As this is my personal blog, or web-log as the name derives from, I sometimes like to take a blog post and just explain what I have been up to. Too many times I encounter bloggers who rarely share, just exactly they have been doing. They reserve their blog posts for really informative and educational tutorials or grand statements such as: The best ways to learn vocabulary. To me, these posts are naturally good to have and I do my fair share in trying to produce them.
However, an important purpose of my blog is to illustrate exactly my working process, so you can hopefully relate to it and then get some work done yourself. It’s no secret that I consider myself a very ‘bad’ student. I can’t put 5+ hours into studying in a day, no matter how interested I am in the language. I’m more of a let’s do an hour a day, split out during the course of the day. I know this won’t get me fluent in 3 months, or anything close, but it’s my pace and that’s the one I prefer. My point with this is, do it better than me! – I know you are capable of it.
Summer update – heatwave and BA project
So here is my update. Recently in Denmark the weather has been absolutely unbearable. Temperatures reaching 30 degrees Celsius, and probably way more inside of my flat. I’m literally bathed in sweat and sadly I cannot go outside, or I prefer not to actually. I’ve always been a bit of an indoor person. But with the work on Actual Fluency, my tutoring, my freelancing and also now my BA project I’m kinda trapped anyway.
As I progress with Russian I’m getting more and more comfortable in understanding. I’m reading the “Erste Russische Lesestücke” which is like a my first piece of reading in Russian and I’m exciting about understanding the stories in it. I also understand most of what my Russian-speaking polyglot friends write to me on Skype or Facebook. For now though Esperanto is in focus with the Add1Challenge but what I am continuing to do is vocabulary building in Russian and just keep reading in the language as well.
The BA project is a little weird for me as I’m not that interested in the subject matter, but it has to be done and I must complete it before September first. This of course puts pressure on my schedule as well.
Esperanto
For my Add1Challenge I have decided to take on Esperanto, something you can read more about here. My routine so far is to just run through a lot of words on Memrise as I watch “Pasporto Ala Tuta Mondo” which is a great educational set of movies in easy Esperanto. You can find them for free, legally, on YouTube.
It’s very satisfying to do vocabulary building in Esperanto and I suspect that I might get the same enjoyment out of doing vocabulary building in French and Spanish when I get to those languages next year. Having that familiarity of both alphabet and origin makes retaining vocabulary so much easier. I like learning Esperanto because of the “wins” that it provides, which is one of my a-ha moments of language learning: If you want to reach a high level, then you need to find a way to consistently getting “wins” that can be understanding some kind of native material, speaking to a native speaker or many other things.
The difficulty of learning multiple languages at once
A few months back I did a community-driven post on whether it was a good idea to learn multiple languages at the same time. Personally I had already stated that my opinion was that you should do one at a time until you reach a level of fluency where you no longer have vocabulary building as your main priority. Even then it’s probably still advisable to focus on one at a time.
Either way I joined the Add1Challenge with Esperanto and I was definitely not ready to just abandon Russian for 3 months, so I decided to learn them in tandem. So far it is proving challenging. I often don’t find the energy or motivation to do both in the same day. Ideally I would do half an hour of each every day – at least. This problem cements my opinion that learning one at a time is right for me. As the blog post revealed it might be different from person to person.
Of course it doesn’t help to have 117 other projects to do, but hey, busy is good right?
New developments with Actual Fluency
As I often do in these update posts I’d like to update you on what is going on behind the scenes. I recently added podcast number 20 – which was a huge milestone for me. In that I shared some of the problems that I had suffered in adulthood and it resonated a lot with people. It quickly become the most popular episode and the feedback I got was really incredible. One particular user agreed on the value of language learning in countering depression to such an extent that had he not found the language learning community he would have probably not have been here anymore. That is a really powerful endorsement for what I believe as well. By learning languages you open doors to the world you previously did not imagine. Now, just to be clear I would always be here languages or not.
For me it was just discovering a purpose. This is a topic I am currently writing a blog post about, but I’m struggling a bit to make it flow just right. As soon as I get it done I will publish it.
Email list
I’ve also added an email club to the site. It’s a way for you to stay connected with big Actual Fluency updates and announcements, but also a source for me to write exclusive tips and tricks as I learn them from the experts or through experience. I call the people who sign up to the club Actual Fluentists, but who knows if that name is going to stick to sign up for this list simply find the form below and you will be given my first practical tip, actually my biggest realisation since I started learning languages.
My aim is to regularly send out exclusive valuable tips and tricks and also update you when I have some particularly epic blog posts or podcast episodes going out.
Audible Partner
I’m also continuing the partnership with Audible. So if you want a free audio book from a selection of 150,00 and a free month trial access then head on over to audibletrial.com/fluency – by taking advantage of this offer you help support the site which I greatly appreciate. Don’t forget to cancel before your 30 days are up if you are not using the service Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I always seem to forget to cancel when I do these kind of things.
The post A very hot update! – Esperanto, Russian, Add1Challenge appeared first on Actual Fluency.