brilliantyears wrote: Oh thank god, finally someone who takes a (to me) sensible approach to learning kanji You're on the right track and your method of learning different compounds worked really well for me.
This is really the only way I ever managed to remember kanji and it seems odd to me that it isn't a more common approach.
I've been missing Japanese a lot lately. I really hate that it's a language I started so late, in relation to other languages, because of things like learning kanji that require so much time. I've been giving serious consideration to doing a little weekly study, like I'm doing with Russian. The problem is, I don't have a good track record with that. If I miss one week's study session, I find it hard to get back on track. Oddly this hasn't been that hard with Russian so far, and I think the 6WC helped get me into the habit of studying Russian. Plus I do a little Russian every day on Clozemaster, even if it's just keep the streak. I don't want to try the Clozemaster Japanese course again, as it's too dependent on reading skills that I just do not have, but maybe Decks has something suitable for me.
I have no real goals for Japanese beyond wishing to be conversational in it and hoping one day to complete my N5 Kanji workbook. Those two things shouldn't be that hard, if I made the effort. really, if I wasn't so deathly adverse to language exchanges, I could even just go that route with learning conversational Japanese. I will give this more thought.
As for Russian, I seem to have fallen into a comfortable pattern of doing Clozemaster daily, then 1-2 days on the weekends, doing a bit more, like Decks plus reading my beginner stories or listening to Slow Russian podcast. Today, I did 50 new sentences and 100 review sentences on Clozemaster, then two review sessions on my Decks course. After that, I reviewed Unit 1-4 in Colloquial Russian instead of reading a story. I'm not in any rush with Russian--it's more of a "Russian is pretty, Russian people are cool and I have 'learn a Slavic language' on my bucket list" sort of deal--so I'm really happy with this routine so far. The only change is I think I should do Decks everyday, even if it's just to keep the streak, because I should be listening to more spoken Russian, and Clozemaster's TTS is decent but no sub for natural voices, like the audio for my Decks course.
With Breton, I'm watching this series, Fin ar Bed on Brezhoweb. Only a handful videos on Brezhoweb have subtitles in Breton, and sadly, dramas like this this one only have the option for French subtitles. So I get to practice reading French and then use it to try to understand the spoken Breton. But the main actors in this particular series are fairly easy for me to understand (I particularly love the woman's accent--they needed to give her more lines!)--the problem is more that I need to expand my Breton vocabulary more so I don't have to think so much in order to understand what they're saying.
With Irish, I'm enjoying this season of Ros na Rún even if the last episode was pretty emotionally brutal. Oh lord. I had unhappy dreams after watching that last night. I kind of got annoyed with how easy understanding spoken Irish seems for me now compared to spoken Scottish Gaelic, but then I remembered that most of the Scottish Gaelic I've been listening to lately is news and informative programs that are dense and use a more formal register of language while with Irish, it's this emotionally messy soap opera. So yeah, I needed to adjust my perspective there.
This past week I started listening to weather reports and news in Welsh via the BBC website as well as my Gaelic programs, and wow, do I have a lot of work to do there. Sadly I probably will not have time to focus on Welsh for bit more until next year.
Another language that I've neglected in recent months is Indonesian. Nearly all I do with Indonesian right now is Clozemaster. Today I started my Decks course again, the one I wanted to complete earlier in the year, with the intent of putting a little more effort into Indonesian.
As we get close to October, another thing I've been thinking about is how I didn't get to Darija this year. But I'm thinking I may try to do something with it after November. In November I'll be working on Navajo. I'm hoping there'll be a 6WC starting in November, but if not I will do my own sort of 6WC thing for Navajo for Native American Heritage Month. Observing this month has become a thing for me, sort of both an act of solidarity with Native people here in the US who are working to save their languages much as Celtic language communities are doing with theirs, and as an act of gratitude for what Native communities have taught me about languages and their role in culture and identity over the years. So that will happen. But I think right after that, I'm just going to dive into Darija, because by then I should be on my winter break with work and will have more time. No more excuses...of course, unless it's like if my mom get really sick or I get really sick or the world ends or something like that.
Other future plans include participating in this 30-day speaking challenge next year. I really would like to do Irish, to force myself to work on my Irish pronunciation instead of just pronouncing everything like it's Scottish Gaelic, but I may end up doing French, because that probably would be easiest, both in terms of my ability and with how the challenge is set up. I'm hoping the challenge's creator keeps this going for a while as I have the chance to participate in more than one. There's this voice in my head telling I need to do it in German at some point, because I so very out of practice with speaking in German.
As for my SC languages, that's going fine, although for some odd reason, I've been speaking to myself in French a lot this week. Usually I do that in Gaelic, if not just in English. Not sure what brought that on, especially since I've been working on my Spanish SC more since I've completed my French SC. Although last weekend I did watch the French version of that new Netflix series Criminal, and each episode is basically 45 minutes of people just talking around a table.
Welp, gotta go finish my Clozemaster stuff for the day. I wrote this long post in the hope that in the time I was writing, my neighbor's beagle would stop his constant baying. My neighbor, who shouldn't own a dog in the first place, likes to leave this poor beastie alone for long stretches, like tonight (she's out somewhere doing Friday night things, I guess) and if you know beagles you know this makes them very lonely and anxious. And when they get lonely and anxious, they get loud. But my neighbor isn't home yet, the beagle is still baying, and I guess I'll just do the bare minimum on what's left for me to do on Clozemaster and call it a night.