I have been a quiet reader on this forum for quite a while now and finally decided to start my own log to track my progress and to hold myself accountable.
About myself:
I am 23 years old, from Germany and I am currently studying for my master’s in financial mathematics. Normally, I am studying in Germany, but I just arrived in Colombia to study here for one semester. Hence, my focus with respect to language learning will be on Spanish for the next few months.
Nonetheless, I would like to give a brief overview of my language learning experience.
English: I started studying English in third grade and I also spent one year abroad in the U.S. while I was in high school. Most of my courses in university are taught in English as well and I’m used to watching TV series in English. Thus, I would consider myself to be fluent in English. However, I could work some more on my active skills and might try to read some English news articles etc. in the future to expand my vocabulary.
Spanish: I studied Spanish for five years during high school. I pretty much stopped studying it after eleventh grade but started a few months ago to refresh my knowledge and like I said before, will focus a lot on learning Spanish in the next few months. As I will spend the next few months in Colombia, I also have the perfect conditions to improve my Spanish. I would say my Spanish is currently in between A2 and B1.
French: I studied French for five years in high school but didn’t study anymore French for more than six years already. I’m still able to read some French texts, but my active skills are very bad and improving my French has no priority at the moment.
Chinese: I started studying Chinese in university, did a few university courses that were not very useful and also spent one semester in China during my bachelor’s. So I have some basic knowledge of Chinese and I would like to improve my Chinese at some point. Currently I’m just trying to not forget all the characters that I learned. So I regularly review them in Anki.
Russian: I did a three-week Russian language course in Saint Petersburg about a year ago because it was financed by my scholarship, mainly because I was interested in visiting Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but not a lot of the stuff that I learned, stuck.
Portuguese: I haven’t really started studying Portuguese yet, but I might start teaching myself the basics at some point, because my girlfriend is from Brazil and I’ll most likely travel to Brasil a few times as well in the next few months.
I will be using the following resources to study Spanish for now:
TV shows:
- La casa de papel
Books:
- Harry Potter y la Piedra filosofal
- Gramática de uso del español
Others:
- Anki
- Clozemaster
- Duolingo
I highly appreciate recommendations for other resources as well
.Unfortunately, the next week will be a little unforeseeable for me, because I will talk with my coordinator at university and will probably choose my courses as well. Since the semester here in Colombia already started about a month ago, I will probably have to catch up on a lot of university work, but I’d like to set some very ambitious language learning goals anyways.
My goals for the week from August 20 to August 26 are:
- Review 1500 sentences on Clozemaster
- 1000 Exp on Duolingo
- Watch 10 Episodes of La casa de papel
- Work through 20 units of Gramática de uso de español
- Read 50 pages of Harry Potter y la Piedra filosofal
- Review Anki everyday
There are 169 episodes, so lots of time to get used to the accents and the show centres around young people (well young people from the late 90s lol) so you can get accustomed to the way speak and their vocabulary. I personally have not watched it (I have only seen the first 2 episodes) but many of my Colombian friends tell me that the show was massively popular in the early 2000s and that it's quality was pretty good. You can watch it on 
Good luck and have fun with your studies!!