How to self study from a textbook ?

[Aloyse]

I would just spread these 9 activities out over a few days (maybe even up to 9) depending on the length of each, while slowly introducing new material.

Thank you for all the details. This method of planning the study of each chapter over several days is indeed what I would tend to do naturally. The problem, of course, is that life never stands still and interruptions will occur
And I'm not very good at going back to previous routines after each interruption.

Maybe I can work something out like staggering the study of 4 chapters then taking some extra time to review/test myself and declaring those chapters officially "done". This way if life interrupts my study for 1 or 2 weeks, I might be able to convince myself to just review the current 4 chapter chunk before forging forward. Or, at worst, restart from chapter 1 of the 4 chapter chunk.

An old thread: How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Thanks for the link!

[David1917]

The problem, of course, is that life never stands still and interruptions will occur
And I'm not very good at going back to previous routines after each interruption.

I used to be a psycho about this when I was using Assimil Hungarian. I tried to do it the exact official way where Sunday is when the Review lessons land. If I missed a Tuesday, I would to Tuesday & Wednesday on Wednesday. Sometimes I would end up with 3 lessons in one day, and sometimes I would just say "damn, well I guess I'll just restart this week next Monday" because the thought of *not* having the review line up on Sunday was unfathomable. Luckily, I have a) calmed down a bit and b) did not end up moving to Hungary

[smallwhite]

... picking up bits and pieces from various threads, your own methods seem perhaps to have changed over the years? Some of your learning (e.g. when you learned Swedish with Hugo) seems to have involved milking every drop out of one textbook; more recently (?) you seem to have moved to going through multiple textbooks fast.

You also talk about drills a lot - has your approach to these changed? How have you refined your approach to them over time?

How much of that is just more access to materials? How much is improved methods? And how much is just being an accomplished language learner who doesn't need some of the tools that we newbies do anymore?

Except for the first language I taught myself (French), I think I always do something like this: I go through textbook-ish material once briefly first, then again more intensively, (then maybe again (and again) as needed). If I'm lucky and the library has several books that I like, I might use them one after another for variety (TY Instant -> TY Beginner -> TY Complete) (or brand A -> brand B -> brand C). If I'm unlucky and the library only has one book on a language (like the Hugo Swedish), then I use the same book over and over, each time more intensively.

I like to get a very quick overview first.

Drills work great for output automaticity. I used do drills with a pencil or by typing, but now I do them orally or in my head. That includes conjugation drills, grammar drills and vocabulary flashcards.

I haven't been studying languages lately so I don't really remember much about my approaches at the moment