Serbian - B1 in One Year

[basica]

You may follow my original log here. Unless this site shuts down, I suspect my log will continue on here. In summary these are the following things I will be doing daily:

# Review vocab on Anki/Memrise.
# Write 100 words a day (at least) on Lang-8. My profile is here.
# Do one file of Glossika per day. As of this post I have finished fluency 1 and am currently taking a break, but will move onto fluency 2 tomorrow.
# Have at least 1 hour of Serbian conversation per week

That said, continuing off my old log here is what my current chart of writing looks like:



In this month there's only been one day I did the minimum 100 words and the vast majority of days have been over 120. In fact, my average this month is about 145 words per day, in contrast to last month which was an average of about 120 words per day. I feel far more comfortable now writing than I did before even though I continuously get corrections (which sometimes is a bit depressing to be totally honest) I continue to write and continue to apply changes in the way I write based on obvious patterns I've picked up. I feel like I'm slowly improving in this area

In terms of speaking, I feel more comfortable than ever. It's sorta amazing to think it's not even 5 months into my journey. Some days I feel like I have really made outstanding progress, and others I feel like I am much the same as when I started (even though I know this is far from the case). I have updated this log just to make for a simpler name I suppose. 1 year will be about March 2016.

My plan is to continue doing what I am doing, and to try to do some more reading to pick up vocab that way. At the moment I am feeling a bit out of steam to be honest, have a few things on my plate but I think I'll be right again in a few days So due to that, I won't be doing anything crazy and also why I took a break from Glossika.

To make it easier for you guys, and in some ways reduce the need for updates, I will be using this forum's progress bars in my signature for some of my goals. Namely, where I am up to in any given fluency module in Glossika, and perhaps how many words I have written for this year's goal that I have set. Other progress bars may be added if I can think of anything worthy of note, otherwise don't fret I will still have my charts handy to share with you all

[Radioclare]

I think you are doing amazingly for five months The highlight of my achievements after five months was managing to buy a stamp in Zagreb And even now I don't think I am equaling your average daily words, though I haven't got around to making my spreadsheet yet.

Now I just need to figure out how to turn on the notifications to follow your log on this website too...

[basica]

I think you are doing amazingly for five months The highlight of my achievements after five months was managing to buy a stamp in Zagreb And even now I don't think I am equaling your average daily words, though I haven't got around to making my spreadsheet yet.

Now I just need to figure out how to turn on the notifications to follow your log on this website too...

I think when you post you automatically get signed up for notifications, but you can also bookmark it and then view it under your control panel (click on the spanner icon at the top to bookmark et cetera).

Yeah, I guess I should let myself be happy with my accomplishments, but it's hard Also starting to get tempted with German now..I have some relatives there who I could attempt to practice with but I'm not sure if I will start just yet.

Today is the last day of the month, and have thus completed 2 months of writing every day in Serbian, with a little over 9000 words to show for it. Would be curious to know how much if any improvement has been had in my writing. People say they've noticed, I sometimes think I have improved but other times I think people are just trying to be nice. I'm too harsh on myself I suppose

I have also got back into Glossika, I had a trip away, and as such it's hard to keep up routines in that environment. There was also the fact I was having a bit of a rough time with some personal things, but they've since improved. I am a day behind schedule, I wanted to start on Monday, but didn't do so until Thursday at which point I listened to 3 of the GSR files, I will try to listen to 2 today, but if not I will catch up sometime on the weekend because I like the Monday starts of my routine.

Aside from that, not too much to report. I'm close to 1000 words in Anki, will be adding vocab for nationalities and countries when I can be bothered as I have pretty much neglected that vocab. There is probably some other travel vocab as well that I should add to my repertoire. I had a conversation last night with someone and I am getting to the point now where I am understanding enough of a conversation to be able to respond but it's still a low comprehension rate if the person isn't purposefully dumbing it down for me - probably around 25% on average which means there is more than one occasion I have to ask them to repeat or clarify what the said, but more often than not I catch enough to be able to converse.

Once I get to 1000 cards, I will take a break for a week or so before adding more cards so I can solidify them a bit better (I have a cap on my reviews, which is at this point quite a bit under what I'd need to go through them all, but I am most definitely too lazy to increase it and be consistent). Once I've done that, I will probably move up to 2000 words and from there sit quite a while. I think vocab at this range should hopefully put me in an early B1ish range. By this point I should hopefully be abroad and from there I will hopefully improve my skills significantly with the constant exposure, for a decent length of time too mind you.

No charts today, but I might post tonight or tomorrow with some

[Expugnator]

You need to manually subscribe to a topic - it's the small wrench at the bottom.

[basica]

Another chart, yay!



It's interesting to see that I tend to have nose dives at the same times during the month. Quite interesting. Aside from that, I am getting near 10,000 words written. I should be there in about a fortnight, probably less. That's kinda cool I think

Also, I *caught* up in Glossika. I have now finished day 7 and will continue on at the rate of 1 file a day again from here now that I am where I wanted to be. I've noticed that since I had a few days off while I was away that my routine was a bit shot. I think it's going to take another week or two till I am not so tempted to skip days when I feel like I really can't be bothered. I noticed that doing them earlier in the day and getting them over and done with ASAP seems to work better for me - I guess because it doesn't feel like something looming over me.

I've also decided I really need to get back into a textbook or something. I might use my colloquial serbian that I got laying around - I just need to find a way to cram it into my schedule in a way that doesn't require too much more of my time. With my current routine I am already spending about an hour a day studying the language. I don't think I can fit too much more in without feeling overwhelmed. I think maybe another 30mins or so.

Another thing I am considering doing (though I might stick with the textbook for now) is going through a book. I have one at the moment that looks interesting - a John Grisham translation (the racketeer), but the problem is I hardly understand any of it. I feel it's probably too early. I took a chunk off the first page which was a little over 100 words, and I did not know about 30% of them (actually a bit less but I rounded up for simplicity) outright and probably about half that again which I suspect I know the meaning of, but am not 100% sure. When it comes to what was actually being said I had little to no idea what was going on. I know that he's a lawyer, how old he is, that he's in jail and there's talk of laws, a judge and things about Washington.

I am tempted to attempt to do a page a day where I will do all the word look ups necessary and see how long I last, but I suspect it'd be too tedious for me. We'll see. I do feel like I need to add something else to my routine but nothing has really risen to occasion for me I suppose.

[Radioclare]

I read Reketaš this year for the Super Challenge and I found it quite a difficult book to get into with a lot of words I didn't know. Looking at the first few paragraphs there are quite a few words that I'm still unable to guess at: licemeran, zagušim, pišljivih, otkinuti, primerno. I can get the sense of it without those words, but I have definitely read books where the vocabulary has been simpler so perhaps the solution is to try and acquire an easier book? The easiest books I've read for the Super Challenge have probably been the Narnia series, an Agatha Christie and of course Twilight Guessing the later probably isn't your thing but young adult fiction can be a good place to start as the sentences are often a lot simpler.

[iguanamon]

basica, why not try some of the reading exercises in DLI GLOSS? DLI stands for "Defense Language Institute". DLI is part of the US Department of Defense charged with teaching military members and other government employees at times, foreign languages. "GLOSS" stands for Global Language Online Support System. Just click on the link I gave you. Then tick "Serbian". There are various search options- Listening, Reading, All. Find your appropriate level and start systematically going through them. This will help you to get used to reading without too much frustration.

When I saw the word "tedious" in your post, that's why I suggested DLI GLOSS. Myself, I have found value in reading with parallel texts at your level. GlobalVoices.org Serbian has articles in Serbian and also either English translations or English originals. Their Serbian site isn't as up to date as the Spanish and Portuguese versions I regularly read but their articles are about varied and interesting topics. (For others who may be interested, GV has versions in 45 languages, including all the common languages and even less commonly learned languages like Khmer, Aymara, Bengali, Pashto and Urdu. Just go to the Global Voices Homepage)

You can make your own bilingual texts by copying and pasting the text from the printable versions into a two columned, one row, text document- pasting the Serbian into the right column and the English into the left. You can then print to pdf and read on your tablet or phone. I use Open Office as my office suite.

Reading with a bilingual text is easier for me at your stage because it saves time looking up words. You can see your guesses or translation at a glance. Going through an article a day or even every two days and moving on (in other words, not stopping to enter everything into anki) helps to build momentum and vocabulary. The reading itself tends to serve as an SRS. I'd probably take an hour or two one day and make up a few. It usually takes me about 5 minutes for a short article I may make for friends, but I've had a fair bit of practice.

Your Grisham novel idea has some merit but it would be very tedious at first. I don't read Grisham, James29 does, so I don't know how his novels are structured. If it's in chapters, you could try going through the first chapter very intensely. Then the second chapter, there should be less to look up and so on as you progress, but I wouldn't describe the process as "fun". If it's not something you are going to stick with it won't help much. There are easier and more efficient ways to break into reading, at your level of the language. I think you will enjoy more reading short bilingual texts (even if you make them yourself) and going through the GLOSS lessons. Just my general language-learning ideas. Serbian speakers/learners will have better resources to give.

[basica]

Thank you for the suggestions guys, it's much appreciated and I will definitely take a further look into the links that you provided, iguanamon. I think something along those lines is a good idea. I just wished there were things like graded readers for Serbian like you can find in some other languages like German and French, but alas you gotta work with what you got after all

I've breached the 1000 word mark in anki last night. I was trawling through my colloquial book and inputted a bunch of useful vocab. I noticed as well that I sorta suck with a lot of daily type questions like "what is the time?" For that I'm guessing it would be something like "sta je vreme?" or "koliko je sati?" but I'm not sure. I might hassle one of my native speaker friends for translations of these phrases as it's about time I learn them

It's actually a bit funny how I've gone about my vocabulary acquisition - I sorta learn words by how interesting i find them to be more often than how useful they are. For example I learned a bunch of vocabulary for animals, before learning the word for animal In only the last couple weeks have I been learning the words for the months - at least they're basically disguised English words (Novembar, Maj et cetera).

Anyways, the new words I added were all related to the home. Things like shelf, pillow and so on. I actually learned a new english word too from it. In the book it talked about a duvet and I'm like "wtf is a duvet??" so I googled it and found out I've only ever used the word "doona" for them, and prior to that my mum would call them a "cover" so that was my vocab for that item. Fascinating. Anyways, I'm about 9 days away from completing all the cards so that's pretty exciting. By mid next week I will know around about 1500 words, probably a bit more as there's heaps of vocab that I haven't got in Memrise or Anki that I just know off by heart.

I definitely feel far more capable than I did a couple months back, but I am still rather limited. I think when I get to around 2000 words in Anki I should be in a far more comfortable spot and 3000 is probably where the magic really starts to happen. Sometimes I am okay with not being where I want to be, othertimes I am frustrated by it and times like today I feel like I can smell the intermediate level, hell I can even taste it - it's like a elk at a drinking hole and I'm a crocodile ever so slowly approaching it - about to grab it by surprise before it can even have a chance to escape from me

Further on that point, I am rather happy with my accomplishments today (so often I am hard on myself). I think the 14 year old me who first started trying to learn Serbian again would be absolutely mind blown at where I am today. He wouldn't even be able to register it. That makes me smile In saying that, I am definitely not feeling like it's time to call it a day and move on - if anything it's pushing me further into improving the language. I was tempted for a while to put some efforts into German, but I don't want any distractions at this point. I'll dabble a bit here and there on DuoLingo, but definitely no assimil of other book/audio course for a while yet. I will reevaluate in a couple months, or probably sometime in the new year. We'll see what happens.

And now I end my rambling

[Clarity]

This has nothing to do with language and everything to do with your profile photo. Those monkeys? (macaques?) are the best.

[basica]

This has nothing to do with language and everything to do with your profile photo. Those monkeys? (macaques?) are the best.

Aren't they though? I use this picture as my avatar in a lot of places as everytime I look at it, it makes me smile

Word of the day: monkey - majmun

volim svoje majmune - I love my monkeys