I've been struggling to formulate my language goals for 2020 in a nice concise way, but these are my thoughts...
- I really want to try to keep up the consistency of language study which I somehow managed during 2019. I've signed up to the 2020 365 challenge with "generic", because I want to continue to study for 30 minutes per day, but I don't want my focus to be exclusively on Russian.
- That said, I do want to try and maintain the momentum which I've had with Russian during 2019. Specifically, I want to feel by the end of 2020 that I have a better grip on Russian grammar. I still have a pile of courses which I want to work through. My initial plan is to finish Penguin Russian, which I'm currently partway through (chapter 19). I haven't made a firm decision about what to do next, but I have a German-language version of Russian Assimil which I'm considering going back to (I completed the passive wave a couple of years back, but was totally out of my depth with the active wave. I'm hoping that I've improved enough to be able to manage the active wave now). I also have Colloquial Russian 2 and some new B1 textbooks that I got for Christmas. Plus I would like to finish the RT online Russian lessons, because I think they're a really cool resource.
- I don't want to be completely obsessed with completing Russian courses though, so I think this needs to be the year I start trying to read in Russian. I have a small pile of books which I hope to at least start tackling this year. If the Super Challenge starts running again in May, I might sign up with Russian to give me the motivation to get started with this.
- At the end of 2020, I want to re-take the Online Diagnostic Assessment for Russian and score higher than I did at the end of 2019 (I scored 1+ in Dec 19).
- I want to restore some balance between studying Russian and studying Croatian during 2020, because I feel like Croatian lost out quite a bit to Russian in 2019. This is sad, because Croatian is definitely my favourite language. This is the first time I've studied two languages from the same family and so I'm also a bit nervous about the potential for me to start getting Croatian and Russian mixed up, i.e. that my Croatian could become worse the better I get at Russian.
- I don't think I can come up with a measurable goal for what I want to achieve with Croatian this year, but I'm planning to track my time spent on all languages this year (in 2019 I only religiously tracked Russian time) and so hopefully by the end of 2020 I can at least see that I have spent a reasonable amount of time on Croatian. Obviously I want to continue reading in Croatian, and I have a pile of novels to get through, both translated and original. I want to finish watching the second series of 'Na granici', which I'm partway through, and then find another series to get hooked on. But I think I also want to do some proper "studying"; perhaps revise some textbooks, work through some of the Croatian-language grammar books I have, maybe even deal with the 2000+ outstanding vocab reviews that I've had pending in Memrise all year Once I've done all that I should probably try to start writing in Croatian again (but I am definitely not signing up for an Output Challenge!)
- I want to continue reading in German, which is something I really enjoy. My active German is rusty at the moment, but the fact that I continue to be able to read in German with a level of ease that I could only dream of achieving in Croatian (or even in Esperanto!) reassures me that I haven't lost it.
- I also received three novels in Esperanto for Christmas and they are all things which I genuinely want to read, so I guess I have a goal of reading at least three books in Esperanto this year
- I would like to have time to start learning Bulgarian, but I'm not sure how realistic this will turn out to be in 2020. I'm not planning to do anything in the first quarter of 2020 anyway; it will be later in the year, if I do start.
I should also say that I don't think I'm going to update my log on a daily basis in 2020. I'm thinking of setting up a spreadsheet to record my times for each language instead, and then updating here a bit less regularly with summaries of what I've done. We'll see; perhaps daily updates have become so much of a habit that I won't be able to stop