What is your new year's resolution?

I study Portuguese as a third tongue, so I want to become fluent in that amazing and beautiful language.

To get a grip and focus on one language at a time! Either Arabic or Hebrew or Polish - going at all three simultaneously is going to make me nuttier than a snickers bar! :slight_smile:

I want to stop procrastinating in terms of language learning.

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20,000 known words in Spanish by the end of 2018. I want to read a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Carlos Fuentes by the end of the 2018. Really accomplish 60 minutes of focused listening/video per day, beyond the background listening I do in the car. Start doing conversation practices with native speakers. Learn how to negotiate with taxi drivers in Ecuador so I don’t get charged the gringo tax.

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To learn the German case system, it is something that I have been putting off for far to long.

No special challenges and certain numbers of known words or new languages.
Just to be happy in life and in teaching and learning languages.
To be happy in our short lifetime is the best and the highest goal of humans.

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I don’t have one because having to make resolutions and set start and cut off dates for stuff means you’re bound to fail. Sitting there on, say, the 12th of December thinking ‘right, i’m going to quit smoking on the 1st Jan’ means you’re not really committed to quitting smoking or you would have done it on the 12th. The same goes for language learning. If you procrastinate now, it being a different year on paper isn’t going to change your habits.

I get the urge to do stuff and i do it. I don’t set arbitrary goals and dates.

Take the JLPT N3 test this summer and hopefully pass it.
To get my monthly unknown word statistic for new japanese children stories to under 5% and NHK news articles to under 15%.

I’m doing quarterly goals rather than goals for the whole year. That way you can have a shorter-term focus on achievable goals. Here are my language goals (all Portuguese) for the first quarter of 2018:

  • Finish 90-Day Challenge in Portuguese
  • Complete 90-day Streak in Portuguese
  • Read a chapter a day of A Saga das Pedras MĂĄgicas in Portuguese
  • Reach 25,000 Known Words in Portuguese
  • Finish a Portuguese self-study grammar book that I have

Bonne Année.
I got my first Kindle 2 days ago - so I hope to read. I’ll probably get back to my school languages french, dutch, english and german.

I’m aiming for 25k words in Spanish and 15k words in French by the end of the year

Procrastination is the big enemy of language learning. This is an interesting opinion on how to stop saying what you want to do and just do it.

Go with Arabic! I’m personally more interested in that than the other two and you could study along with Steve!

Lol. All great motivators.

I was a given a copy of “El coronel no tiene quien le escriba” by my high school Spanish teacher when I graduated. It was one of the first books he ever read in Spanish. I pretty much did nothing with Spanish for the 10 years after that, but I imported an electronic copy into LingQ and had good luck with it.

First, I’m going to get a new old iPad that hopefully LingQ will work on (otherwise I’ll scream so loud they will hear me in Vancouver).

Then, I will set out to finally “finish” Spanish this year by:

–Doing 250 hours of learning activities (bringing me to 1200-1400 hours total), which will involve:

–2 hours of speaking to bring myself up to 50 hours of speaking.
–Doing a (final?) 90 Day Challenge of 1.5 hours or more daily, mostly reading novels in LingQ to get myself over 2 million words read and 33,200 known words (Advanced Level 3)
–Get around to writing a lot (ideally 7,000) words to hit 16,400 all time words written (Advanced Level 3)
–Listen to or watch 40 more hours worth of videos to get to 600 hours of listening total.
–Read a fiction book unassisted
–Start Don Quijote in LingQ
–Plan a trip to a spanish speaking country in Latin America

Bingo. When you resolve to do something you do it right away. Arbitrary dates and aims are the domain of the failures. My mother always tried to give up smoking by setting a date in the future (which meant she didn’t have to do it right away and could instead keep smoking because she feared giving up), getting lozangers and sweets stocked up to ‘help’ her etc.

She wasn’t ready to give up and so deferred the date and introduced crutches to help her do something she didn’t really want to do. If she’d really wanted to give up she’d have just quit on the spot. I did.

Saying you’re finally going to do something and ‘this year is the year’ is just doomed and it’s why the majority of resolutions fail.

If i decide mid-December that i need to do more of something, i just start doing it. I don’t want until Jan 1st and then spend a fortnight kidding myself before giving up because i can’t be arsed/don’t have the drive/don’t want to really do it.