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?
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.
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’m learning Arabic, Danish and Portuguese. I study everyday but not very intensily. My progress is very slow, I should try harder.
That’s ambitious! Are you at different stages in them?
Yeah I am. I’m almost fluent in Danish. Somewhat good in Portuguese and Arabic is the hardest, but that’s because it’s not Indo-European
That makes sense. It’s a curious mix. Any reason for choosing those three? I mean, you’re well set for learning loads of other languages as you’ve gone Germanic and Romance as well as Arabic. Was that part of the plan?
I’d say I’m almost fluent in Spanish now. I think I could pick up another language without getting confused if I could find the time for it. Lately it’s been hard enough to find the time just to maintain it. Don’t know if it would’ve been very productive to try to pick up a third or fourth language before now.
Danish because of family, Portuguese because I used to go to Portugal a lot and Arabic because of general interest
Slowly continuing my Spanish studies, mostly Duolingo for the past few months. I think I have about 200-250 days in total but the streak broke when the damn owl website decided to stop letting me log in to my first account
My current streak is 240
I’m Spanish learning I’ve been doing one lesson a day in duolingo for a while, and I’ve finally started doing Language Transfer everyday. I intend to attempt reading the Spanish version of ‘the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe.’
And how is your study going, afellowkid?
Well, honestly my language studies are not very active at the moment as I have been focusing on other things. However I hope to start up a language study routine again soon, sometime this month.
For Spanish specifically, I need to engage more with things in Spanish. I can read/listen to things fairly comfortably in Spanish so I just need to actually do so way more often than I currently do. I think I’ll try establishing a routine of doing that too rather than just doing it occasionally by chance as I have been.
I have times like this. It’s been hard for the past month or so tbh. In the past, I’ve just watched ½ an hour or more of the TV in Spanish (usually dubbed shows as the Spanish voice acting is easier to understand and you’ll be well understood if you pick up their accent(s)). Lately, though, I go for low effort audio books. Non-fiction can work better for this because the vocab isn’t as flowery. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself.
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