Postby malach » Wed Jun 30, 2021 12:32 am
Bengali
I'm continuing to take advantage of my recent burst of motivation, and completed 2+ hours a day over the past week. This has been 1 hour of Glossika + 1 hour of listening to C-programming videos + some miscellaneous stuff.
Work is more-or-less out of the picture from now to October, so, unless something else comes up (it usually does!), I'm hoping to keep this pattern for a few months. But I'm also going to add in an hour of reading. I like reading. The other two activities I think are essential, but they still feel like 'training'. I'm rarely unhappy if I read (and understand) something!
Listening - seven hours of C-programming videos (+ listening to Glossika) this week. I feel I picked the right material with these videos. The occasional wins I mentioned before on understanding a new part have become more frequent, and I'm getting a good grip on the verbs he is using. All right, so I have learnt the words গৌণিক and মৌলিক ('factorial' and 'prime'), which are not "high-frequency" vocabulary I guess, but it's all part of the mix! When he talks a little more deliberately, explaining line-by-line how the program works, I can now more-or-less follow him word-by-word, which is already encouraging progress. But then he starts talking more generally, and the syllable rate gets too much for me.
Reading - I realised I read Bengali quite slowly - I did a little test, and it's 30 words a minute. OK, so I'm not understanding much of that either, but I would like to improve the speed. Also, reading is my favourite language-related activity. I had a link to StoryWeaver, and they have a lot of Bengali books for (free) reading. So I'm (re-)starting there, from the very beginning. I plan to finish the 26 'Emergent'-level books in the next few days. Why start from the beginning? Well, I may know the words for 'factorial' and 'embassy', but somehow I didn't know the words for 'kite' and 'string'. And I do need to go over the simple sentence structures still, with different words. It's not that I don't know these structures, but there's a difference between being able to get something right, and not being able to get it wrong. Reading books which are easily understood should help improve my reading speed. Level 4 books include stories by Rabindranath Tagore - on a quick look, they didn't even look abridged - so this looks like being my main source of graded reading for a while.
Speaking - seven hours of Glossika this week, plus some reading aloud of texts. With Glossika, I can feel the earlier sentences becoming easier to say.
Vocabulary - I believe the above will naturally take care of repeated exposure to words and so learning vocabulary. But I am using Clozemaster each day and I also revived my Memrise account. I'm trying to train myself to spend time on these in the day rather than random internet browsing when I procrastinate to escape work... Actually, I'm surprised how often I seem to come across the same word on one of these sites as I have elsewhere. A few days ago I learnt the word for 'future' from a book, and then there it was in a Clozemaster sentence, and I even remembered it! It's a nice bit of reinforcement.
Writing - I do a little writing, and even posted a few pieces on reddit /r/BanglaStreak. But this is not my focus for now. It's still time-consuming, and I have to check many details of grammar.
German
I did try listening to some Rust programming tutorials in German. Like the Bengali C-programming videos, I think this will be an excellent source of comprehensible input. But I'm not going to distract myself with two languages for now.
I do almost daily read some German, as I follow some sources on Mastodon, and look up some words I don't know.
7 x