Started the last chapter of Tobira this week! What a journey, whew. The books had been sitting in my bookcase for like three years before I finally figured out motivation, planning, and neurospicy stuff. Feels really good.
Also looking forward to some time off, hah. Once I’m done with this last chapter, will take some time off, do a review of some of the grammar that hasn’t stuck well, and then it’s onto the next stage.
English Practices
As a native Turkish speaker, I started to read Paul Auster’s the New York trilogy. I’m using a voice recorder while I was reading. From sentence to sentence I am recording my voice to my voice recorder to compare it with the native speakers audio. By doing so, I hope I can correct my pronunciation mistakes.
German Practices
And also I am learning and refreshing my memory in German language. When I was in high school I learned German, because we had a German lessons. After 19 years I start the again to my German practices.
Using Anki flashcard application with sentence decks and vocabulary decks. At the same time I am practicing on LingQ German. And I bought dealing with books in German language ( German and Turkish ). I started my practices 79 days ago and now I can easily understand intermediate level voice records and the texts. I am not checking any of Grammar rules in German. Just trying to understand translating full sentence and using echo shadowing technique.
In Anki application I am using four different colors in my flashcards. Feminine articles are pink, masculine articles are blue, non-gender articles are green, plural forms are yellow. I’m adding photos if available. And using in text to speech features of Anki.
Russian
A 2014 I was living in Russia. I stayed there one and half year. I have already B1 level Russian. To keep it fresh sometimes I watch YouTube videos such as уральские пельмени, Comedy Club. And using echo shadowing method. When I was watching I am also recording the interesting parts to my voice recorder.
I have followed through on my promise last week and have been doing my best to read every piece of French written-text I have come across. Some are harder than others & sometimes I really don’t want to turn on my brain to read newspapers… but I think it is working. I’ll keep up with this. Also keeping up with the Anki decks can be tough at times… but I’m doing my best as well, at least like 10 new words even on a bad day
Speaking of immersion. I haven’t bought StS2 yet but I’ve been playing vanilla Slay the Spire completely in French honhonhon there’s no way I’d misremember what douleur mean again, thank you “soldier of iron” (why did they do Ironclad’s name dirty like this)
I’ve noticed myself slipping this week on doing lessons and videos. Gotta get back in the groove. On the good side tho, I’ve done at least a little every day and I’m more caught up than usual with Anki.
I started Slay the Spire 2 this week and played around in different languages. Spanish was very easy for me, but it was so good to see that Japanese was much more comfortable than German. I haven’t really started studying German, but Japanese can feel daunting with its non-phonetic alphabet making new words tough.
It’s stagnating lol. I do a mini lesson almost every day but don’t have any opportunities to practice conversation or get feedback, so I end up forgetting quickly. I can read and understand books fairly well but speech and sentence formation are weak. I chose a language which I don’t have much use for, and it has grown on me, but at this point I do it out of routine and because I’d feel bad losing progress if I stopped.
This might not be possible for every language, but if you can, try to find something that you can only access in that language. Like some book that you’re interested in that hasn’t been translated or some topic where much more material exists in that language than in English. It makes it feel more worthwhile than just learning to learn.
That’s good advice. I do make myself read books and watch media in my target language (or subtitled in it) for practice. I just have nowhere to apply it in written or spoken form. Most likely I will start a new language while continuing mini lessons online until I finish the entire course.
Just for writing you could find a game with servers in that language. This may be a bit tough for Dutch though.
Have you tried shadowing?
Its not perfect speaking practice, but you can do it by yourself. You need a script + a recording. You listen to the recording, you read the script, then you play the recording AND talk at the same time (possibly reading from the script). Songs are a good start, but you also want to practice “normal speaking melodies / normal speaking rhythms” if at all possible.
I’ve been using songs + a German A2-graded news script here: https://learngerman.dw.com/de/kurz-und-leicht/s-69137519 . Its free for me, but you’ll have to search in your target language for a similar resource…
The idea is you want to match EVERYTHING with the native speaker. Accents, melody, rhythm. Exactly everything. Shadowing at EXACTLY the same time is your best shot at matching perfectly.
I haven’t heard of that before but I will try it! Since it’s a casual hobby for me, I’m not too worried about learning it perfectly. At one point I considered learning German instead (it comes up much more often in work opportunities) and Deutsche Welle is what I was going to start with as a resource. How do you find it so far?
At the very least, shadowing is invaluable for muscle memory, just getting the pronunciation and prosody somewhere close to right. Can always record yourself if you’re not able to get native feedback.
Nicos Weg (from Deutsche Welle) is probably the best free source of German study in the whole internet.
So yeah, definitely use dw.
Agreed on the shadowing rec. Journaling in your target language might be helpful too. Even w/o feedback, thinking about how to phrase things can be productive.
But if you already do well with reading and listening, maybe it’s worth reflecting on your goals. Do you feel it’s important for you to be able to speak well and produce sentences?
@lasta what language?
Dutch
Currently reading my A2/B1 middle difficulty German story book.
I read some kids Easter books this week.
We travelled on trains and I managed asking some questions as well as ordering food in German.
I’m rereading some Dragonball books.
I’ve spoken with some more neighbors, but not nearly enough.
The big motivator is that I’ve applied for a huge opportunity that would require much better German speaking in about 12 months. If I get the job it’ll be do or die time. Machen oder toten zeit!
I finished the Finnish course on duolingo (what a nice sounding sentence). You can see it’s tiny but stopping before getting to the past tense? Come on. There is no way I could follow any sort of media so it’s probably time to look for other courses and maybe drop duolingo all together. RIP streak.
I think Duolingo is only good for very few languages and often only if you speak English.
I didn’t know they still had courses you could finish. I remember back in the day it seemed like the courses were all managable chunks of lessons and pretty fun. When I look at it now it seems like it’ll just go in forever. I’m sure it varies a lot for each language.
Props for completing it! Hope you find a good next step.
My Irish lessons start soon! Other than that, just been mindlessly at my studies, missed most of a day, otherwise doing okay. Going to start my studies today in probably an hour from now. Sort of mellowing to Gorillaz Demon Days right now to turn the temperature of the day down. It’s helping. No real hangups this week, save for getting piss drunk yesterday. Still feeling it today. So just going to dive in when I can.
@emb I need to study more. I also made a new rule for myself that I’m not allowed to buy any more Japanese manga/books until I’ve read the stuff I have.
Highly understandable! I was just looking around a bookshop this weekend and thinking about all the ones I already have that I’m not reading (some foreign language, but also just regular English books). It’s so much easier to buy than to see it through. But then when you do really get into a book and finish it, it’s usually very much worth the effort.
