The 6WC ended last night and I got in over 70 hrs of Hebrew. That about 100 minutes a day over the period, which I'm impressed with and do not think it is something I could maintain. But some of that was really just watching tv or films (not intensively). My learnings?
The 6WC does help to spend a lot of time on a target language, but the competitive aspect is distracting to me. Because I was looking for activity that would generate a fair amount of time to record I choose activities that where time intensive. This meant that I re-discovered Pimsleur and watching TV. Pimsleur is just great, at my level, I found it extremely useful and will continue to use - one lesson a day with one or two times of review (maybe more if it starts to kick my butt). Surprisingly, the TV that I watched went from zero understanding to about 20%... that is a nice surprise and I really like that I got listening in like that early into the learning curve. I don't think I would have spent so much time listening at this point in my study if it didn't "count". So the surprise was that it is something I'm finding enjoyable, useful and worthwhile.
However, I feel that I will pare that down a bit to work on more intensive listening - either taking notes, transcribing or sub2srs this content.
I think it is very easy to learn to be comfortable not understanding audio to the point it being counterproductive.
I've also learned that I'd like to go back to tracking beyond "time spent on task". So, personally, I'm going to add two soft measures or "multipliers" to tracking. Let's call the first one "quality" to cover material relevance, learning focus and content intensity. For example, a movie with little dialog might have my full attention, I may take a lot of notes, but if it is sparse on dialog, well that's low content intensity. "Quality" is intrinsic to the material and my perception of it as corresponding to the task at hand (Hello, Robert Persig).
The second, I'm going to call "joy" (it seems to be the thing right now) or enjoyment. I could just stick everything into this but sometimes low quality brings lots of joy. Life is full of mac and cheese moments. So "joy" tracking is going to be about me - my attentiveness, my fulfilment, my mood, how I feel about the time spent. Was I just running through the actions, getting the time in, or was I really getting emotional value from the experience. Right now, my "joy" with Pimsleur is rather high (and I'm really surprised to write that, because I've had a deep hate of Pimsleur in the past).
The 6WC fails to really push for "joy" or "quality" - just look at the number of people that find it overly stressful or drop out or post (what seems to me) as relatively low quality study time.
By tracking how I feel about learning and how I feel about the material, perhaps I'll learn something along the way?
Let me know if you think that's useful or if it is something you do...
(and the first thing I did this morning was wake up early to do my iTalki Hebrew class! I still have Pimsleur and Anki joyfully waiting for me!
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