kanewai wrote:Well, it didn't take me long to run into trouble!
Here's what I got with Coffee Break German:
Intro - I skipped it.
Lesson 1, 20 minutes: We had a long introduction to the hosts, in English. We learned hello, yes, no, it is good, and good morning. Then we met Julia, who talked about German culture (in English). Then we met Kristina, who talked about her love of German grammar (also in English). Then we reviewed the words for yes, no, good, etc.
Lesson 2. 20 minutes. I thought maybe the podcast would start now, but it was still 80% English, with maybe five or six new words.
In 40 minutes I got maybe 5 minutes of content. I can't honestly consider this as counting in any way shape or form. Luckily I have Assimil at home and was able to to work on that for 30 minutes each afternoon. And that will be fine for now - but will get challenging on nights where I'm tired, or out with friends, or when I'm on the road. We'll see.
My first session and a bit of Arabic was in French (the base language of the course I’ve just begun using), all on how to approach the course, different types of Arabic etc.
I’m going to add a rule that if you do a session of learning for language X but you hear/use/read language Y or Z as the base language, instructions or narration and it’s an integral part of the content, even if your 30 minutes included explanations in (an)other language(s) to make use of the content, this still counts towards language X. Otherwise it becomes too hard to calculate and unfair on the learner putting time aside, sticking to their routine, but being punished for it.
It would then become a real grey area as so much content is translated (Assimil for example), you’d litterally have to ignore the content or stop and start a timer every time you referred to content in another language.. in fact you’d then even have trouble with dictionaries. Too hard to draw the line and too hard on the learner.
On the other hand if you
seek out bilingual movies because you’re trying to avoid your target language, well that’s a different story, imo. If you have a movie with 50 minutes of English and 25 minutes of Spanish and Spanish is your target language, the one you have signed up for in this challenge, well you can only count 25 minutes.
If you watch movies in your target language with subtitles in another language for your reference, no problem, as long as you are either hearing the target language, or reading it.
rdearman wrote:I just found Coffee Break Italian on Spotify tonight and had the same experience. I skipped forward to the end of the first season and they were still introducing words for coffee. So I'll be ignoring that.
In addtion to my above reply, I just add (not to rdearman specifically, but anyone), just try to use common sense and avoid something full of narration in English or another language which isn’t your target language if it’s superfluous to your language learning level. I mean, if you want to use content full of English narration, go ahead, but is it going to be helpful to your learning? I guess weight it up yourself. An Assimil course might be full of another language for comparison, but it’s still highly useful. Coffee break Italian would be worthless for someone already at the C1 level. It’s all good judgement and fairness. If you are C1 and feel coffee break Italian is a good way to review some vocabulary and it works for you, I’m not going to argue with it (I’m using a pretty easy ‘advanced’ course right now for French which is full of English explanations, but it’s what I like to use).
All in all there’ll be
NO loss of time for any narration/instructions in a langauge other than your target (announced) language(s).