BengaliI've been making good progress with my vocabulary lists. I went through the 400 words I've so far written out on saturday, and I know more than 300 of them now (BN->EN). So that's 300 new words in around 2 months.
The grammar section of Thompson on different sentence structures has proven a sticking point. Although I have studied and understand the materials, applying them correctly is difficult. Also, when I get a sentence in Bengali I can look at it and find it impossible to translate the meaning, even though I know each of the words and the structure the sentence is meant to illustrate. This probably just needs practice to become more familiar with the different pieces of these sentences.
To tackle this:
- I've written out a page of the example sentences with my vocabulary lists, which I will review. I will continue this for each of the problem structures.
- Take each structure in turn and simply write out a page of example sentences of that type.
Overall progress:
- Finished Unit 11 of Thompson - the grammar section here was easier, being conditional statements which I already seem to have a good handle on. The English->Bengali translation exercise is very useful practice.
- Continued to hand-write 50+ words a day, and consciously trying to use more complex sentence structures.
- At least three complete 'listens' to the Bengali CD in the car.
- Continued work on the vocabulary lists.
- Read more pages from Citizen Test parallel-language book.
I'm not far off finishing Thompson, except for practising the grammar. Unit 12 discusses tenses, and Unit 14 mostly seems to introduce new vocabulary. So Unit 13 is the main grammar topic left, which covers joining sentences and correlatives.
GermanI haven't done any reading as yet, but I found the Open University's
free German courses. I've started "Intermediate German: Understanding spoken German" which seems about right for now.