Anyway, last year I defined my Spanish goals in terms of the amount of listening, speaking, reading, and writing I wanted to do. However, looking back on it, I'm not sure if quantitative goals like those are as helpful as I thought. Instead, in this log I'm going to describe what I want to improve about my Spanish and French in 2020, and each month I will try to assess my progress and see how to stay on track to reach my target result.
Spanish
- Listening: I want to improve my comprehension of shows that have fast dialogue and use a lot of slang, such as La casa de papel and Elite.
- Speaking: I want to improve my conversation skills, especially when it comes to asking questions to further the discussion and making small talk in general. I also want to improve my ability to talk about more complex topics, so I'll need to increase my active vocabulary a lot.
- Reading: I'm very happy with my reading skills right now, but I would like to start reading a wider range of sources, such as blogs and magazines for native speakers.
- Writing: I want to practice writing about more complex topics. It would also be nice to try writing formal essays in Spanish.
French
Honestly, I'm such a beginner in French that I'm not sure what kind of goals to set. I barely have any French skills right now, so any improvement would be good. I know that I would like to accomplish the following though:
- Finish Colloquial French.
- Finish Pimsleur French I. (Maybe do Pimsleur French II as well?)
- Finish going through an introductory grammar book such as Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French Grammar.
- Have at least two French lessons per month until I feel confident switching to from formal tutoring to language exchanges.
- Start enjoying native materials on a daily basis.
I should mention that this year I will be spending less of my free time studying languages. I've spent pretty much my whole life so far wanting to be a writer, and I'm tired of planning to write and then never doing it. This year I'm going to put in a real effort to finish some of the writing projects I've started and improve as a writer. Of course, I'm not going to stop studying languages (otherwise this post would've been pointless). My plan right now is to focus on French and my writing projects at the beginning of the year and to squeeze in Spanish when I can. We'll see how it goes! I will make another post soon with my goals for January.