It’s been a while since there was activity here. How’s everyone’s language study going? (Whether it’s Spanish or another language)
It’s been a while since there was activity here. How’s everyone’s language study going? (Whether it’s Spanish or another language)
I’m learning German (I’m a native Spanish speaker), and I know have a 65 day streak on Duolingo, which is pretty good, I haven’t had a streak this long since a couple of years and I’m looking at keeping it that way. Last year I did a year at German in my uni so I’m improving but it’s still pretty slow. I’m just doing 3-4 lessons a day so there’s not a lot of progress, mostly just practising and learning a few words or memorising some grammatical rule. In English, due to my work, I’ve improved a lot, so that’s nice.
Nice, I’m glad you are keeping up your study habit even if progress is slow. Are you hoping to have faster progress or are you satisfied with your pace in German?
Well, I guess my biggest issue is that I started around the beginning of 2019, did a lot of progress until something like the end of 2020 and the practised sporadically until the beginning of this year where I started again. So the thing is I’m fairly advanced, but I feel unaccomplished because of how long I’ve been learning and the fact that I should be more advanced, even. I also really want to start learning Chinese or Japanese so this also holds me back, I’d like to be at a level where I could at least take my learning to outside of Duolingo (for example reading simple books or comics) so that I could replace that time with the other language, but I’m not just there yet, even if I’m not that far, so that bothers me.
How about you, how long have you been learning Spanish?
Could you swap half your Duolingo time for graded readers and see how you go? You might make faster progress jumping in with more interesting material?
Yeah, I’ve thought about it but it’s not so engaging for me since you end up reading some stuff that’s not so interesting just for the exercise, I’d like to get to a level where I at least could read something like Kafka’s Metamorphosis which I’ve already read in Spanish and it’s not soooo difficult, even if I miss something. I’d like to be able to read like some real literature that’s not so deep, for example when I started reading English texts I started with Bukowski or some sci fi stuff.
You could try the listening-reading method. Then you can jump into any novels you like. It would work well if you already have some basic vocabulary and grammar. https://web.archive.org/web/20221004162508/http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/! L-R the most important passages.htm
I think it would be good if you tried branching out from Duolingo even if you don’t feel completely ready to leave it behind. I totally empathize with the other comment you made about being bored by graded readers though–I really prefer to read stuff that interests me in my TLs too but that often means it’s above my language level and therefore not the ideal learning material. It’s tough to find the right balance at that stage.