Another six days down, another post for you all. How am I coming along with Ainu? Let’s find out…
Okay, so after my last progress report, where I said things weren’t going great, they’ve certainly improved. Well, a bit anyway.
Straight after that post, I got some help from Rebecca (@cuppalang) on Twitter, who gave me some phrases I still hadn’t learnt through the Unilang/STV course and linked me to the Shito Channel on YouTube, which has just over 30 Ainu lessons uploaded. They’re all quite short (and, again, I don’t think they’re the same dialect as the Unilang course, but that’s neither here nor there) but they’re conversational and I’m being exposed to more audio, which is nice.
Also, while the Unilang course isn’t teaching me a lot of things I can use in conversations right now, I think I am technically learning more complex grammar than I did with Scottish Gaelic. I’ve learnt about the continuous present tense for example, which I didn’t specifically learn in my first 18 days of Gaelic.
Either way, it’s turning out to be (of course!) a very different experience. I’m hoping I’ll pull something together for a video on the 5th but I’m thinking it might be a little shorter than the last one!
Stats:
In total, I’ve spent 424 minutes (7.07 hours) learning Ainu, which means I’ve studied for 197 minutes between 24th-30th January. A little less than my first six days, sure, but I’ve had to make some overall changes to my language learning (keep an eye out for a post tomorrow about that!) so I’m not surprised it’s dropped off a bit here. Either way, that averages out to 35 minutes (0.59 hours) per day, so I’m still above my 30 minutes per day minimum.
If I add up the vocabulary I’ve learnt through Memrise and Drops, I’m at 229 words total. Again, some are sentences, but this isn’t bad—I’ve added 61 words in six days.
Here’s my latest breakdown of study time:
I’m glad to see that the time I’ve spent on Unilang is catching up to how long I’ve spent on Drops, especially as I’m still not finding the app all that useful, unfortunately. Memrise is the one that’s dropped a little, which I’d like to push up as much as I can in the next six days, just because I know that’s a resource that really works well for me.
Sadly, I didn’t reach any of the goals I set myself in my last post; I’m on lesson 11 of the Unilang course and I was just a little short of my 250 words goal. Still, I’ll set myself some more goals now that are hopefully a bit more realistic and therefore achievable by the 5th:
- Reach lesson 15/52 of the Unilang course.
- Watch 15 of the YouTube video lessons.
- Learn 250 words/phrases just on Memrise.
Oh, and here’s a sentence I wrote yesterday that should be accurate and is actually true! Numan eiga ku=nukar. Yesterday I watched a film! (The Grudge.)
I’ll be back tomorrow with a Jan review/Feb goals post—so see some of you then!