There and Back Again, A Traveling Language Log by Neil

[neilgrey]

Hello fair people of ALLF!

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.

2019

• 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!

[rdearman]

Good luck!

[jeff_lindqvist]

Welcome to the forum, Neil!

All your languages are covered here, by native speakers and/or member logs. If you have a question, there's a big chance that someone will have the answer.

[eido]

You're learning quite a few of the languages I want to learn. Yay!

[neilgrey]

Thanks for the encouragement!

It's definitely great being able to see other learners progress... feels like standing on the shoulders of giants when I see all the amazing things y'all have achieved.

[neilgrey]

Sunday Check-in: 01/07/2018

Summary:

Overall it ended up being a decent week, especially considering how much traveling we did. Tue/Wed we spent about 10 hours driving across Sweden and on Thursday we traveled to Strasbourg in France.

Today I started into the Pimsleur Korean course and I'm a bit scared just by the complexity of the translations for simple sentences. That being said, I'm still looking forward to doing the next lessons tomorrow morning.

I also reset my WaniKani account, as I'd been on a hiatus for over a year and was worried about not remembering a lot of the easier / more fundamental stuff. I've worked my way through the Level 1 radicals and most of the Level 1 kanji; now into Level 1 vocabulary. I should be able to reach level 2 tomorrow.

German is going pretty well, although my account seems to be a bit stuck at the current level of 3.3. I'm waiting for the remaining vocabulary to release, as I've already completed the materials for 3.4 as well. Hoping to reach 3.5 near the end of this week.

Last but not least, I've been doing some foreign book reading as well. I've got a copy of Harry Potter in German, that I'm using to generate vocabulary for the Goldlist Method. Also, in French I've picked up the first 2 "One Punch Man" manga comics that I'm looking to read tomorrow.

Last Week's Progress:

• Deutsch [16:40:32]
  
  • Chatterbug Flash Cards [8:14:26]
  • Chatterbug Lesson Prep [0:07:05]
  • Chatterbug Live Tutor [6:50:57]
  • Goldlist Method [0:31:04]
  • Pimsleur Lessons 3, 4 [0:57:00]
• Español [2:04:38]
  
  • Chatterbug Flash Cards [2:04:38]
• 한국어 [1:52:45]
  
  • Pimsleur Lessons 1, 2 [1:33:00]
  • Korean From Zero [0:19:45]
• 日本語 [1:11:08]
  
  • WaniKani Lessons [0:45:21]
  • WaniKani Review [0:25:47]
• Svenska [0:52:00]
  
  • Pimsleur Lessons 20, 21 [0:52:00]

Next Week's Key Goals:

• Complete Pimsleur Swedish (8 more lessons)
• Do 1 hour a day of Pimsleur Korean (2 / day)
• 10 Chatterbug Live German Tutor Lessons (45 min each)
• Goldlist / Harry Potter every day

P.S. Happy Canada Day!

[eido]

Pimsleur Korean was hard for me because I couldn't hear all the sounds in those long words, or at least word strings. I could sound out Hangul pretty well (with a bad accent of course) but that didn't help me match up what was being said. There was one phrase in particular that I couldn't get, and it was something about speaking. It had the verb '하다' which they said meant "to speak" but in a really weird form that ended up being a tongue-twister for me. I usually didn't remember it, and if I did, messed it up.

I wish you luck with learning from it. My library I believe only has the first two levels. If I could have learned more effectively from it, I would have continued through them. 파이팅!

[Bex]

Wow you're covering a lot...impressive

Chatterbox looks interesting...I may try it for Spanish. You seem to be using it a lot, do you have any issues with it and how do you find the live tutors?

[neilgrey]

I couldn't hear all the sounds in those long words, or at least word strings.

Ya, I've done a few of the Pimsleur courses and this one is quite different. It's interesting, because I really like the Japanese one; it's clear, concise, and easy to remember the key phrases. In the Korean course it feels like the concepts are more complicated than they're making them out to be; aka. it feels like they're over-simplifying the translations. In other courses it's pretty clear how each idea comes together to form a whole, but here I'm just rushing to spit out a bunch of sounds.

You should both message leosmith about his transcripts. Even though Pimsleur is suppose to be a listening only, with Korean 'letter blocks' being a mashup of two to three sounds together and with so many pronunciation rules that aren't explain in Pimsleur, transcript is highly recommended.

That's a fantastic idea! I'll definitely do that

Chatterbox looks interesting...I may try it for Spanish. You seem to be using it a lot, do you have any issues with it and how do you find the live tutors?

I've been using Chatterbug since October and I'm a huge fan. Essentially, they tie the self-study content into your live lessons, so that no matter what tutor you're booked with for a given session, you're always looking at material relevant to your level. Booking a tutor is as simple as clicking an open time-slot in their scheduler. The lesson actually takes place via their website, so there's no Skype involved either.

It is definitely on the pricier side of language learning programs, but the organization of the content is stellar. If you're like me and want to get speaking practice at least once a day, it's actually quite cheap compared to other online tutoring services.

• There's a demo video that can explain it better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPUbVyplngQ
• If you're interested in 25% off the first month, here's a referral code: https://chatterbug.com/r/neilgrey

[eido]

Pimsleur Korean was difficult for me as well. You should both message leosmith about his transcripts. Even though Pimsleur is suppose to be a listening only, with Korean 'letter blocks' being a mashup of two to three sounds together and with so many pronunciation rules that aren't explain in Pimsleur, transcript is highly recommended.

I think it'd be a challenge to try to make a transcript myself, and then compare it to @leosmith's. It might help the words stick in there longer and would give me listening practice. I'll think about this.