Postby WildGinger10 » Thu Feb 04, 2021 9:37 am
So obviously I dropped off the face of the earth for a while, it's been almost a year and a half since I posted here. I've had a lot going on in my life in this time (who hasn't?) and I can only keep so many plates spinning at once so the journaling took a backseat. I'd like to get back into it a little bit so here we go.
Well I've been keeping up the German journey. In May my (German) company certified me at a B1.2 level of fluency. Since my industry is shut down due to COVID, I've been stuck at home and have taken a German course with my local community college - went into third semester German and it seemed to be about my level. I'm currently taking the fourth semester course and trying to switch up my Anki game a little because I'm at a vocab level where picture cards aren't always effective. I'm also really bad with certain grammar rules (yes, I know everybody struggles to decline German adjectives and articles but still) and would really like to work on those specifically. Trying to start learning to use Cloze cards properly so I can drill case and tense declensions better.
I have a semi-regular standing Zoom date with a German friend of mine also, so we can have a little Sprechstunde and it is nice, though we somehow always end up discussing world politics or some similarly specialized topic where my vocabulary has big gaps. But we make do and it is helping.
I'm also gearing up to put some effort into Russian again. It's been a while since I've even looked at Russian because I've been so focused on German and so busy but I have an idea to hybridize Duolingo and my current Anki programming to create a kind of hyper-Duolingo that might be efficient at building the basics of Russian in a way I couldn't do before. I will journal about that in another thread when I get there.
Otherwise, I would say that despite another year of learning, I'm probably not much better in my German than when I was tested, which is a bit frustrating. But I guess it just takes much more work to move through CEFR levels than I expected, and this is my first language I'm learning to this level of fluency so it's all a learning curve. Each new level of fluency presents new challenges that must be tackled. Kind of excited to apply my knew knowledge to Russian and see how quickly I can progress there - though I don't expect to give it a huge amount of time and energy in the beginning so it may be slow to start as well.
That's all for now, hopefully I can shake the dust off this log and join back in the fray!
8 x