Now that my job search is concluded and I've started work, I'm starting to look back towards what I'll be spending my time on outside of work, and I would like to resume my language learning efforts. I finished my whole living-in-Paris project and I don't have a clear vision of what's next. Some options:
- Focus on Spanish and/or French. They both need work but especially French. I don't have a clear idea of how I'm going to progress yet.
- Return to Mandarin. Relearn everything I've forgotten and wipe off all the dust. Perhaps attempt to enroll in a spring semester college course--with learning happening online right now, it should be uniquely easy to do that.
- Add a new language, probably German. I'm thinking about enrolling in a Lingoda Super Sprint for the next three months, perhaps supplementing with a little Assimil. I could probably reach A2 in 2021 but I doubt I'd get higher as I'm still trying to focus on my career.
The Lingoda German option appeals to me right now but ultimately I'm not sure. I'll have to decide in the coming days, though.
I signed up for a Super Challenge in Spanish and in French. Given how little language learning I've done the last six months that doesn't look like it's going to be happening. I have however one small piece of good news on this front: I learned a few days ago that Gran Hotel is leaving Netflix at the end of the year and I've been binge watching Season 2 (on Netflix, which includes some of the original Season 3) the last few days-- I think I've watched at least 10h in the last week. Really addictive stuff and I'm really enjoying it. I'm going to keep watching as much as I can before it leaves Netflix and might seek it out on my own after it leaves. I think Seasons 2 + 3 are around 40 hours in total so that would at least get me on track for one of the four components.
Finally the last thing to report is that even though I've resisted Anki so insistently to date in my language learning, I've started to experiment with it for vocabulary. But I'm trying it out in an unusual way: I'm putting the front of the card as a sentence containing the vocabulary word, and the back the definition of the word in the TL. The thesis is that I simply want repeated exposure of the word in context (vs training myself to associate the isolated word with its English-language definition), trying to solve the problem of looking up words and then not encountering them again before I forget them. Whether or not this is going to be at all effective remains to be seen.