My main focus languages for 2019 will be French and Croatian. I actually plan on taking the French B2 exam in December and I plan on studying Croatian as if I was getting ready to pass the B2 exam. I was originally planning on taking the DELF in June, but my French spelling is atrocious, being ready for it in June would mean dropping all my other languages and that's not gonna happen. I hope spending 6 hours a week per language (not counting watching TV or listening to music) will be enough to get me ready for the B2 exam by December. I have the DELF B2 book and some lower level practice exams I downloaded. I plan on posting the writing exercises from the book as well as write about my life and language adventures in French, Croatian and Italian. Your corrections would be greatly appreciated.
My "second-tier" languages are Egyptian Arabic, Greek and Russian. I hope to make some progress in these languages while only studying 4 hours per week each. I have been "studying" Greek for over a year, but I've yet to finish the Duolingo tree nor the Mango Languages course. So spending 4 hours per week on Greek is a vast improvement over an hour or less per week.
This past semester I went back to school (university) full-time and had the brilliant idea of signing up for a Russian class since I figured with my knowledge of Croatian Russian would be an easy A . Boy, was I wrong. Out of the the 30 students in the class only about 5 of us were brand new to Russian, that should've been a sign. We went through the first eight chapters of Beginner's Russian with Interactive Workbook and it was crazy. We had to do every exercise on the website for homework, which took extra long for me since I decided to write out every exercise by hand rather than just printing it out. In the end I managed to get a B+ in the class, but never in my life have I ever had to work so hard at something only to get a B+. My Russian cursive is pretty awesome though, even if I'm nowhere near conversational. My current plan for Russian is to
Egyptian Arabic, sigh. I was making great progress and then I took a break. I made this video in April of 2018 https://youtu.be/fHiYLJevR2Q and although the passive skills are still there if I were to try to say all of that now I would probably struggle quite a bit and not be able to come up with all of it. Trying to write something along th elines of what I said was what broke the camel's back and made me temporarily give up on Arabic. I want to be able to read Egyptian Arabic and not just speak it so I'm re-starting from scratch with Rocket Languages and writing out by hand the writing exercises. I plan on using a mix of Luca's Bi-translation method with the Goldlist Method. Last night I bought the newly released Anki deck for Mido in Egyptian Arabic (a bilingual book with audio published by Lingualism) so I'm definitely incorporating that into my study routine. I have tons of materials for learning Egyptian Arabic, so I need to make sure I don't jump around from course to course.
And last, but not least Italian. My Italian got a bit rusty this fall, but it was at a high enough level that it should be back up and running in no time. I don't have any definite plans for Italian other than doing this month's 30-Day Speaking Challenge, speaking at Meetups, and reading and watching TV for the Super Challenge. I hope to write on here too, but I'm not aiming for a specific amount of writing, at least not yet.
So that's all for now. Here's to a productive 2019!!!