Hi guys! So, it might seem a little soon, but here is my first progress report for November’s 6WC. I was going to do weekly reports, but I always plan to do those and then never follow through; I think it has a lot to do with which day the beginning of the challenge falls on and weekends just do not work well for me. I thought, then, it might be better if I tried to post a (short) update every few days instead.
Part of that is because I figure if I’m talking about this challenge at the beginning, when it’s still exciting and everyone’s putting in all their effort, I’d be encouraged enough to keep going for the rest of it. Part of it is because the more often I post, the shorter those posts can be. It’s win-win for all of us! 😉
And so, without further ado…
Time logged to date: 201 minutes (3 hours, 21 minutes).
Time spent learning Slovak: 69 minutes (1 hour, 9 minutes).
First things first: for Slovak, I have so far hit my 15 minutes a day goal. More than hit it, in fact. I can already feel lots of the words coming back to me (I was a little surprised by how much I’d forgotten on the first day, but then I really hadn’t studied for more than six weeks by that point) and I’m hoping in a few days I’ll be almost back to where I was then. I’m using memrise a lot to review the words from the first few chapters of Colloquial Slovak and then I’m hoping to add another Slovak course in the future.
For the textbook itself – I’ve not made a lot of progress. All I’ve done so far are exercises four and five from lesson seven; exercise four involved translating sentences into Slovak, which took a long time as I had to re-look up a lot of grammar rules, and for exercise five I had to fill in the gaps in Slovak sentences and translate them into English. However, I think I may have taken a lot of these exercises too quickly in the past and relied a lot on the fact that I could just look up anything I didn’t remember. I spent a while on exercise five today, checking my answers and then trying to work out what I’d done wrong (locative case + soft feminine nouns = very confused me), which means I have a much better understanding than I might have had, had I rushed like I usually do.
So Slovak is going pretty well. Unfortunately I didn’t log any time with German on Sunday, but I counted some time I spent chatting yesterday instead. For Mandarin, I’m still working my way through NPCR lesson fifty; I’m doing the exercises and practising the vocabulary on Memrise. Spanish has been a variety of things – my Teach Yourself Complete Spanish book, Memrise, Duolingo and the Flashsticks app, so yesterday was an especially good day for that.
If you’ve looked at my breakdown on the 6WC site, you may also see that another language has sneaked in there – namely, Russian. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but Duolingo finally released their course so I spent twenty minutes messing around with it yesterday. I don’t know how long it will hold my interest – I like Duolingo, but never for too long – but I’m willing to just dabble in Russian occasionally, especially if that helps me keep on track with my other languages.
That’s it for this update! I’m hoping in the next one I can share something – a text or a video – that I can use to see my progress between the beginning and end of this challenge. Also, I haven’t visited Bratislava yet this month, but don’t worry. I’ll let you all know when I do – until then, čau!
Ahoj! I stumbled across your posts and am fascinated with the 6WC idea. Curious: Why did you choose Slovensko? My reason is twofold- husband who is Slovak and my needing to make learning a language (or many!) a priority for health reasons. I had a hard time with Slovak because my husband actually speaks more Polish. I recently looked into Polish because there are more resources. I need to get a handle on what I’m learning and follow a schedule. Thank you for your posts, and for the inspiration!! 🇺🇸🇸🇰
Ahoj! Oh, you have such good reasons for learning Slovak – mine is basically that I’ve been living in Vienna since last October (2014, though not over the summer) and about this time last year I visited Bratislava for the first time and I just loved it. I’d always wanted to learn Czech but Slovak is (according to the people I met there) so similar and a much more accessible country for me, so in January I started to learn in earnest. Polish is definitely another good one though (I’ve considered learning it a bunch of times too), especially for resources – that’s such a problem for Slovak. It’s so interesting that your husband actually speaks more Polish too. Following a schedule is always the hardest part I think, but you’ll get there – and good luck! Thanks so much for dropping by and commenting as well! 😀
Thank you so much for the feedback and encouragement.