3 MONTH CHALLENGE!

Those of you who read other language blogs probably know about Benny and his "Three Month Challenges."  This is my first attempt at a three month challenge and it will be an intensive focus on Spanish.  Spanish is my language for this year anyway, but I have a good motivation for the next three months (OK, really 11 weeks, but it's close enough).  For the July 4th holiday, I will be spending time with my wife's best friend and family.  Her husband is from El Salvador, and they live in a city where Spanish is nearly the primary language.  I figure I will use this opportunity and present myself with a challenge to prepare me for the trip.  My plan is to upgrade my Spanish from where it is now, about B1, to C1 level in the next 11 weeks.  How will I do this?

It is going to require me to up my learning pace and take myself out of my comfort zone.  I am going to need to use Spanish as much as possible in the next three months and make my environment a Spanish language zone.  I have already begun to do this by switching my iPhone and computer over to Spanish.  The second step for me is to change my audio input from English to Spanish.  I can easily do this through my TuneIn radio app while I am at work, but I face some challenges in the car because there is no full-time Spanish radio station in my city.  I also have Spotify, so if you have any good Spanish language music to recommend, please do!  I am also going to raise my work output on LingQ to at least four pomodoros a day, which equates to about two hours of reading and listening daily.  Realistically, I only study five days a week, but by increasing the aforementioned areas of my life, I should be able to expose my self to Spanish approximately nine hours a day.  This is a good start, but I'm not done.  I also need to add more speaking to my weekly routine, so I will attempt to speak with people who I know speak Spanish more regularly and force myself to stay in Spanish even when I am struggling.  If I do all of these things, I believe I can reach my goal.

Musically, I have a busy month.  I am currently in rehearsal for two different shows that I am in.  After that I am hoping to attend a summer program which should put me on the right path to finding more work next audition season.  I have had some exciting things happening in my voice and I feel myself growing in confidence every time I perform.

Der Plan

As we have started a new year, I have already put in two days of study on my new language for the year, German.  I figure I would outline my basic plan for the year with regards to my acquisition of German.

Resources:
     German with Michel Thomas
     German with Ease by Assimil
     German on LingQ

In general, my goal is to spend ten hours a week studying German over the course of the next year.  As I do not study on my days off from work, that equates to 2 hours a day, 5 days a week.  I will go through one lesson/track per working day with MT and Assimil.  On LingQ, I plan to add approximately 100 known words to my vocabulary every working day.  This is a little bit slower of a pace than I would like on LingQ, but I think it is the best plan for the amount of time I have available to devote to this study.  As I go along I will have to read more and more material to acquire 100 new known words, so ultimately my exposure will grow exponentially as I become more accustomed to the language.

On the side, I plan to watch a German movie every month and listen to some German radio programming every week.  Also, I am going to start praying the Rosary in German and hopefully I will get to the point where I can spontaneously pray in German by the end of the year.  I also have a number of friends and acquaintances who speak German, so I will be practicing my spoken German from a very early stage, as soon as I start to know some more relevant material than:  Der Tee ist kalt.

Based on my previous work in French, I anticipate that I will get to a pretty comfortable place with German by the summer, at which point I will have finished both MT and Assimil.  The rest of my year in German will be spent focusing on listening comprehension and vocabulary building through LingQ.

German does present me with some challenges, the most striking one being that I have practically no previous coursework or study of the language outside of the one month I studied it last year.  With both French and Italian I had taken actual classes prior to my self-study, so I had a little bit of a head-start.  I am excited to see how I do with my first completely self-taught language and hope to be able to use this working plan as model for my future languages.

End of September/Beginning of October

It has been a bit since I last wrote here.  Some good things have happened on both the language and singing fronts, as well as some discouraging things.  In my language work I have begun reading Les Fables de la Fontaine which are mostly on my level.  I find that the hard thing with reading is that though I know the words I'm reading, I often miss the actual context of the story.  I figure that this is similar to listening comprehension and the practice will ultimately make things clearer as well as fill in the holes in my vocabulary.  I have unfortunately been rather lax in my other forms of study.  I have recently picked back up on Michel Thomas, but as of yet have not gotten back into my Assimil work in about two weeks.  I have every intention of working on it again tonight though!

In other news, I feel that I am to the point now where I can actually begin to call myself a tenor.  For the last month and a half or so I have been working on the Duke's arias from Rigoletto by Verdi.  These arias have stretched me and almost forced my voice to work in a different way than it has in the past.  In the last couple of days my Bb4 has really come into its own and the B4 is not far behind.  I am looking forward to the few weeks, during which time I am hoping to have a few lessons, some coachings and even participate in a recital (my first as a tenor)!

The only discouraging part of my singing life currently has been this week.  My voice has been feeling different this week and certain things that were relatively secure before are not this week, while other things that were not present before are now starting to present themselves.  I assume that this is just some of the growing pains in the process and am not terribly worried by them though.  I'm hoping to get back into being slightly more regular with my updates here, but with the holidays quickly approaching we'll see what the reality of that is.

Mid-September Update

Je pense que je vais ecrire un post en français.  Cette semaine etais un peu agaçant pour moi parce que moi et ma fiancée sommes malades.  Parce que-là, je n'avait pas pratiqué.  Je n'aime pas perdre les temps et je ne peux pas attendre commencer encore.

En autre information, je commence ecouter de la radio française.  Le meilleur problem pour moi est l'audition; je peux lire et parle, mais je ne peux pas bien ecouter.  Etrange, non?  Maintenant, j'ecoute à France info de Paris.  J'espere que je peux amèliorer mon compréhension à l'audition devant l'année finit.


*I welcome any corrections, as always.  An English translation is below for those who would prefer not to read French.


I think that I will write a post in French.  This week has been a little annoying for me because me and my fiancée are sick.  Because of this, I have not practiced.  I do not like losing the time and I cannot wait to start again.

In other news, I am beginning to listen to French radio.  The biggest problem for me is listening; I can read and write, but I cannot listen well.  Strange, no?  Currently, I am listening to France info from Paris.  I hope that I can improve my listening comprehension before the end of the year.

French Update

Since I have some free time at the moment, I figure I will free write a post on my progress as of late. 

Currently I am sitting in the library listening to France Bleu Isere out of Lyon and they are currently playing a French version of the Frank Sinatra hit "My Way."  It actually sounds very nice in French, although lacks a certain swagger that Frank had when singing this.  In listening to the radio I have noticed that I am understanding quite a bit of the words, although they are not necessarily completely making sense in my brain (natural listening) and the pace is still a little fast for me.  I have to research some exercise to improve my listening to a more natural level.  A large part of this I think needs to be approached by simple immersion (i.e. listening to French radio, watching French TV and movies, etc.).  I find that the most annoying and challenging thing about immersion for me is that the only way I can access French radio when driving, which admittedly is how I spend most of my waking hours, is through my Palm Pre which has horrible battery life, especially when using streaming apps.  I suppose that my solution to this will have to be podcasts.  In keeping with the immersion concept, I have changed much of my computer, internet and GPS to French in recent weeks.  Truthfully, I don't even notice that most of them are in French, which I take as being a good thing. 

I have been working my way through Assimil and Michel Thomas during my studies and have been keeping  a pretty steady pace throughout the last month and a half or so.  I only recently started the MT and only do one track a day, so I am only at about lesson eleven or twelve and ultimately the amount of material covered is relatively small.  For the most part, however, I am using MT as a reinforcement so I am okay with the slow pace I am taking on it.  At my current rate it will take me about three months to get through the course and then I will move on to the vocabulary booster and then the advanced course.  In Assimil I am currently on about lesson 33, so nearly one-third of the way through the Passive Wave.  I find that I am learning quite a bit from the Passive Wave without necessarily doing a whole lot.  The book recommends spending between twenty and thirty minutes per lesson in the Passive Wave, but I find that I am under this number daily (maybe 15 minutes or so per lesson).  The program has been helping my listening and in general I have noticed that I am gaining between 2 and 5 new words per lesson at this point.  This may not seem like a whole lot, but percentage wise 5 words over the course of about a one and a half minute segment is rather significant.  There are also other words in the course of the lessons that I do not know and do not necessarily pick up through just the Passive Wave, but I am sure that I will pick these up during the course of the Active Wave.  More importantly than the vocabulary, arguably, is that I pick up new grammatical rules, structures and some colloquialisms as I am going through these lessons and am finding myself retaining some of the work on tenses that they present during the course of my listening and reading. 

I do not necessarily have a great measure of how well I can speak the language at this point, although I seem to have an easier time staying in French when talking with my friend and I generally have a certain level of comfort in my conversation that I did not necessarily have a couple of months ago.  I think I mentioned earlier that I have changed my learning plan for my languages.  I have progressed to a more realistic plan of spending all of my time with one language until I have learned it to a level that I consider fluent, which I will describe eventually to the public, and then move on.  I believe that I can reach this level in most languages I am working on in a year and thus I still will be well within my goal of ten languages by the time I am forty.  My progression through languages has also changed based on my needs for my intended profession.  The order is thus:

1. French
2. German
3. Italian
4. Spanish
5. Russian
6. Czech
7. Swedish
8. Portuguese
9. Arabic

The tenth language here is English, obviously and the reason that Italian is third on the list is because I need to take my French and German farther than I do my Italian which is already at a decent level, although not completely fluent.