I’m still dealing with fatigue. It’s been a regular feature of my life these last few years, but it just seems to get worse as I get older, and some periods are even worse than that. Right now is typical. I have a few hours in the morning when I’m awake and I use those for going to the gym and exercising. Then I spend much of the afternoon in a zombie-like state. I can’t usually nap, but I’m too tired and mentally absent to do much of anything. Then around 5:30 or 6:00 in the evening, I wake up again and that’s when I usually do most of my study. I usually try to turn off screens and just read from about 8:30 or 9:00 at night to make it easier to sleep, but it doesn’t seem to help. I feel like I might get more rest at night (I sleep, but I don’t rest) if I didn’t spend half the day in a daze. I cancelled on my language exchange partner last Saturday because I was so tired, and I don’t really want to have to talk tomorrow either, but I can’t keep cancelling. I only ended up with a language partner because I forgot to set my Italki profile to invisible and she contacted me and for some reason I thought, “Why not?” Well, now I remember why I don’t do a lot of language exchanges. I don’t really enjoy talking about nothing to people I don’t really know in languages I don’t really know. I still struggle to speak German (even if Zenmonkey tries to claim that I’m B2
), and when I’m tired I become completely incoherent. Moreover, I’m usually too tired to care and I just sit there sputtering random and made-up words and wondering why I put myself through this torture.
Being so tired and having to figure out how to organize my day so that I schedule the activities requiring a brain for the hours when I actually have one, has made me think a bit about how I study languages. Maybe those people that say you should learn one language to a reasonably comfortable level and only then start a new one have a bit of a point. It probably would be a lot easier to make progress if I were only doing one language. On the other hand, I don’t want to give up any of my languages and backslide even more.
I’ve also been thinking a bit about the Polyglot Gathering and how I’d like my German to be comfortable enough to use there. So, I think for the next couple of months, I’m going to make German my focus language. I’ll try to spend at least 45 minutes a day doing “real study” such as my grammar workbook, FSI, maybe some online grammar exercises or GLOSS, writing and speaking. TV-watching and reading books comes in addition and can be done when I’m less alert. I might even try some Italki lessons, but only if I start to feel more awake. It’s really hard to schedule a lesson when you don’t know when your brain will be available.
My Spanish is not exactly comfortable, but it is pretty functional so I think I can safely slide it onto a back burner until after the Gathering. Actually, I think at this point the best thing to do with Spanish would be massive input, especially reading. That would increase my vocabulary and give me a better feel for the language. I did a good bit of reading aloud during the 6WC and that really improved my ability to wrap my tongue around the words. Spanish words seem to have a high syllable-density or something, and I used to stumble over them, but now I can read much more smoothly. I still read aloud sometimes because I feel it’s very helpful, but I mostly read silently because it’s much faster and I want to finish this book I’ve been reading since forever. I always read really slowly when starting a new book if I’m not familiar with the characters and this book took a long time to get into. It might be half a notch above my level in terms of vocabulary, but I think the main problem was that it has a whole lot of characters and the story hopped from one character to another every few pages and after ten hops it was back to the first character, but I’d forgotten who he was by that time since I was reading so slowly. Anyway, somewhere in the middle, things started to get clear for me and I started to get “into” the book and that made it easier to read faster. And now I’m trying to read extra fast because I decided to join the April book club since they’re doing a book I’d been planning to read in any case and it’s originally in Spanish. Anyway, I ordered the book from another library and it came faster than I thought, so I’m probably going to have to try to start and finish a little early in case I have to return it before the end of April. I don’t want to be reading two books in Spanish at the same time, so, I’m trying to rush through the current one. Anyway, reading and TV can be done when I’m too tired for real study, but too awake to sleep. I should probably do a bit of writing and some recordings too, or else I’ll risk getting rusty. My Spanish still rusts pretty fast.
Japanese will continue on the back burner as planned until I’m finished with the kanji and my current Anki deck. I’m not making much progress on the kanji lately because of being too tired, but I seem to manage to squeeze Anki in either early enough or late enough in the day such that I’m making good progress. I think I will be ready to move Japanese into a new phase by next year, providing my German is somewhat comfortable by then. I’m not exactly sure what that phase will be yet, but we’ll see.
So, the plan for the next two months is:
German: grammar and real work, including speaking and writing, during alert times and otherwise a bit of reading and TV
Spanish: mostly reading, some TV, weekly chats with Zenmonkey and at least occasional recordings and writing
Japanese: Anki and RTK and occasional TV
And then, of course, after a couple of nights of staying out drinking with Rick, Dave and Zenmonkey, I’ll have forgotten
all the languages before the Gathering even begins --- just like every year.