Also lost some momentum the past week or two, but back into it now. Been trying to write more as it's just difficult getting speaking reps in.

How's everyone else coming along?

I took a week off after finishing the second level on Duolingo, I will be back on Monday though!

Nice!

Ill give you guys 1 piece of advice for learning a language that gets overlooked
. Work primarily, and i mean 90% on your listening comprehension. So try to avoid watching chit with subtitles, try avoid learning via text too much, just strictly listen. And also have conversations with yourself. So try to talk about yourself. Then try to talk about the weather. Then try to talk about what type of haircut you want.

Yeah I try to watch without subtitles these days but some people speak so fast or with an unclear accent so sometimes subtitles come in handy quite a bit.

Weekly Update- August 3rd- August 9th:

Completed/Goals:

Korean:5.5/5
• Korean Class 101
• Anki
• WOD

Spanish:5/5
• Netflix
• Book

Russian: 5/5
• Russian Pod 101

Japanese:0/0

Comments:Solid week. Felt pretty good and strong across all the languages. The quality of study felt high all week and definitely one of my stronger weeks in a while.

I decided to drop Japanese for the time being.Maybe not entirely, but as a matter of dedicating time towards weekly goals Japanese will no longer be a part of it, for the time being. I might do a bit here and there just as a break to mix it up, but I realized I want to try and get some more progress more quickly and I was just spreading myself too thin given that 3 of the languages I'm doing are difficult ones and 2 of them I started as a complete beginner at the same time. I ended up taking the remaining hours I had set as a goal for Japanese for the year and spread it across the other 3 languages.

I'm not quitting entirely on Japanese, just removing it for the time being. I know at some point I will study it again.


MODS:I'm having issue when trying to post in this thread specifically. I get an access denied message a lot.

Yes, in the beginning.

I've never been comfortable with letting morphman handle scheduling for me. It's never worked just right. But I do let it handle tagging, as in it will tag 1T, 0T and MT sentences.
Anyway I sorted the list first like Matt said using the word, giving me a list of words I already knew from that deck (I think I had close to 1K).
Then gave them sorted them again using the sentence field this time, giving me a list of dictionary sentences that were 1T.

I then just browsed through this list and picked 10 sentences per day to study. Did this till I had 100 cards.

After that I just did what Matt suggested, read through the monolinual definition of the words I come across, and if the dictionary definition is 1T then turn that into a card to learn the unknown word in the definition.

However I quickly realised this wasn't ideal.


Firstly, most definitions I come across are not 1T, they are MT (meaning there's several words in the definition that I do not know).
So what I strated doing was making multiple cards to learn the words.

I'll give you an example in english so it makes sense:

Lets say I was learning english and came across the word word Lion so I look put the word Lion in an English dict. and let's assume it says "Large predatory cat that lives on the continent of Africa" (chitty definition is chitty lel)
And lets say I didn't know the words "predatory" and "continent".
I'd now find a 1T sentence that has "predator" in it and make a card. Then I'd find a 1T sentence with "continent" and make a card. (i just realised I know both these words in JP: 猛獣 and 大陸 lel).

Secondly, even if the dictionary definition WAS 1T, dictionary sentences kinda suck and are messy. Plus I don't have audio for it.

So to find new sentences the Core10K deck has been invaluable. I think I found it on Matt's site but I think NukeMarine popularised it. I have it in my anki even though I don't actively learn from it, I just use it to get sentences..


So yeah doing this I've right now made 290 cards. At around 150 I started making monolingual cards to learn the dictionary vocab. And making cards to learn any unknown words in these definitions as well. Basically dictionary diving several layers deep until you find a definition you can understand. (which I think is the way AJATT people did it originally)

However I think I will stop at 300. Focusing on monolingual transition leaves little time for regular sentence mining. And dictionary diving in this way isn't nearly as much fun as regular sentence mining.
I'll still make cards to learn dictionary vocab but I won't go more than one layer deep. Thankfully most days I can sentence mine without having to fall back on bilingual definitions.

oh and there's some times where bilingual definitions make more sense:



ayy lmao!

Weekly Updated- August 10th- August 16th:

Completed/Goals (hours)
Korean:5.5/5
• KoreanClass101
• Anki
• WOD
•Pimsleur

Spanish:5.25/5
• Book
• WOD
• Netflix
•Anki

Russian:5/5
• RussianPod101
•Michel Thomas

Total Hours:15.75

Comments:Mixed it up this week in all 3 languages (bolded are new tools). The KC101 and RP101 that I have been using for a long time now have really just gotten to a point of aggravating me every time I use them. It has always aggravated me that so much time is wasted with introductions or useless instructions (like "First we're gonna say a word in English, then we'll give you a second to say it in Korean, we'll give you the translation, and , finally, we'll repeat it. Halfway through, we'll switch the order" LIKE, ****. YOU, KC101). Using the 101 series for multiple languages (JapanesePod101 is the least annoying of them, by far) probably isn't helping it either, lol. I fast forward through those parts, but it is still extremely frustrating and extremely annoying to have to do it every few minutes.

So I decided to give Pimsleur a shot for Korean after hearing pretty good things and then my sister giving Pimsleur her endorsement as well. I got that one yesterday and have done 3 lessons. So far it is delivering on a closer experience to what I was hoping for. 30-minute lessons, nice, neat, and most importantly, without all the fluff bull**** of KC101, lol. Convenient that it's on Audible, so handy for in the car, on walks, or while doing chores.

For Spanish, I decided to get a couple of Anki decks to try out (today is the first day I have introduced the decks). I wanted to reintroduce a more traditional study method, and now with the extra time from dropping Japanese, Spanish will no longer be in a "maintenance" mode, but an active language I'm trying to improve.

In Russian, I had listened to some of the Michel Thomas method for Russian somebody had uploaded to YouTube. I liked it and it seems very similar to Pimsleur while also being on Audible, so I decided to give it a shot (started today) and did the first hour and ten-minute lesson.

I'm not a chronic ADD guy, constantly switching or anything, but I had been going with the Pod101 series as my main listening tools in Korean/Russian/Japanese for a while now and got burnt out on them.

Anyways, I feel good about the recent changes I have made these last few weeks and I look forward to seeing how it shakes things up for me.

Weekly Update- August 17th- August 23rd:

Completed/Goals (hours)
Korean:5.75/5
• Pimsleur
• Anki
• WOD

Spanish:5/5
• Anki
• WOD
•StoryTelling Podcast
• Netflix

Russian:7.25/5
• Michel Thomas
• WOD

Comments:Really liking the change up I made. It's making studying much more enjoyable (Pimsleur and Michel Thomas). Those are what I was looking for as far as main listening study aids. Added a new Spanish storytelling podcast that Olly Richards (I Will Teach You a Language) released last week (for free). I've used several of his Spanish books and enjoyed them (also preordered the Korean one) and his Podcast (7 mins eps release every day) is a similar format. Now I have 3 solid listening study tools that I like.

Moving 15 hours away this week, so should get some good studying in the car otw. Not sure how the rest of the week will go, seeing friends and such here before I leave, and packing things, etc, but should be able to still get work in np.

Subscribing to thread.

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Totally forgot about this thread...

I really want to learn German, so I actually decided to take a winter course through a local community college. Here is my review:

Finished my german course, received an A, but I don't feel like I truly LEARNED much more than I do having my wife speak German to me.

I will say a couple things in defense of the curriculum:

-I am over a decade removed from any formal education, so I know I had trouble getting back into that mindset of studying.
-Online courses have inherent flaws and limitations. Breakout sessions are a joke, it's difficult to truly get direct assistance, and it's hard to get class participation if you aren't truly required to participate (vs just being present)
-This was a winter course, so it was EXTREMELY fast paced and requires a substantial amount of independent learning/studying, which is really fukking hard when it's a foreign language and your entire text book is ONLY in German... My professor would comment at least every other class how "if this was a regular semester course, we would be able to blah blah blah" and we skipped over a good amount of course material.

I will say, it was good to spend time focusing, albeit EXTREMELY limited/brief, on the grammatical side. I have been learning phonetically and through repetition, and seeing how things were written really blew my mind lol. Also learning to conjugate verbs etc is very helpful.

I am going to go back to Pimsleur and see if I can find adownloadof it and just spend time with that.

If anyone doesn’t know Laoshu passed away at 39 years old. He left behind a wife and 3 kids. So sad he has inspired thousands upon thousands to learn languages. He was the original language polyglot YouTuber from over 12 years ago.

Anybody still alive?

Still keeping up with my languages, with some changes in focus, though.

I started doing speaking lessons in both Korean and Russian on iTalki starting back in January. 1-2 lessons per week of each. However, I felt more progress and more motivation for my Russian lessons. While both were productive, I felt I was getting more out of my Russian lessons, so at the end of March I decided to just focus on Russian. I've been doing 2-3 lessons a week in Russian since and I am very happy with how I'm progressing in a relatively short amount of time. So right now my main focus has been:

Spanish:Goal at the start of the year was to read the first 4 Harry Potter books. I'm over 1/3rd through the 3rd book, so I think I'll end up easily beating this goal. I've been considering trying to do some iTalki lessons in Spanish, but I might wait until next year, I'm not really sure. My Spanish is decently advanced, so I know I could make a lot of progress speaking fairly quickly.

Korean:Now that this is taking a backseat to Russian, I'm mostly just trying to keep the language in my mind, but only looking to dedicate about 1.5 hours or so per week. Mostly Anki or short stories (reading + listening).

Russian:This is my main focus now and where most of my efforts will go. iTalki lessons, short stories, lots of passive listening, doing daily logs of what I did, and basically anything else I can fit in with all of the other things I like to do.

Edit:

French:thought it was worth mentioning, French is a co-first language for me, along with English, but I've been making more of an effort to include reading French literature, watching French shows/movies, and doing some iTalki convos just to keep myself engaged. I talk to my dad in French, so we talk on the phone, but I just wanted to immerse myself back a bit more than I had been lately. I grew up half time English (school/friends) and half time French (home/family). But since graduating college and moving, it became much more English almost all of the time, so I just wanted to bring a balance back.

おい、俺がまだ生きているよ、カズ おじさんよ！

冗談です、そんな言い方。失礼いた ます。

本当は、僕も前より今、このサイト 来ません。

仕事もあるし、日本語を勉強なけれ いけないし、二十代みたいに暇では りません。

Edit: lol looks like this site can't even display some kanji correctly. here's a screen shot of what I wrote:

So I've been switching every month between Russian and Spanish. One Month on Russian using (Pimsleur,Duolingo(which I don't think is that good) Going to have to find something else for actually reading Russian or maybe I should stick with it.

I'm doing Spanish this month. Using Pimsleur for both Russian and Spanish.
Spanish is pretty easy to be honest already know a decent amount. And Duo is actually good for spanish.

My big problem is motivation. I did Pimsleur Russian for about a month I think in August and I wanted to do it again but the motivation faded. Anyways I'm focusing on Spanish.

can you recommend an instructor on italki