druckfehler wrote: I wouldn't have been able to pull it off if I hadn't been at or near B2 level when I started.
I'm thinking about joining in with Persian this time, but I'm not sure how much I'd be able to accomplish from starting from current ~A2.
Kerrie wrote:I think if you are working on a related language to something you know (Romance or Germanic for most of us, Polish for a Russian speaker, etc), it is certainly possible. I am planning to do something similar with Portuguese, for example.
Kerrie wrote:alexraasch wrote:How do you go about the challenge for languages that you are an absolute beginner in?
You don't.
You work your way through other sources to get the basics first. You will not be able to read 100 books in Chinese in the next 20 months if you are an absolute beginner. You are much better spending your time with other sources.
Sorry for the harsh truth.
This is what I have come to suspect: the smaller the gap between your current level and the level of the material you use, the more effective the SC approach can be. My successes with Dutch and French were starting as a beginner, but as a native speaker of English with good comprehension of German. In the second SC, I tried doing Russian, and it was much less effective at getting me to a high level. It still helped, but extensive input simply throws too many words and phrases away in such a case, because there's not a good way to learn them from context.
For comparison, I just started with Swedish, but I was able to follow some children's literature relatively well (and learn from context) immediately due to my background in several closely related languages. As with Dutch, simply doing the SC is probably enough for me to get to a respectable level in Swedish. Irish, on the other hand, will probably require a lot more direct vocabulary work and textbook work to get similar results.