Language Learning

I just restarted anki practice of sentence mining of the 5000 most common words after a hiatus since August.

Also working through the later section of Fire and Blood volume 1 (a game of Thrones, the origins of the iron throne) in French. Which has been going really well now that most of the vocabulary is in my head. I barely stop to check the dictionary anymore. My comprehension is definitely improving rapidly. Next step would be to start practicing production.

@Lazycog I decided to set aside some time to study Spanish, but I haven't done much yet.

Woo, nice! I've had a lot of ups and downs myself lately, so always good to hear about the wins.

I've shifted my focus to automaticity. The listening practice has continued to be a frustrating disaster, and I decided to drop the focused practice and change gears towards reading--a lot--at an easy level to cement comprehension of upper beginner/lower intermediate grammar structures in my head first. The idea is once easier content becomes more automatic in my head, I'll have more bandwidth for the additional parallel brain processing power I need when the input is by ear. I've already gone through an entire graded reader book which is leading me to think I might have a different problem of being short on content. That's a better problem to have, I suppose! It should also be easier to find reading than listening material. I also ordered a Japanese folktales book at my local library that I tried a few months ago. It was a tick too difficult for me back then, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes later this week.

Automaticity is a really interesting concept, and it applies to the broader skill as well. The past week in general, I've found my study to be less draining, now that I've stopped planning and started doing the reps. I'm not holding my schedule in my head, or the processes, any of that anymore. Just sitting at my desk and knowing what to do, where my tools are. It gives me the energy to put more time into it.

Been continuing to play through a game, read news, and also started trying a short novel, but I'm not quite there yet. I'm excited to find new words and Kanji as I go through these but have to keep reminding myself I should be more focused on the content than the language. The biggest learnings won't hit until the language fades into the background. So I'm trying to find the balance, but having a hard time preventing myself from looking up a word or two every other dialog box.

Glad you kept trying and it worked out better Lazycog!

I managed to pick up a crime novel off a free pile this week. I'm not able to read it outright, but the percentage of the prose I'm getting is about 60-80%. That's a huge win for me.

In more formal practice I'm nearing the end of translating book 95 of Die Drei ??? Kids - Geheime Zeichen (secret signs). I'm thinking about getting another one of those since the vocabulary level and prose difficulty are about right for me at this point.

I did manged to order food a few times during the week entirely in German, though I bailed when trying to describe how much of a cheese wheel I wanted to purchase.

Well done! You're making me want to retry Spanish with the GF, I might try it once she wakes up later.

Been pushing hour long study sessions in to my Japanese as well as my Spanish and also doing 10-25 mins of maths a day, as well as exercising (cycling) for 20 mins a day all week. Been having a very hard day just today though and not sure I can make it today, but I'll certainly try to.

... Also feel guilty about my Irish lately, it feels like out of all languages I should be learning, Irish should be one of them. I felt so guilty that I managed to make a few flashcards in Irish using one of those Irish dictionaries. But lord knows if it'll actually go anywhere. It's hard enough to muster the strength to do an hour in Japanese, let alone an hour in Spanish, let alone the other stuff too. But not learning Irish still kills me at times. In part because people keep saying how terrible Duolingo ends up being but the Duolingo Irish learners are still leagues ahead of me too. I'm Irish, born and lived here my whole life, yet can't speak a word of it. I feel like I'm sort of a disgrace.

I often find that when days are good, the best I can feel is when I'm studying. But days where it's hard, I can't study to relax, and I can't find other ways to relax besides studying, my mind is constantly racing, and I can't watch or play anything and I enter this phase where I'm constantly trying to do something but ruminate on the bad instead, then have to disengage with the distractions since it's not distracting enough.

So that's been at me today again. Really wishing I had a different brain, I get so panicky like today for the dumbest of reasons and I was doing really good up until now too. I'll try study after this post, and then if today is successful, I'll post a small update of how the day went. I think today is just a day where I need to rough it out and learn how to rough it out.

Sorry for the wall of text.

Hopefully a good update soon.