rdearman wrote:You can always speed up the audio to say 1.5 speed which will cut the time by 25%.
I thought about that, but since the reason I'm doing this is to improve my passive vocabulary, I want to make sure I can hear the words clearly and with time to process the meaning. I'm a little worried that speeding up the audio might reduce my ability to give each word the attention it deserves. I may give this a try, just to see how it goes.
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LATIN:I have to say it: Lingua Latina killed my enthusiasm for Latin. I genuinely can't understand why this book has the reputation it does. It makes me feel like I'm crazy for being the only one who doesn't dig it. I finally went back to it, and after skipping the rest of the dry "geography" pages, I started in on the pages describing members of a family, who I assume will be front and center in future stories. The problem is that the first pages are so mindnumbingly boring and are clearly written solely for the purpose of hammering in case endings that I can't focus on them - I keep naturally skipping ahead to try to find something of interest. The problem is, there is nothing of interest ahead, and then suddenly I realized that I passed over all these dull sentences without getting from them what I'm supposed to get - so I go back and reread them for a few seconds until I inevitably start skipping ahead. I really don't get how I'm supposed to get into this book. I keep thinking it must get better, but when?
So in the midst of all this futzing around/procrastination with Lingua Latina, I lost both my enthusiasm and routine. I think the only chance I have to get it back is to reread the Cambridge Unit 1 as a brief refresher and then dive into Unit 2. I really don't want to give up on LL, but reading it feels like Chinese water torture.
ITALIAN:I've been making excellent progress with my novel. I decided to count the actual pages, and it turns out there's 245 pages worth of text, which makes sense with the length of the audiobook and the average I calculated (2.5 min/page). In order for me to complete a SC within 1 year using this R-L format, I'll need 1hr 40 min/day, 5 days per week, 50 weeks. At first this seemed daunting, mainly because I was thinking that I'd have to do that in one solid block of time. I'm not a fan of stopping part way through chapters, but I've been doing 20-30 minutes here and there in the last days, and it can really add up. Also, knowing that I can stop whenever I want makes me paradoxically spend much longer doing R-L. When I was aiming to do a complete chapter twice in one sitting, I was kind of dreading it, and then avoiding it.
When I woke up this morning, I started thinking about how I should record myself to see how it felt to talk for 10 minutes nonstop. I started thinking about a topic in my head, and was surprised by how fluid it felt. I thought:
I'm going to nail this! Well, I should have recorded myself shortly after doing my mental monologue, but I didn't get around to it until the evening. I couldn't recreate whatever I had been thinking at all - I think the pressure of being timed and recorded gave me an instant block. I did manage to talk for 10 minutes, but boy was it labored and awful. I'm hoping that as I get used to this format, sentences will start flowing more easily. Even though it was labored, I think that talking for 10 minutes/day is definitely doable.
I've also been writing 200+ words/day, and that also feels very doable. All in all, I think that the combo 1 yr SC/Output Challenge is within reach.
POLISH:Where it might get a little sticky is doing a SC in Polish. 1hr 40 min/day for 5 days is only ~8.3 hours/week. Considering that I did a full year of 21 hours/week, I don't know why 8.3 hours would be unattainable. I just have to get back into the mindset of using my time more efficiently. I'm hoping that focusing on reading/listening will help to revive my passion for Polish, because it's what I really enjoy doing. I only started having problems when I tried to learn and apply grammar in an attempt to improve my speaking ability. As long as I can accept that I will never speak this language even at a basic level decently, I might be able to just enjoy it passively.