July has finally come to an end and I don’t know how your progress was last month, but I am reaching my goals.
If you are not planing out your days and weeks, success will be hard to achieve at the level that you envision. I make a plan for each week and I do my best to keep up with my daily and weekly plan. Somtimes I make some changes, but I keep up with the learning even when I have to step aways from the computer. Yes, I did lose my streak but I was traveling and keept up with my language learning using other methods.
Last month I logged over 30 hours with my tutor and my pronounciation has gotten much better. My goal is to log another 30 hours this month along with using Lingq, story learning, reading books, flash cards, tv shows, and audio (radio, podcast, audio books).
I hope you are planning for another month of learning as well. What goals do you have this month? How do you plan on reaching your goals? Please share so that others can experience success.
I will be honest anyone trying to learn any language will have to invest a lot of time and some money in order to move forward with a language. Free apps and programs will not get you to your destination as quickly as a paid program or tutor. Be willing to spend time and some money or be willing to spend extra time to find older resources that might not be the best fit. I personally spend less moeny on the programs that I purchase than I would on attending formal classes.
Like yourself, I reached my milestone last month. I had done 186 hours of active listening in German averaging 6 hours every day. This month I have a goal of reading a couple of books in German to pick up more vocabulary. I signed up for a hardcore German challenge for it which may last over the course of three months. Let’s see how it goes. To this date I have done 2100+ listening hours since March 2020 (when I was a zero beginner) and somehow I need to reach 3000h mark by the end of this year. After this I will incorporate shadowing and then perhaps schedule some speaking sessions.
In the interim I will keep absorbing the language through listening and reading.
Radio plays, audiobooks and watching dubbed television series in German. I have Amazon prime membership. I never run out of compelling content. Costs me 30 euros/year. Best investment I ever made.
Yup. We use Amazon.de. All the television shows are available in German language.
Can you use VPN type of hack and have access to it in the USA?
I was able to use Netflix in Pakistan through VPN when it was not “officially” available at the time.
When you watch a tv show in German do you watch it with subtitles on? Do you first import the transcript here to LingQ and read it here before you watch the episode?
U.S. version the pickings are slim to none. Netflix is much much better.
I haven’t tried asad’s suggestion of using vpn to have it think I’m in Germany for Amazon. However, I have used vpn to access the various public German tv station websites. wdr, ard, etc.
Nope. I never use subtitles. while watching Tv shows. With television shows common words and phrases repeat themselves. Therefore, I make sure that I watch all the seasons of the same television series before moving on to the next one. I always have deepl/linguee dictionary open in parallel so when I come across an important word I look it up but not every other word. Usually, 2-3 words in a 45 min episode. My trick is, if you come across an unknown word/phrase in the first episode, look it up. Chances are that they will be repeated again in the following episodes.
I only use novels at Lingq and some lessons from the library… I never studied/imported transcripts before hand. Yet wax is tapering off my ears. Intensity is very important. Watching 5 episodes in 5 days is not the same as watching 5 episodes in one go. You forget less and your chance of reinforcing the unknown word (when meaning is still fresh in your mind) gets increased.
French was pretty easy for me. Russian is much harder. I expected it to be hard but now I’m in the thick of it, it really does feel hard.
But I’m having some success. My expectations were higher than the reality perhaps because of how fast I seemed to make progress in French but I’m definitely making some progress. It’s following essentially the same stages where I can barely understand anything to recognizing individual words then to recognizing a word here and there then to recognizing at least 1 word in 20 and now a small phrase here and there plus a little more than 1 in 20.
My stretch goal for this month is to have 2,000 words learned in anki with 1,000 of them mature. A lesser but still acceptable goal will be 1,500 words with 500 mature.
As for lingQ, I’d like to get to 60 lesson complete and maybe 10 of the mini stories complete.
It would be really cool if I can understand partial chunks of sentences in russian telenovelas by the end of the month but that would likely be too optimistic. More than right now will be acceptable.
Unfortunately VPN + Amazon Prime doesn’t really work for me anymore. I was able to watch Deutschland 89 last fall on Amazon.de, but now it says I can’t use my Amazon Prime while traveling.
I should also develop a stretch goal for words but it seems at around 10,000 plus words in takes longer to find new words. But with time I know things will improve.
I have never though about counting my LingQ lesssons I will see how many I finish in a month. I do have a goal of 60 30 minute language lessons with my tutor.
You certainly could set some type of goal of LingQ lessons completed, but I’d recommend instead focusing it on words read. It’s a more “regular” metric that you can measure.
My goal every work per “main” TL is 60.000 words read. This goal has increased pretty regularly as I’ve noticed I can read faster and faster. I do add words read to LingQ for any books I’m reading outside LingQ, but really worry about other reading sources anymore.
This month I met my goal of reading a couple of books. I read three books in German in August. Game of Throne book 1 & 2. I think I can not bear any more torture. The story is slow-moving with a lot of characters thrown in between. And, Der Code by Fredrik T. Olsso.
tbinder, hopefully, you achieved your goal for this month.
Ouch. Those would be tough. I listened to them on audio book (In my native language). I think they clock in together at well over 50 hours of listening time.