6WC November 2015: Progress Report #002 - 学习Sprachen

Hi guys! Well, it’s been three days, so here I am, back again with another update about my 6WC progress.

I bet you’re all gonna be sick of seeing me posting in about five weeks’ time. 😉 But, for now, let’s just get on with it, shall we?

Time logged to date: 397 minutes (6 hours, 37 minutes).
Time spent learning Slovak: 195 minutes (3 hours, 15 minutes).

So first things first: I’ve studied Slovak for at least fifteen minutes every day so far! Yayyy! 😀 I have also finally finished Colloquial Slovak lesson seven, which I’ve been on forever – though looking at the grammar for lesson eight is a bit scary. But yes, two awesome bits of news. I am also well on track to hit my goal of eighteen hours of study this month; so make that three bits of good news? I mean that one could change at any point, though.

I am however a little concerned about Slovak grammar and how much of it I’m absorbing. If I sit and spend time with a text and read then I feel like I’m doing okay, but I’m still having to look up a lot of words that I first came across lessons ago and I don’t remember all my verb conjugations properly (or cases or anything else to be honest). I mean, I definitely think there’s something to that usual classroom practice of reviewing material – I am not good at doing it on my own. I think my goal before the next update is to work out how I can review and make sure I’m getting the most out of what I’m learning.

Also, I’m surprised by the number of German-Slovak cognates I’m coming across. It never even occurred to me that there would be any, but it’s kind of fun to find words that are the same in both languages (Kino, Roman/román); I’m used to this with English but not really with German. 🙂

I’ve not been as good with my other languages these past few days. I’ve logged a fair bit of Spanish because I’ve been using the Flashsticks app a lot, so I’ve been revising vocab. I also finished unit nine of Teach Yourself Complete Spanish yesterday, which is great as it was one of my Clear the List goals to complete a few units of that book. Looking at it, Spanish is the only other language I’ve logged outside of Slovak – though I know my German has had some use because I’ve been back at work. Really, I’m slacking with Mandarin again, and that’s not okay. I need to try and make sure I’m spending time with my other languages too, so that’ll be my other goal for the next few days.

So I guess now it’s just time to see how it goes. I’m about to hit my slump – it’s usually around day eight that my interest in constant studying begins to dwindle, but I hope that moving onto new chapters in a couple of my books will mean that I will mostly avoid it. I’ve also found that knowing I have these updates to write makes me more likely to study; because if I don’t study, then I have to tell you guys about that. I mean, obviously nothing bad is going to happen if I do miss a day (my German and Mandarin are testament to that!) but this kind of public accountability works pretty well for me, in this case at least.

My goals for the next three days, then:

• find a way to review Slovak and try to get a better grasp on the fundamentals
• try and study my other languages, not just Slovak

I think that’ll do it! Let me know how the challenge is going for you – or your learning in general, if you’re not involved in this. I’m really excited to hear what everyone else is up to! 🙂