Did you have any big or small wins?
Chugging along in my A2 Norwegian course on Babbel (supplemented with Memrise and the occasional peek at a textbook). I have some passive input a few times a week (podcasts as well as NRK shows (working my way through the kids’ show Bablo for comprehensible input and the occasional documentary that I mostly don’t understand)). I really need to start talking with someone soon (AI doesn’t count for me).
I just did 40m of French 👏I hope I can make it into a habit.
It’s interesting how Québécois French uses blonde for girlfriend and chum for boyfriend.
I’m finally able to listen and comprehend some of the Kinderlieder I’ve been working on for a month. I’ve been branching out to other learning material. There really isn’t much in the A1 level. A lot of stuff on Spotify is A2+.
I started trying some practical listening exercises however, and I’m just not quick enough with listening. No where close to the necessary speed. Reading / writing can be taken much slower, meaning I can do far more complex reading/writing than I could ever hope to accomplish with listening/speaking.
I’ll continue my +10 words/day (aka: +20 cards/day) with Anki but its become clear that listening and speaking are the weakest points of myself. I’ve decided that I need to log into “Learning German Discord” more often, both as listening practice and speaking practice. My writing is still awful though, I’m barely able to compose a sentence (let alone speak complete sentences). But both speaking and writing are separate skills (even if somewhat related). So it makes sense to practice both.
Today I was only able to respond with 2 or 3 word phrases to anything in an actual discussion. But its also literally the first time I’ve ever tried speaking in German, so it makes sense as a starting point.
That sounds like a lot of progress, nicely done.
I know the struggle and unfortunately there is no way around it except listening and trying to fill the gaps with context until you are able to take it all in at some point. I tried listening “coffee break german” on youtube for awhile and think it helped, but it was a bit boring.
Coffee break German seems too slow for me.
While I’m barely picking anything up, Gothe-Geschichten (on Spotify) seems far more applicable and useful. They still talk very slowly but it’s 100% German. I assume it’s around A2+, but it seems like even as a beginner A1 I’m making progress with it.
Easy German on YouTube is strange. It’s clearly full of B2+ speaking but it’s all very slow. There’s some segments for A1/A2 beginners. It feels like most of Easy German is more for the B1++ levels, where they need slow but complex talking (trying to reach Native…)
In all cases, slow German isn’t real German. It’s a useful stepping stone as I reach the next skill level, but it’s clear I need to find full speed practice somewhere somehow. Or in other words: slow German helps me learn new concepts. But I need something that reinforces my already known concepts and brings them up to native speed IMO.
The best I got for that is the nearly daily A2 level news briefs from DW. https://learngerman.dw.com/de/kurz-und-leicht/s-69137519
It’s about the same speed as any news broadcast, so it’s still slower than German Comedy or real life German talking. But it’s the closest thing to a real but still beginner-friendly German learning material IMO.
I’m really sick of Duolingo making some of the quiz questions blanks the name of a person. That’s not the language I’m trying to learn.
Can relate. Used to enjoy duolingo, now i am annoyed everytime I use it.
Sadly it’s the only way I can learn Swahili
Ah damn, sounds like there aren’t many resources for Swahili :(
I hope you get something out of duolingo for it and wish you a productive week with Swahili!
Thank you!
Haven’t done Irish in a bit. Keeping up with Japanese though. Spanish is a bit hectic, but surviving a lot better than my Irish. Maths is completely fallen over and my reading habits are just standing there laughing at it.
Despite the lack of language effort, I’m reading a chapter a day, and despite reading a chapter a day it still feels like I haven’t even eaten part way into Lord of the Rings.
Japanese has seen better times, I was a bit skimpy on the vocab up until recently. Ended up knocking a 200 word a day pile down to 70. Spanish and Japanese see some sight of Busuu, bit of Duolingo, and a bit of Migaku. This all being said, there’s still not enough done. I genuinely feel like at this moment in time, I could do with hard copy physical books, not just apps, ironically though what would help my Irish a lot are apps that don’t suck like Duolingo or RosettaStone.
Time is however short, and I have no idea how I’d divide my attention per language, then again per activity for hard study. Life would be a lot easier with a teacher or some guided activity cheat sheet or something.
Despite my love for languages, and I’ve been doing this for like 2+ years, I still have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.
Yeah, it is really hard to know how to best divide your study.
I think paper books are really nice to have. Textbooks are literally from someone sitting down and saying, “What’s the best way to teach these things to someone”, so those are good for structure.
Textbooks aren’t a whole picture though, and I think that’s why some people are hard on them. They mostly wind up focused on analytical approaches, which to an extent should follow exposure and intuition.
To get that exposure, I think it’s important to listen. Listening and speaking are just harder than reading and writing. So IMO a good plan should have at least a few minutes (maybe 5) where you deliberately, attentively listen to native speakers with no subtitles.
Paper books are great for extensive reading too, but I wish I had libraries around me with more non-English books. Can get a limited selection of Spanish, but Japanese is unlikely. I don’t necessarily want to keep stacks of random easy books around the house just because they’re in another language.
In general I’d also say it depends a lot on what you enjoy and what you’re willing to do. In your case tho, you seem pretty disciplined and I’d pretty much trust you to make some kind of plan and follow it.
Mix of ups and downs this week.
I’ve gotten into to worse time-wasting habits on my phone, tending to mindlessly play chess or scroll Lemmy, etc etc during small downtimes. Need to snap out of that and stop letting Anki cards pile up.
Also started to drift a little into looking for resources too much. Love a good educational resource, but sometimes I find myself seeking those out insteading of using the ones I have. A handful is plenty.
On the upside, I finished my first novella in Spanish. (Not counting that short story collection I read a couple years ago.) Reading a paper book written by a native speaker, aimed at native adults, feels like a pretty good benchmark of progress. Did I understand it all? Not even close. Did I read fast? Nope. But I read through, followed along, finished, and enjoyed it.
Oh yeah I have the same problem with time wasting on the phone. Think for me it’s the stress. Soon I have holiday break!
Piling up those resources is kind of a procrastination type as I understand. Productive though. Do share on this community!
And nice, congratulations! That must be super rewarding! Don’t need to understand or be fast, it’s for learning afterall :)
Yeah, I think there’s some stress about getting holiday stuff done, some about wrapping up work projects, some because I’d just gotten into a bad sleep schedule or got lazy in the cold… but as always, it’s time to move past the reasons and excuses to make more progress. 😄
I need to share back more, will try to keep an eye out for things that might make good posts. I do miss that about the old place, used to see more resources and advice just randomly go across. It can be a distraction, but also great motivation.
Yup, exactly the same! This time of the year is always like that… But we’ll get over it!
And that is very true unfortunately :/ I think many of us were lurkers and it’s a hard habit to break. But we are slowly getting more monthly active users on threadiverse too, maybe at some point we have a nice frequency of posts in languagelearning too!
I don’t get what’s going on with all these threads. You seem to be spamming your own community. All these threads with this same title do not link anywhere or have any content. It’s drowning out meaningful threads.
Nah, it’s just a weekly general discussion thread. It keeps the community active and shows it’s alive, even when links aren’t getting posted.
Ideally there’d be more other posts in between with different things, but as you know the userbase on Lemmy is on the smaller side.
Yup! Lemmy is full of communities that died out because they were not active enough. Then no one posts new content there because last post was from 6 months ago and it’s perceived dead.
emb already gave a good answer, but I want to add that you can always block a community if you don’t like to create your own curated subscribed-feed and are annoyed at these threads popping up on all-feed.
If you think this community breaks any instance rules on your instance, feel free to report it. Otherwise I highly recommend the above suggestion.
There’s some kind of tech defect going on here. When I posted my comment, this thread and all others w/the same title had zero comments. Now I see many comments in here, some of which are older than my own. So in my view of this community, it appeared like a ghost town with a bot making a bunch of empty threads. Apparently posting in this thread triggered the node I am on to fetch the comments.
Ah! You might be the first one on your server that has subscribed to this community, that might be it. Your server only starts federating with remote communities (like this one on sopuli) once someone from your server subscribes.
It’s a bit janky at times and takes time to properly federate content on the initial subscription.
Glad the comments arrived. Welcome :)
