I'm excited to be making the transition from lurker to logger here, in this my first post, of what I hope is the beginning of a long relationship with many of you.
I'll be updating this thread weekly with updates on how things are going.
Please do comment with any tips, tricks, or questions you may have!
BACKGROUND
Taking intensive French in high school, and finding it excruciating, I figured I'd had enough language education for one lifetime.
Zip forward a decade and a half, and I find myself in a flexible job that I can travel with. Two years ago I told my boss it was my goal to go to Japan before the end of the year. There was no guarantees at all, but in my stubbornness I began learning Japanese on a daily basis anyway. While it was always difficult, there were little wins here and there that kept me going. Come the end of 2016, work doesn't really need anyone to go to Japan, but there is an opportunity to go to China. Having just spent the last 10 months learning Japanese, I jump at the opportunity, knowing that once I'm done my work in China, it's only a short hop over to Japan. After 4 weeks of riding the Shinkansen from Hokkaido, to as far south as Okayama, I'd found myself on the verge of both a travel and a language-learning addiction.
At the beginning of 2017, I started brushing up on my French again with plans to go to Paris in the summer. I found a fantastic grammar book and a very enthusiastic tutor from Strasbourg on iTalki. We spent a couple hours a week chatting about everything under the sun. This gave me plenty of confidence for the trip. While my French was still pretty rusty when we arrived in France, it didn't deter my ambitions, but only fuelled them further. On that trip in late-June, my wife & I decided to take off on a year-long European tour.
Here I am, now back in France after 10 months of working while traveling, with only 6 weeks left to go. This trip has been monumental for me; I've come to learn that while ambition may know no limits, there are only so many hours in a day. Those limited hours have been getting divided between learning German since October, catching up further with French, digging in on Spanish, muttering to myself in Swedish, and memorizing Japanese Kanji. It's been a blast!
While our Euro-Adventure is almost over, we're already talking about spending a few months of 2019 in Korea, Japan, and China. I have a strong desire to find a way to make that possible, so I'm diving deep to get learning projects around those ambitions moving now.
I've been tracking my studying with toggl for the last 4 months and have been averaging between 3-5 hours a day of studying, mostly dependent on how much we're moving between cities in a given week. I'm hoping this will level off at around 5 hours when we get back to Canada, but am keeping in mind that that's still very ambitious while maintaining full-time work.
GOALS
2018
- German [cur. B1]: Pass CEFR B2 test by end of October 2018 (one year from when I began). Make a plan to reach C2.
- Japanese [cur. N5]: Pass the JLPT N4 test on December 2nd, 2018.
- Swedish [cur. Beginner]: Pass CEFR A2 test on December 7th, 2018.
- Mandarin: Commence studying beginning of January, either via an intensive course or an independent plan.
- French [cur. ~A2/B1]: Complete CEFR B2 course by end of January 2019.
- Spanish [cur. A1]: Complete CEFR B2 course by end of March 2019.
- Korean: [cur. beginner]: Pass TOPIK 1-2 test by end of April 2019.
LEARNING RESOURCES
- German, Spanish: Using Chatterbug self-study and live tutors on a daily basis.
- French: Living Language Ultimate French, iTalki Community Tutor
- Swedish: Pimsleur Course, Routledges Colloquial Swedish, iTalki Community Tutor
- Japanese: WaniKani, TextFugu, iTalki Community Tutor
- Korean: Pimsleur, Talk to Me in Korean, Lingodeer
Am I taking on too much? Of course! That juggling act is a great part of the fun too though...
Fortunately, while the dates above really are targets I'd love to hit, my real timeline is the rest of my life. I've got so many attack vectors because I've currently got the energy to do it, not because I want to "be fluent in X months". I'm definitely aware that these languages are going to take me the better part of the next decade to get actually decent at.
One step in front of the other — here we go!