Well, I am late to the party on this one! Aaaaaaand I didn’t do a great job on my goals last month (unsurprising, with how lofty they were), but I’m here and ready to do something.

Anything.

But, since this is back to school month—at least, here in the UK it is—I thought it would be a good time to think about habit forming and trying to, in some ways, start over. I’m currently taking part in something called the 100 Day Goal (though my goal is not language related), which involves lots of tiny actions to make a big change and I think I can apply that here.

Currently, I’m trying to actively learn five languages (I’m basically maintaining/enjoying my German at this point), which is tricky. If I leave any one of them alone for too long, I feel like I’m sliding backwards in terms of my progress. But if I can just spend five minutes on each of them, that’s only twenty-five minutes per day. Even on my busy days, I’ve got that kind of time, albeit spread out a bit! 😉

So, that’s my main goal for this month: from today (9th September) until 28th September, I will do something towards each of my languages for five minutes per day.

(I’m not including the last two days of September because I’m travelling at the end of the month and have no intention of doing anything but enjoying my holiday.)

I also mentioned last month that I wanted to get back into blogging regularly… and that’s true. Still, as I’m not studying so much, I’m having trouble coming up with blog posts that aren’t just me complaining about how bad I am at being consistent, so I wanted something I could do that wouldn’t require too much effort and would still help my language study.

I’m going to start another German Readalong!

I did this for the first time a while ago, when I went through Die Bestimmung (Divergent) by Veronica Roth, made up vocabulary lists and wrote, in German, what I thought of the book. I tried to do it again with Kind 44 (Child 44) by Tom Rob Smith but never finished the story, so the posts kind of tapered out.

I’ve gone for a sure bet this time and it’s a book I’m hoping most German-learners will be able to follow along with me.

The books I’ve chosen for this German Readalong are the Harry Potter series! I’m going to go chapter-by-chapter, beginning tomorrow with the first chapter of Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen. Hopefully, I’ll post about three chapters a week (Monday-Wednesday-Friday), but I’m not going to force myself to stick to this schedule; I would like to post once per week as a minimum.

Let me know if you’re going to join in the Readalong—if you’re a beginner learner, see if you can get hold of both a German and your native language copy of the books, using them like parallel texts. I’m also hoping to have some fun additions over on my Instagram, so give that a follow if you’d like!

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