter book: I made it all the way through once and partway through a second time. It was pretty interesting; I could follow along a lot better than I expected, thanks to similarities with English. For the first pass through, I was largely just reading in English while listening to Dutch, but I started getting a little nervous that I wasn't absorbing that much, so during the second pass I tried to read along in both English and Dutch at once (prioritizing English). Besides the L-R, I did a very small number of Clozemaster sentences and listened to the first 16 or so Assimil Le Néerlandais lessons on the app, and (especially towards the end) I occasionally looked up some basic grammar things online.

Overall I'd say that the L-R was grueling but ultimately promising. One thing that I started to do on my second pass was to search for and highlight certain highly common words in the upcoming chapters that I was trying to learn, so that I could note them in context when they came around. For example, in one chapter I have highlighted gek ("crazy"), [ik] bedoel (" mean"), [i]luisterde ("listened"), blijven ("to stay"), and genoeg ("enough"). This felt pretty effective to me and I think it would be interesting to try combining this approach with a frequency list: every X pages you could highlight N words for some values X/N (say every 20 pages you highlighted the next 20 words, for example).

I enjoyed Dutch a lot more than I expected, so much so that I'm kind of sad that the LJ is over. I've never studied another Germanic language before, and it was really interesting and fun seeing all the shared DNA with English. I think it's the most joy I've gotten out of purely linguistic phenomena in a while. Indeed there is a nontrivial part of me that doesn't want to drop it, which feels like a bit of a waste (this is exactly why I try to avoid dabbling in the first place, generally).




Still... the fact remains that Dutch is logically just not really a priority for me: there is very little Dutch media I want to consume, and the high level of English in the Netherlands plus the infamous aversion of the Dutch towards speaking their language with foreigners together are a big deterrent.

In the Germanic family, I do have German on my "to-learn" list, and I'm starting to think more seriously about taking the first steps there. In fact, I think I could very well consider taking basically the same L-R approach that I was using for Dutch, and I think there are enough similarities between the two that I'd probably get some (undoubtedly small) transfer from the work I did this weekend. There are other reasons I've been thinking about German: I'm grandfathered on the Chatterbug unlimited plan, and I want to be able to continue taking advantage of the relatively good deal it's giving me, but I estimate I'll finish with the French curriculum by early May. Their other languages are Spanish (where I've been, to date, a little too advanced for it to be a good experience) and German, and it would seem logical to start taking some German lessons at some point.

The other thing is that, strictly on priority order, I think German would be my next language anyway. I posted a while ago a language bucket list: four Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese), German, a Slavic language (probably Russian), Mandarin, and possibly Japanese. I don't really want to start a third Romance language that soon (it's getting a bit dull...), and I don't think I would want to start a more "ambitious" language (Russian or Japanese) until I got my skills up with Mandarin, so I think German is the natural one to start as a zero beginner.

But then again, it's also worth thinking about trying to focus more seriously on my beginner-level Chinese, and worth thinking about trying to improve my Spanish some more...

Still, I think I might start adding in a bit of German to my days, and since the LJ experience seemed so promising, I might start doing the same with German Harry Potter. I think I mentioned that I'm not the biggest HP-obsessive person, but it was fun rereading the first book this weekend (I remembered it extremely well, even though it's been some 10-15 years now-- much better than I remember some books I read in the last year or two!) and made me want to go through the whole series again-- plus, the materials are easily available, high quality, long, and uncomplicated linguistically. While it's true I want to learn German to read Kafka, Musil, Mann, Bernhard, Sebald, etc. they probably aren't such great learning materials for a zero beginner.

To keep my momentum and focus on French, I think I'll make a requirement that doing any German work is a kind of reward for getting enough work done on French. Not sure how I'll quantify that, so for the moment I'll leave it subjective. I'll take it week by week, but I think I'll keep it pretty casual through April. With the SC starting in May (and possible lifting of quarantine restrictions!), it remains to be seen how my schedule works out there.
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French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Sun Apr 05, 2020 10:18 pm

Another week, another update.

On French I've spent another week on Chatterbug: 10 more live lessons, and 7 more units finished (now on 4.2.2), for a combined total of 13 hours on the platform (mostly M-F; I've been mostly taking a break from it on the weekends). Beyond that, I've managed to work in a few more diverse activities in my life this week: I watched the remaining 37 episodes of Bref and read the first Astérix + a (very) short story from this Penguin collection (La plage, by Robbe-Grillet), as well as advancing a lesson in French in Action (now on 18). I've tried reading some literary novels a bit but they're unfortunately still incredibly tough going. I do have a few Petit Nicolas books left behind by a friend who fled Paris because of the virus, so I might try reading one of those. I also have two more Astérix books here that I'll read through.

In Spanish, I did at least watch a video or two this week, but nothing much grander than that. Ditto for Mandarin.

I did check out another language learning tool this week-- Speechling. I submitted some sentence recordings in French and Spanish, but didn't get much feedback besides a lot of "Fantastic!" "Great job!" etc. Only on one sentence in Spanish did I get one correction, and even then the corrections aren't really that great-- the native speaker simply repeated a word from the sentence that I pronounced poorly without any additional commentary. It doesn't really seem that worth paying for. With that said, the site does intrigue me: I tried the dictation mode and liked it quite a bit, and I think the generally clearly-recorded sentences are also good for training pronunciation (by looping them and chorusing). I might consider trying to use it some more for Mandarin.

Finally I did start listening-reading the first Harry Potter audiobook in German a couple days ago. I'm intentionally keeping myself from dedicating too much time to this but it's enjoyable so far. The language does seem to resemble English a bit less than Dutch did, at least so far.

I've been reading and thinking recently a little about conference interpretation. My languages are nowhere near good enough (C2 in several languages is a minimum, and from what I've read even at that point it's still very hard to make it work successfully) but it's fun to daydream about as something one could shoot for-- it's motivating to work on mastering languages to a high level.

I found a couple Coursera courses-- this one on style in Spanish and this one on Macondo-- that look pretty interesting, and I might think about trying one at some point. The Macondo one would work well if I decided to take the time to read through some García Marquez. It covers La hojarasca (~170 pages), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (~90 pages), Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (~175 pages), La mala hora (~200 pages), and Cien años de soledad (~500 pages-- this one over two weeks) for over 1100 pages of reading over six weeks. I have enough free time that it's not unthinkable, but maybe I'll wait until the super challenge starts in a few weeks.
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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Sun Apr 12, 2020 10:21 pm

Time for another update...

This week on Chatterbug for French, I took 11 live lessons and progressed another 7 units, bringing me to 4.5.1. Including self-study, I spent 13 hours. At this rate, I'm going to finish all the self-study units before the end of the month. I have a lot of exercises unlocked, which is good, since I was finding myself limited by them in the past. It means I have more material for live lessons, so I've increased the intensity a bit this upcoming week to 15 live lessons scheduled. I think I've got, I dunno, 50? or so more live lessons on Chatterbug before I run out of new exercises. At that point I might switch over to some combination of German/Spanish/French to continue taking advantage of the good deal I'm getting.

Beyond Chatterbug, I finally found some good reading material: Petit Nicolas. I'm reading Le Petit Nicolas et les Copains and it's relatively easy going. As Nicolas might say, it's chouette! I'm going to continue reading it this week, hopefully finishing. Finally, I finished another French in Action lesson and am now on Lesson 19. Even though my French level has gone past where I am in FiA, at least grammatically, I'm still finding it broadly worthwhile: the videos are a good source of input, the documents are good reading materials, and I'm still picking up various pieces of vocab and phrasing and other details that I hadn't necessarily seen systematically.

For all my languages, I've signed up for LingQ tonight and I'm going to give it a try for reading in both Spanish and French. I've been exploring various language learning tools lately, and it seems natural to give this one a spin. I've been moping about the challenges of learning vocabulary lately, at least at the higher levels-- in Spanish there are so many words I still don't know, but they're never the same words! I'm hoping that LingQ can give an upgrade to reading with a kindle in that I'll be able to better track which words I look up and see when they reappear. The first challenge, though, is simply getting my existing ebooks uploaded, since I have to find a way to work around Kindle's DRM.

Speaking of vocabulary, I did the vocabulary tests just now at arealme.com. I think I've done this before, and the English one was going around maybe a month or so ago. In English I got something like 31,000 words and the top 0.0x% (I closed the tab, maybe 0.08%?). In Spanish I got a surprisingly high 21,000 and top 8.08%, though I think this is an overestimate and that I must have just gotten lucky with some words. In French I got a much more believable 6800 and only top 47.88%. Long ways to go with French still!

Other updates (I sure love to ramble...): my summer Mandarin program is officially cancelled. This has been a roller-coaster ride for me, from essentially sacrificing three months of my life last summer to study it, to all the research and dreams I had about continuing to study and about doing this program, to applying and getting admitted, to seeing it get moved to NJ and now cancelled. At this point I'm honestly a little happy it's cancelled, because NJ wasn't all that appealing anyway and this way I'll get some more time in Paris to make up for the time I'm losing to this pandemic, as I expect the program would've started all not that long after I expect the city opens up again. Still, I don't really have any clear path forward now for improving my Mandarin. I certainly have the resources to do it, but I don't have the motivation right now, and I have no external structures to force me either. My Skritter queue remains full, despite my half-hearted goals to clear it. Okay, this week I'm really going to do it...

I started German Assimil last Monday, using the e-method, so that brings us to lesson 7 today. I've done a very small amount of L-R too. I'll continue that this week, maybe doing slightly more L-R, since I think it loses a lot of effectiveness at such a low level of intensity. On the other hand, I want French to remain my primary focus. My goal with German for now is simply to start taking in some basics so that I feel more comfortable when I start learning on Chatterbug.

Finally, I've been thinking about longer-term goals recently, and I'm thinking about setting a C1 goal for both French and Spanish by the end of next year, 2021. In Spanish I think this is definitely doable, provided I get a moderate stream of input and provided I work on my output, since my Spanish is (ignoring the rust that has accumulated especially recently with the French focus) in the B2+ zone, ie part of the way to C1 already. French will take more work, since my level remains a fair bit lower, but provided that I reach my stated goal of B2 by the time I leave Paris-- and with the cancellation of my Mandarin program, that makes it until the end of July, so three and a half months, which should be ample time-- upgrading that to C1 in a year and a half doesn't sound so crazy. Of course, this timeline fits nicely with the end of the Super Challenge, which isn't a coincidence; I'm hoping that the two can reinforce each other. Finally, I might consider trying to take actual C1 CEFR exams, both since I've never taken an official one (though I did some small amount of prep for the Spanish B2 one at some point) and to give me something concrete to shoot for. But that's still some ways away...
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Wed Apr 15, 2020 6:17 pm

I've been using LingQ the past couple days to read Don Quixote. Some initial thoughts on LingQ, and on this genre of app: nothing seems to be perfect and every existing tool has a lot of flaws. Some things I like with LingQ:

  • I can upload my own ebooks.
  • There's a database of existing definitions.
  • Words are automatically added when I turn the page, and unknown and unseen words are highlighted.
  • There's a mobile app.

Some things I don't like:

  • The community definitions are incredibly low quality (!). Bad spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and often incomplete. The phrasal definitions are nigh impossible to create on mobile and the existing ones are supremely bad, often just nonsensical word-by-word translations using the wrong meanings for individual words.
  • It's not easy to add a new definition on mobile.
  • It's not easy to browse through existing definitions on mobile.
  • It's really annoying whenever you accidentally tap on a word on mobile (happens all the time) since that creates a new LingQ and it's annoying to undo.
  • The splitting of an ebook into arbitrary lessons is annoying, and it's annoying that these don't match up to chapter breaks, and that it's not easy to make them do so.
  • Doesn't support footnotes or formatting.
  • No attempt at lemmatization at all, so if a new word appears with six different inflections, you have to select the definition every single time. The stats are also meaningless as a result.
  • Interface is junky, especially on web: too much gamification nonsense and simply reading a book is awkward thanks to the poor organization of how lessons are presented (why is there not a simple button, right when I open the app/website, labeled "Continue" or something in order to pick up where I left off??). Lot of small usability things, like how if I accidentally upload a Spanish ebook when I'm in French mode, it just chugs merrily along treating it like French, and I have to dig through some menus to figure out how to delete it.

As far as I've seen nothing is really fully satisfying for me right now. I might try playing with Langliter since it seems to have a mobile app, lemmatization, and ebook support. I'm not sure it'll be able to handle older Spanish, though; the Spanish of Cervantes' time attaches pronouns to the end of conjugated verbs in ways that aren't allowed in modern Spanish (eg "Hízolo") and eg the Stanford NLP library (Stanza) doesn't seem to support that out of the box.

Creating my own tool is at least worth thinking about, but it'd be a lot of work.

It's not actually clear to me that reading Don Quixote with LingQ is a better experience than reading with my Kindle, where I can access both a quality dictionary and I can click on footnotes. I'm going to keep experimenting.
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Sun Apr 19, 2020 9:18 pm

This week's update-- I'll try to be fast since I need to go to bed.

For French, I've continued with Chatterbug. I did 15 live lessons this week and a total of 14.5 hours including self-study. I did very little self-study on Chatterbug this week since it's mostly just dull flashcard work and I already have plenty of exercises unlocked. Despite that, I advanced another 5 units to 4.6.3. I'm not too far from finishing their whole curriculum, at least the self-study portions; probably the update two weeks from now.

Beyond Chatterbug, as I mentioned above I started using LingQ this week, and I've been reading this past year's Prix Goncourt winner Tous les hommes n’habitent pas le monde de la même façon with it. I'd actually started this book on my Kindle but hadn't made it very far. I'll finish the fourth "lesson" before I fall asleep tonight out of 33 total for the book, so I haven't gotten that far yet; the print book apparently has 233 pages, so that's only around 28 pages or so of actual reading.

I finally have an update for Spanish: I started reading good ole Don Quijote with LingQ, though I also bought the latest RAE edition to cross-reference footnotes. I read the first six chapters (not that impressive, they're not that long); the first part has 52 chapters, and I'll be quite pleased if I can push myself to finish them. I'll record my thoughts on reading Don Quixote later, but for now I'll just say that it's really not as hard as I was expecting, and it's also a surprisingly engaging and enjoyable read so far.

For German, I've been inconsistent with Assimil this week and I think I only finished through Lesson 9 or something. I'm not too bothered since again I'm much more concerned about making good progress in my existing languages.
2 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150


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