Hi guys! Happy Monday! I hope this week has started out well for you all.
Yet again, it’s time for a progress report about the 6WC – we’re onto number five and we’re now over two weeks in, so how far have I managed to get?
Time logged to date: 2604 minutes (43 hours, 24 minutes)
Time spent learning Slovak: 807 minutes (13 hours, 27 minutes)
I honestly didn’t think I’d done all that much this weekend – I certainly didn’t delve into my textbooks like last week – but I’ve added ten hours to my total since Friday, which I’m pretty impressed with.
I spent about two hours of that on Slovak – and although that’s a fair amount of time, I haven’t really done all that much. I’ve spent a lot of time still with Anki, trying to add cards (the reviews don’t take much longer than about eight minutes) – and Saturday was the first day I didn’t actually hit my fifteen-minutes-per-day goal! (I did twelve minutes on Memrise, but still.) It’s not anything to turn my nose up at, however. Reviewing vocabulary every day is pretty important, especially for Slovak right now, so I am happy with what I’ve been doing. I do plan to step it up with the textbook, though.
German came up on Friday (my German day) and Saturday too, because I had to write the next Kind 44 blog post. I’m hoping to add more German throughout my day in the future, but I am really enjoying this book (it helps, I think, that I haven’t read it before) so even if I only read, that’s still good. I am exposed to German pretty often, after all. I have got some goals in mind to do a little more, but I’ll put those at the end of this post. Oh – I also watched Inglorious Basterds last night, so that counts for a bit of German, right? 😉
Saturday was my Mandarin day – and all I did was watch four episodes of 花千骨, oops! I do need to remember to work actively on this language; it is nowhere near the level of my German and I’ve got plans that really require me to put in some effort right now. I am going to do my best to focus during the challenge, though obviously my main target language is Slovak – but I think come mid-December, Mandarin is going to be my focus language for a little bit.
And yesterday was Spanish! I had such a good day with Spanish; I have a lot of issues with this language that stem from me having studied it many times over the years and I’ve got like a weird false beginner’s status where I can’t speak a lot but I understand a fair amount. I am still working with Teach Yourself Complete Spanish, but I also read for a while yesterday (Matilda and some short articles) and watched the first episodes of Destinos and Águila Roja (it’s on Netflix). I watched Águila Roja with subtitles, but I found that although sometimes it was way too fast, I could mostly match the words/phrases up with their translations and understood it here and there. Each episode is over an hour long, so I’m hoping that if I watch one or two every Spanish day, I’ll start to notice my comprehension reactivating even more.
I didn’t really achieve my three-day goals from the last post – except for the one to keep going. I don’t feel like I’m losing momentum, either, though maybe that’s because I did take a break from the coursebooks for a little while. Sometimes that can do you good – it does for me, anyway.
So my next set of goals:
- For Slovak – I want to get to the end of Lesson 8 in the Colloquial Slovak textbook. I’ve got some more language points (aka grammar who do you think you’re fooling Colloquial series) and exercises to do, then two more short readings. I feel like that’s doable, especially since Wednesday is my day off.
- For German – reading! So it’s a totally different challenge, but the Super Challenge finishes at the end of 2015 and I’m currently on 71/100. That means I need to read 29 books (1,450 pages) to finish it, which I think I can do (it levels out to fewer than 35 pages a day). I’d like to read a little every day, but really focus on that on the German days – I’m currently reading Sabriel (Garth Nix) as well as Kind 44, so if I managed to finish both of these that would help. If not, I have a bunch of other books I’d like to get through as well.
- For Mandarin – I have got to start knuckling down with this. I still can’t read properly and it’s frustrating. I’m also beginning my master’s applications and I feel like although I can get in, my Mandarin is maybe not quite up to par. For now, I’d like to just make sure I’m spending at least fifteen minutes actively learning per Mandarin day, THEN I can watch some TV.
- For Spanish – keep doing what I’m doing. I’m going to see if I can read some more and watch some TV, but this is pretty low-maintenance and after yesterday, I’m feeling good about it.
I guess that’s it for now! I’ll be back on Thursday with another update, and of course, there will be some posts throughout the week. Let me know how all of your endeavours are going right now, too! I hope they’re going well! 😀