it is always a trade-off, interest level versus difficulty level.
what I meant by the hump, was the point at which I am not overwhelmed by interesting but difficult material. I do alternate back-and-forth between challenging but interesting material, and easier but less interesting material.
Hi Octavio, I am back at my Korean, and I must say that doing it in the new beta has given my Korean learning a new lease on life. I still haven’t found interesting intermediate content, so I am still having to fight my way through difficult content like Kim Youngha’s podcasts. I think I speak Korean better than before, and probably better than I give myself credit for. I am continuing with the challenge.
I agree that listening, lots of listening, is a very important element especially when we are dealing with difficult texts. It gives us momentum. It makes it easier to read through difficult texts, even if we continue to not understand that well what we are listening to.
Staying with the same author, or related subject matter, is an excellent strategy. I stayed with Tolstoy as my first Russian author and have always found his language the easiest to understand, even though many people tell me that I shouldn’t read or study 19th century literature.
For me, the whole “point” of easy content is to imitate the experience of living in a country. During the first three months or so that I was in Russia I barely studied. I worked through a couple beginner level textbooks, but maybe only spent 30 minutes a day with them. I was able to internalize about 2000 of the most basic words just through living here, hanging out with my girlfriend’s monolingual grandparents, etc. A couple weeks ago I came back to lingq and I see that with my recently acquired knowledge of the most basic slavic-root words, and my knowledge of French and English, I know a rather large percentage of everyday vocabulary. Now I’m able to enjoy interesting texts (Evgueny’s upper-intermediate stuff is great), and progress is easy! Took a B1 test, was easy, and only after 6 months? So much for Russian being hard.
If I lived in the States still, I suppose I’d have to have slogged through the largely boring beginner level stuff on lingq. To anyone who has done that, I take my cap off to you. It’s one hell of a hard way to get from zero knowledge to intermediate.