How many resources do you use?

Ask specific questions about your target languages. Beginner questions welcome!

When ACTIVELY studying a language, I regularly use # resources ...

1 - 3 Resources
24
59%
4 - 6 Resources
11
27%
7 or more Resources
6
15%
 
Total votes: 41

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księżycowy
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Re: How many resources do you use?

Postby księżycowy » Thu Jul 07, 2022 12:09 pm

For me, it's typically one textbook (whether Assimil or something else), Anki (which I've been far too lazy on lately), and maybe something like Pimsleur if I can/want. I don't count a reading source (like the BHS at the current moment) or dictionary (like BDB) if it's textbook directed. So 2, maybe 3 total.
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Re: How many resources do you use?

Postby jimmy » Thu Jul 07, 2022 3:21 pm

I currently use textbooks but for Arabic I will also use videos in further levels. Now I am about b1 ,I mean upper than b1.

I hope if I have a chance I will just prefer to live "chinese" .. I mean I will prefer to live in china as said ,if I have a chance. (my Chinese is A1) meanwhile, I realised that in use,I was better than working alone ...this was for russian.
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Re: How many resources do you use?

Postby tractor » Thu Jul 07, 2022 6:33 pm

I misunderstood and voted 7 before I had read through the thread.

I rarely use more than two courses, textbooks etc. at a time. My time is limited, and if I spread across too many resources, I struggle with keeping up progression and momentum.

I don’t count native content as studying though. Reading, surfing the web, watching TV, listening to music or radio are things I would do anyway, just in a different language.
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Re: How many resources do you use?

Postby luke » Thu Jul 07, 2022 8:03 pm

tractor wrote:I misunderstood and voted 7 before I had read through the thread.

I rarely use more than two courses, textbooks etc. at a time. My time is limited, and if I spread across too many resources, I struggle with keeping up progression and momentum.

I don’t count native content as studying though. Reading, surfing the web, watching TV, listening to music or radio are things I would do anyway, just in a different language.

I just updated the poll to allow people to change their vote.

I don't think of "resources" as limited to courses.

Using the list of activities you provided, I would count like this:
Reading (2 resources = 2 books I read every day).
Surfing the web (0, for me, since I don't do it systematically or for a certain amount of time). (I do generally do Wikipedia in TL, use online translators and online dictionaries, read an occasional article, etc, but since they're not part of my "study plan", I don't count them.
Watching TV. (I watch plenty of tube and would definitely count it).
Listening to music or radio. (For me, 0, although I listen a few minutes each day).

Those things that got a 0 is what I'm not doing with a particular goal in mind or not giving some time to each day on a regular basis.

It would be interesting to get a combination of:
Study time per day AND number of resources.

I.E., if someone studies 15 minutes a day and uses 1 resource, no surprise. But there is a difference in approach between someone who studies 2 hours a day and uses 1 resource, compared to someone else who "studies" for 2 hours and uses 8. With "comprehensible input", the term "study" can be imprecise.

The poll is meant for fun, insight, and especially discussion.

That everyone uses their own definition of resource is okay. The written answers highlight the differences.
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Re: How many resources do you use?

Postby leosmith » Thu Jul 07, 2022 8:18 pm

luke wrote:I just updated the poll to allow people to change their vote.

I think I also overestimated. Do you mean "at a time"? For example, if I read today, watch a movie tomorrow and use anki both days, do I put 2 or 3? What about if I finished Pimsleur last week, and will start FSI next month - do I add those to the total or not?
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Re: How many resources do you use?

Postby luke » Thu Jul 07, 2022 8:33 pm

leosmith wrote:
luke wrote:I just updated the poll to allow people to change their vote.

I think I also overestimated. Do you mean "at a time"? For example, if I read today, watch a movie tomorrow and use anki both days, do I put 2 or 3? What about if I finished Pimsleur last week, and will start FSI next month - do I add those to the total or not?

I was thinking "at a time". So, if you finished Pimsleur last week and start FSI next month, that's 1.

I see how the alternative interpretation makes sense too. I.E., "in total, how many resources do you use"?

But this poll is meant to ask, "at the same time".

So, more about "focus", than "how full is your bookshelf"? ;)
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Re: How many resources do you use?

Postby german2k01 » Thu Jul 07, 2022 9:00 pm

Reading a few pages of a book. Watching a few episodes of a show. Listening to an audiobook. This is my daily activity. My comfort zone is using three resources at the maximum beyond that I feel overwhelmed. Now I have started reading a book, an SRS review has gone on the back burner. When I was doing SRS, I was not reading much. As you can see that using 3 recourses at max is a comfortable zone for me and does not tire me out mentally too much. Today I have just added an activity that is going to a German class and listening to a German native speaker. I am attending this German class more as an experience sake just to gauge whether they can be added as a valuable resource :lol:
Since I am living in Germany and have not attended a private school so I do not know if they are worth the money. Today after listening to my teacher I have observed one thing is that watching a lot of youtubers in your target language is the best way to develop an ear for understanding native speakers and it should be included in your regular study. Listening to the audiobook is okay but listening to youtubers is closer to listening to real native speakers. I will be watching a lot of youtubers.
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Re: How many resources do you use?

Postby Sae » Sat Jul 09, 2022 6:34 am

I use:
iTalki, it has exercises & prompts for practice that people can make corrections on and it's where I found my Vietnamese tutor. I highly recommend it, and its pretty affordable as far as tutors go, though that might vary country to country as economies vary.
Mango languages. which I am using to learn Tuvan and will use to improve my Vietnamese vocabulary
Google Translate, it's an easy way to find a word I don't know in Vietnamese and I don't use it for anything else.
Talking Dictionaries, there's no Tuvan options on Google Translate, but there is on Talking Dictionaries.
YouTube, I am subscribed to a few Vietnamese speaking YouTubers just to integrate myself into the language, I also use it to listen to Tuvan. Phuc Map is a good one to follow whilst learning Vietnamese, he puts English and Vietnamese subtitles and jumped between English & Vietnamese and is not a native speaker, so he's approaching the language from a similar perspective. Plus he's got a decent sense of humour.
Côc Côc, it's a Vietnamese web browser, so I am using it to help me immerse into the language
Vietnamese Stories for Language Learners, a book with a collection of short stories in Vietnamese with English translations and explanations behind keypoints
Lexilogos, it has a few web-based Cyrillic keyboards I can use for Tuvan
Unikey, it a software keyboard extension for writing Vietnamese.

I'm still looking into what I may use for Mongolian. Sadly Mango doesn't have it as an option, and I don't think I'd have the time or money for another tutor whilst I am still using one for Vietnamese.
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eido
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Re: How many resources do you use?

Postby eido » Sat Jul 09, 2022 3:00 pm

I study a lot of different languages, and that can add up to quite a lot of resources! :lol:

For each language, I only use what I need at that particular moment, and if I find a resource isn't working for me in that second, I drop it (but I usually go back given enough time). However, the total usually hovers between 1-3 for each one. Though, like I said, this is time-/schedule-dependent. ;)

Good question!
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Re: How many resources do you use?

Postby druckfehler » Tue Jul 12, 2022 7:00 pm

When I'm serious about language study at a level below B1, I'll get a few textbook-like resources and work through them simultaneously, while preferably putting every sentence I study (if I don't already know it by heart) in an Anki deck, with audio if I have that available. I find it really helpful to use many sources at the same time, because it really cements my knowledge of the language. It's sort of like every resource is a different context and words stick better when I see them in different contexts.

With Korean, I also partly did that with newspaper articles and the like, but once I got well past the B1 threshold it became overwhelming and I had to change my strategy towards more extensive methods. At that point, I also used several resources at the same time, to get exposed to spoken and written language, as well as to different topics and registers.

I tend to find it motivating to have several materials to choose from at any given point. However, I never looked at all of them every single day and would sometimes leave a resource aside for a couple of months if I got tired of it.
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