In that thread I was mentioning how some advice had adversely affected my study. Mainly creating a tough schedule without really thinking about the how. Just assuming the learning would take care of itself.
zenmonkey wrote: I'm curious - what kind of program did you buy and what deadlines did they impose that you were missing? Were these self imposed deadlines? Or you were scheduling to spend 2 hrs a day and you were not finding the time?
I didn’t buy anything (other than textbooks). My problem was self imposed deadlines. I didn’t have a target, like achieve B2 in 3 months or anything like that. Rather, I would create a schedule based on I would do one chapter from a given textbook a day. I would do that for multiple resources, so for example Day 1 would be do chapter 1 from X, 2 lessons from freewebsiteY and z number of memrise lessons. Day 2 would be the next chapter, another 2 lessons, and more memrise, and so on.
There was little to no time in there for review, no float for missed days, etc. But my biggest problem was forgetting everything. Words, grammar the lot. I didn’t have a strategy for listening. I would go back and look at a chapter or lesson from a few days ago and I would remember nothing. Basically I was trying to study the same way I would have studied maths. I thought working through a textbook would get me where I wanted to be. Moreover, I didn’t know how to make a textbook work for me like I do now.
The biggest failing, for me, of the learn X in X months mentality was tying things down to a tight schedule.
First you need to learn how to learn, fail a few times to find the methods that do or don’t work for you. I found a far better schedule was to simply aim to do X hours or minutes a day.
What sort of fails or dead ends have you had. I see a language learning world out there full of lifelong beginners and false beginners. Most people here would have moved past that phase a long time ago, but you must have stumbled along the way.