Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2017

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It's mid-December and time to ask...

What are your New Year's resolutions for 2017?

What new languages do you want to start? Which old languages do you want to finish?
What new goals will you set? Which old goals from last year will you carry forward?
What level do you want to achieve? How will you measure it?

Inspire and be inspired. Share your plans with us!

See also: Your Language-related New Year's Resolutions 2016

[Egwene]

Someone has to be the first haha..

So, I want to finish Assimil Greek and Colloquial Greek in 2017. I want to be able to understand the grammar parts inside the books and use the language in daily life. I will move to Greece in April, so this should be possible. My wish for 2017 is to step away from my fear of speaking Greek and learn new words and sentences by 'try and error'. I don't aim for fluency, but I aim for confidence and impressing myself.

Apart from Greek, I want to slowly improve my German by speaking regulary with guests during my work. Same thing for French and maybe Italian, if there are Italian guests.

Maybe another language will appear later in 2017, when I know my winter destination.. could be Spanish if I will work on the Canary Islands, but could also be Portuguese or Arabic. This is for now a surprise.

[DaveBee]

I'll finish my Assimil french course in the coming week. (Hurrah!) I'd like to get my french up to B2/C1 land. Something that feels fluent to me anyway.

From comments posted on this forum I've set myself a checkpoint of 30-35 books (10,000 ish pages), at which point I'm expecting my french to be superplusgood.

This is my first foreign language so if I'll probably want to validate the level to myself with a Delf/Dalf test. (The TCF one looks more expensive).

[Cavesa]

I must not let go of actively studying German and Spanish till the exams! German B2, Spanish C1.

For the first time in ages, I am setting a weekly time goal for myself. At least 10 hours of Spanish and German learning per week. Divided among the two more or less equally. Input doesn't count, I plan devour tons of it (finish my upgraded SC goals) and it will fall into my relax time. I know the 10 hours don't look like much, considering my goals. But they are much more than I am doing now and could give me a real chance, if I add my irregular crazy study nights on top of those. This year has been mostly about the irregular crazy study nights (and sometimes afternoons)

I shall not actively study or maintain any other language, unless I'll have fulfilled the quota for the given week.

[Finny]

In Spanish, I'd personally like to smooth out some lingering grammatical errors. Watching some movies or reading some books would be nice too, but we'll see; all my evening language time goes to French since that's by far the weaker language. Besides that, continuing to increase my vocabulary and knowledge of idiomatic expressions would be nice.

In French, I'd like to get to C1 in speaking and listening. I'd estimate I'm at B1 speaking, B2/C1 listening, and C1 reading, but getting to a level where I can say pretty much anything I want in French (the way I can in Spanish) will be what really determines how well I teach the kids French, so that's the goal. To get there, I'll keep reading, listening to the radio, and watching series (currently Les Enquêtes de Vera, Tout Compte Fait, and Les Carnets de Julie...planning on starting Commissaire Magellan, Mongeville, and maybe Fait Pas Ci, Fait Pas Ca after Vera).

With the kids, I'd like to keep strengthening both languages by continuing to do everything we're already doing: speaking, reading, listening to the radio, watching cooking shows, etc. Right now the rotation is Spanish Mondays through Thursdays and French Fridays through Sundays. I might modify that if I feel they need more of one or the other. I'd also like to find more opportunities to place the kids in environments where the languages are used. There's a Spanish storytime that takes place a few times a month, but we haven't gone since last summer, so maybe revisiting that this summer. Similarly, there are French movie nights in Chicago in the summer and similar events, and I'd like us to go to at least one of those so the kids can see and hear people besides themselves and folks on TV / radio using French. But we'll see. My daughter learned Spanish with minimal exposure to Spanish-speaking people in daily life, so I know the same is easily doable in French; the determining factor, as I noted above, is my proficiency in the language, so that's what I need to work on.

[tomgosse]

My New Year Resolution is pretty much the same as last year: 2016. I will try and learn as much French as I can. I may dabble in Russian.

I wish all of you a Happy New Year,
Tom

[IronMike]

Which old languages do you want to finish?

Language learning is never finished.

My plans continue with Russian. For 2017, I want to do more LR in Russian. I will study Russian till the end of April, then again starting after August.

Starting in May, I'm going to resurrect my BCS. We are planning a vacation to Montenegro and Croatia in August. At one point I was a C1 (3) in listening and strong B2 (2+) in reading and speaking. I'd like to get it back. I've got Glossika as well as Magner's text and some old DLI stuff that I'll use to get the language back.

All along I will continue to improve my Esperanto. Every other month I'll take part in the Esperanto-Sumoo, reading Esperanto for 15 straight days. I'll continue with La Dangxera Lingvo (great book and out in English soon), but as I did 100 pages last Sumoo, I'll be done with that book soon, so I'll have to choose from my others. I also listen to Esperanto radio on the weekends while walking the dog, and I aim to continue that during 2017.

Being the fickle language lover that I am, I'll also add in some others. I mostly dabble in other languages linguistically, meaning I learn how the language is structured and learn some basic, Berlitiz-level stuff in them. Currently, Tok Pisin is leading in the voting in the Oceania Lingua Franca group on FB, and I've always had a love of pidgins and creoles, so if it wins, I'll do some reading and studying on that language. Lakota is the LF in the Native American LF FB group now, and I'm reading up on it. That'll continue into the new year.

Other than that, who knows? I've got neighbors who are native speakers of Japanese, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian, and probably others, so who the heck knows?

[neofight78]

I may dabble in Russian.

Do it!!!! Russian is awesome

[outcast]

After two years of Tunnel Vision Chinese (where did the two years go?), 2017 will be the most complex year of my language learning life. It is the year where I start cleaning up and start making things look nice and beautiful, the major "construction" work mostly now over. Hard to believe since I started this in 2010.

Basically, in terms of logistics, the first months of the year I will be back in the United States starting in February sometime. I will be there until mid-summer, then all bets are off, but it is too early to even leak anything. There are many variables, and in fact several places I could end up going to, or even nowhere at all.

What I do know is, as mentioned, it will be a COMPLEX year. And probably my last year where learning language will be first priority in my life, at least at this point in the "big game". 2018 will start to shift to some more mundane and unavoidable things. Projects, which I will list in chronological order rather than by language (because next year schedule is more important than language):

Native Languages:
At this point I am still too busy acquiring new languages and reviving others to focus at all in English (where I want to tweak my pronunciation slightly, and recover my very low frequency vocab), or Spanish (where I want to read books to restore my full vocabulary range, and I also want to focus eventually on some orthography and writing essays). So until at least mid-2018 nothing much here.

Core Languages:
Project 1 (January to March): continue full-steam with Mandarin up to the HSK 6 test sitting in late march. My goal is to get 240 on this exam, which is damn hard. Getting such a high mark on this test would be almost an equivalent of C1. It maybe a stretch, but since this test is mainly listening and reading I think I can try to go for the big Honcho. There is an oral exam that is separate and on that one just passing will be fine with me.
(Beyond March): I will try to have a daily exposure to Chinese characters, which are notorious for being high maintenance or skills deteriorate quickly. As for the language itself after the HSK 6 exam, well, the main idea is to do something with the language every day. This is the ONE language I must do something every day in. It was very costly to acquire and being radically different from the others it needs it's own maintenance. Beyond that, of course, my ultimate goal is a decent C1 level. This is probably a couple of years away, since I won't study as intensively anymore. But I will get there.
Project 2 (February to August): Mission German, after two plus years of no study and only sporadic use in meetings, texting, and some input, this language must roar back and surpass my high mark of solid B2. I plan to sit a C1 exam at some point next year or 2018.
(Beyond August): Just expose myself to the language a little every other day, and every week have some activity with it.

Strategic Languages
Project 3 (January to August): Korean will continue as the main-side dish, semi-intensive, but always fun project. The point is to never stress with this language. I am making progress now and as long as I see progress I am ok, it need not even be quick, just noticeable over time. My goal by August is to be able to survive only on Korean if I went to that country, possibly sit a Topik 2 with good results by then, and even try Topik 3 (but not necessarily pass). After August, we shall see... More on this at some point later. Ultimately my goal is B2 though.
Project 4 (July and into 2018): Hindi will at long last enter the fold. I will first concentrate on the obvious which is the script and the phonetics, as I always do, for a couple of months. Taking it easy at first, reading tons of resources about the general aspects, features, and history of Hindi. In September I plan to start formal study and as the year quickens to a close this language will take up an increasingly large segment of my study schedule until at some point it will be come THE primary focus by year end. As some of you may now, the reason for this is I plan to head to India in January of 2018 and study one semester Hindi (hopefully at intermediate level), in country. My goal is a good B1 level by the time I leave India, with B2 level within a reasonable sight with further studying.

That covers most of what I know I will do. So next year the focus will be Chinese, German, and on the back side Hindi, then Chinese and German. All along Korean as a slow-building language.

Which brings me to French, there is a chance I will re-engage with it in the 2nd half of 2017, but that would mean there are changes to the above plans. If things work out, then French will not be able to be a major priority in 2017. But I hope I can at some point make 30 minutes to an hour on some days to reconnect with it, and just chip away at the rust. Once some of my other projects can go into more maintenance and slow-building mode, I can take care of this.

Portuguese: Oh Portuguese. Well I have this crazy idea of banning Spanish and replacing it with Portuguese, when I speak to people that speak Spanish (including one person at home). So that way I would use otherwise dead time to work on resurrecting it. I just feel a bit odd about doing that, but I tend to feel worse about not doing anything with this language. So I may suck up the awkward and just go for it.

That's 2017, it is the landmark year in my pursuit of the Polyglot dream.

[rlnv]

I hope everyone had a productive 2016, and will have an even more productive 2017!

I have some fairly specific goals in mind for 2018, and to put myself in a position to realize those goals, I will have to accomplish some fairly specific tasks in 2017.

+ Continue spending an average of 3 hours per day on French, at minimum.
+ Read no less than 30 novels.
+ Watch a bunch of TV series in French.
+ Create an Anki French Frequency deck for words 5,001 through 10,000, and start working on that.
+ Complete the following courses:

-- The remainder of Grammaire Progressive du Français series.
-- French Sentence Builder - McGraw Hill
-- Develop Writing Skills in French - Graham Bishop and Bernard Haezewindt
-- Rédiger clairement - Commission européenne