Hi guys! Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Sorry about that. I got caught up in visits and stuff – which means I haven’t studied as much as I even thought I might, but it’s been a fun couple of weeks anyway. It’s also almost time to wrap up this challenge; it finishes at midnight on Saturday, so I’m hoping to have reached my goals.
But let’s see how I’m doing right now, shall we?
Time logged to date: 4149 minutes (69 hours, 9 minutes)
Time spent learning Slovak: 1000 minutes (16 hours, 40 minutes)
Alright, so I have made very little progress on Slovak (only 36 minutes since the last post from November… oops!) but I’m surprised to see that I’m closer to my 18 hours goal than I thought I was. Looking at it, I think that goal is perfectly achievable – I have to get in eighty minutes’ worth of work over the next three days, which isn’t impossible. I started using Krížom krážom yesterday and honestly, while I don’t think the months I’ve (sporadically) spent learning the language have been a waste, they’ve also not been used well. I’ve not spent time learning anything properly, and it means that even when going through the greetings they didn’t flow the way they should. However, I’m glad I found that out now rather than later, because it’s fixable. I’m going into this textbook with a sort of hazy knowledge that I’m hoping to solidify. The Colloquial books are definitely not useless, but I also don’t think they’re for me, at least not right now.
So although my time spent learning Slovak hasn’t increased all that much, I’ve managed to do about eight hours of extra studying – most of which has been in German. While I am still reading Kind 44 (and I do plan on posting about it this Saturday), I wanted to pick something else to read alongside it – and I started reading the first Song of Ice and Fire book, Die Herren von Winterfell (A Game of Thrones). Oh mannnnn. I read all of the books in English a couple of summers ago but haven’t touched them since – and I forgot how much I enjoyed them the first time around. Plus, the chapters are short and since the POV character changes, they usually end on cliffhangers; and the language isn’t all that difficult, I don’t think. That or I’ve really improved without noticing. But yes. I’ve read just over 150 pages in the last few days, so I’m happy with that.
I haven’t done a whole lot for Mandarin, though I’ve chosen that language for polysprachig’s December Polyglot Challenge on tumblr; but yesterday was a Spanish day (and my day off) so I did some studying, some reading and watched some TV. My Duolingo account has also seen some action for the first time in a while.
It feels like it’s been so long since this challenge began… but it’s about to wrap up. I really, really hope I hit that time goal for Slovak and get some studying in for the other languages – but I’ve had a lot of fun in the challenge itself, and in documenting it here like this. I’m going to post a reflection post on Sunday with my final time scores and how I feel the challenge went as a whole, but until then – I’ve got to get on with studying!
If you’ve been taking part in the challenge, then good luck with these last few days! If you haven’t taken part in a 6WC before, then I highly recommend it. Six weeks is not a super long time to try and stay motivated and there are people doing it with you, which I find helps. But either way – good luck with whatever you’re doing, and I’ll see you around the blog! 🙂