Postby coldrainwater » Sat Jun 08, 2019 8:37 pm
I am announcing a switch from Spanish only to generic. I gladly announce my intent, as suggested per the rules, but am doing so here since I think a few of you might be interested in the reasoning that I share in journal-like form (clearly ignoring brevity and also scampering away from my actual journal to write a few words in English). I prefer not to clutter up the scoring thread with the self same message. The rules are sufficiently flexible (thanks Peter!) to allow for a proper decision in my case, even though I juggle only two foreign languages. That is another good reason to place the elaboration here.
Strategy and decision: I finished three years of consistent Spanish study at month's end May 2019. After the dust settled, it left me with intermediate skills in writing and speaking and advanced skills in reading and listening. I started L3 (DE) in May 2019. Starting new habits are tough, and I wanted to wait and see how things went with DE. Relevant to this challenge, I am leaning heavily on my L2 (ES) for an assist in adding L3 (DE). After a month of dedicated German study, much of which included Assimil and Duolingo, both sourced in Spanish, I can see a small but clear improvement in my Spanish that I believe came from learning German with it. I don't mind if others interpret that as an endorsement as my experience doing this has been quite positive. All this is in addition to a slight ES listening taper, coincident with a conscious move toward more desk study and away from brute listening. Retrospectively, I had been on what amounted to an all out assault on Spanish listening, which was successful and for the record, I likely listened a few months more than needed, dipping mildly into a bucket of diminishing returns. I didn't think of it that way in the moment, but looking back and looking at the hours....
Separately, I feel that my German habit has more than less taken hold, and thus I am comfortable switching to generic. I would like the flexibility to do some days in pure German without English or Spanish (or anything else romantic for that matter, which notably is a wide-open revolving door that smacks me every now and again, sometimes in the nose, other times in the rear) should the whim strike. I chose generic also over pure DE to reflect the duality that I am consciously using as much ES as I can reasonably fit, deferring, when appropriate, to specific English resources that would be detrimental to skip in my better holistic judgment. I have a few side quests going on that I can elaborate on elsewhere, but pertinently, I find learning an L3 far more enjoyable from an L2 than I do from L1. Part of my reasoning traces back to 35+ years as a monolingual and having been a bit bored with a single language. It is also a way to stay planted firmly in language learning, balancing, quite literally, my constant employment with EN living in TX. Yet another part of it is that I was searching for an ideal way to push L2 to advanced in one of my output areas (and speaking sure as ____ isn't happening first), and I think I can do this with writing by learning DE. I am killing four capital letters with one heavy stone, but quite honestly, I had not really figured out how I was going to push ES writing. It was less a matter of how to do it, which is trivial thanks to this forum, but rather of how to get myself to actually do it, which is the question that comes pat to the purpose.
Yet another way of putting it is that bootstrapping an L3 using L2 adds motivation and beginner excitement to habit, making for a cool summer wave to surf in on.
So generic it is now, and generic I predict it to be for the last 7/12 of this [challenge + journey]. My only regret is not having written this announcement in ES, would have been good practice. I have an idea or two for writing practice though that I will share in rdearman's crazy challenge thread.
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