I am getting back in the swing of things somewhat with German over the past couple of weeks. I have been really good about doing my Michel Thomas, however I have not touched Assimil in over a month. I think that I have subconsciously decided that I will move on to Assimil after I have finished the MT. In truth this is probably a good thing because it will give me something to do the second half of the year in addition to LingQ. I am currently debating whether to go back to the beginning of Assimil, or just pick up where I left off. In my split second decision making process I just went through I will pick up where I left off. The last two weeks have been particularly good for my LingQ work.
It never ceases to amaze me the way that we continue to adapt and evolve the longer we work on a specific task. In the case of LingQ I have just recently modified my approach and find that I am getting a lot more out of the program this way. Before, I went through a three step cycle which was laid out this way:
1.) Listen without reading
2.) Read without listening
3.) Listen and read simultaneously
This way served me well and I thought that this way I could train my listening separate from my reading and visa-versa. I recently though began listening and reading all three times through a passage and have found that my comprehension overall has grown markedly. This should not surprise me since the creator of LingQ, Steve Kaufmann, says that you should never read without listening, nor should you listen without reading in the early stages. The more surprising thing to me is that my brain spontaneously decided to try this approach seemingly out of the blue. I am currently creeping in on 1500 words known, which is well behind my goal, but I am still happy with progress of any kind.
Vocally, I have had a similar epiphany in the last week. It has been about a month since my last lesson with JRL and I decided one day last week to listen to the recording of my lesson. At first I did not really think I was going to gain much other than some reinforcement of the things I was already doing. After going through the recording I was amazed at some of the things that I had let slip in the last month. My practice the rest of the week was great and I felt like I made some very big steps forward, all because I listened to a recording of my lesson.
This was a big time for me in learning how to better learn. Sometimes progress may come in different areas than you expect, however it will ultimately lead you to your end goal.
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.
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.
I am nearing the end of my intensive time with French and can say that I am very happy with where I am. I am understanding the vast majority of what I read now and will try and do a reading test from a newspaper before the year is over. My listening is still a bit behind everything else, especially when listening to the radio, however I have begun to work intensively on my reading and listening abilities so hopefully they will both come up in level before the end of the year.
To increase my levels in those two areas I have begun to use LingQ almost exclusively. I even upgraded from the free version so that I could use the program more effectively. I have to admit that I find it to be very helpful. I love the concept of extensive/intensive listening and reading, but it is very difficult to read when having to flip back and forth from a book to a dictionary. LingQ eliminates this by having a pop-up dictionary always present. I have talked about LingQ before so I do not want to spend much time here on it except to tell you all to try it out. As much as I liked the idea of using it for free, I do not feel that one gets the full benefit of the program until you upgrade to a pay version (and come on, it is only ten dollars a month!).
I am currently on the train on the way home from NYC, where I had a lesson with JRL. Today's lesson was a very frustrating one for both of us I am sure. Lessons like the one I had today are huge tests of courage and perseverance. I have gone through a range of emotions in the six and a half hours since my lesson and have landed on a huge desire to get into a practice room and work. It may be perseverance, or it may be ego, however I cannot have another lesson go by like this one did. So I will spend the next month fixing my issues and come back better than I was today.
The largest frustration to me is that I spent the last two months working very hard and came in today feeling pretty good about myself. Unfortunately during those two months I seemed to have regressed on a certain bad habit that I honestly was not paying as much attention to in the time between lessons as I was other technical things. It would appear that I overdid to the point of misunderstanding a certain idea I was given last time and now I must go back and fix those issues which were not plaguing me at my lesson but came back with a vengeance today. If this teaches one anything, it should be that we must always be vigilant! Complacency can only lead to disaster.
This has been a decent week for my Arabic studies. I began a new approach this week which was developed by Moses McCormick. I modified this a little bit, which is probably slightly to my detriment, but I skipped over the first couple of phases of the method and went straight to the textbook work. Moses has put out a number of videos on youtube highlighting his skills as well as his method. I have noticed a lot of progress this week, which I am not sure whether to attribute this to the FLR method of Moses or, more likely to the amount of time put in, which I will discuss in my methodology minute this week.
I have been continuing to have wonderful progress vocally. I had a realization this week that I had not been practicing as effectively as I could be. So, I have modified my approach to practicing so that I can be more intensive in my work, which should compound my achievements.
Methodology Minute - The Power of Patience and Perseverance
I had a few interesting things happen this week which solidify for me the concepts of patience and perseverance. First, while I was working through my Anki deck this week, I had a day where all of a sudden I simply knew all of my cards. Additionally, I was watching some Arabic TV the other day and suddenly I was able to pick out words here and there that I knew, I had come out of the fog. Thirdly, I have noticed that I have started to think and play around with the Arabic that I have learned thus far, enabling me to actually greet people and have some very basic conversation. My theory is that all of this corresponds directly with the amount of time I have put in up to this point. In the next couple of days, I will cross the forty hour mark in my studies. I believe that this is an important number in which things start to solidify in the brain and become more concrete. I have had similar things happen vocally, where I try to approach a specific pitch, or a specific phrase multiple times and then suddenly the phrase or pitch falls into place. I believe that there are specific numbers of hours, or minutes, which mark points of achievement in almost all aspects of skill acquisition.
There are many linguists who maintain that the key to learning is to put time in every day, no matter how much. I would venture to apply this to all areas of skill acquisition. Learning compounds over time and in areas such as language acquisition the time spent is more important than the method used. In areas where technique is important, it is only with time that the technique becomes ingrained. It should be the goal of anyone who is learning a skill to spend at a minimum fifteen minutes a day working on their skill. As I said above, I believe that there are specific times associated with milestones; so the more time put in daily, the quicker these milestones will occur.
The second half of this minute I need to spend on perseverance. For the last few weeks I had been struggling and frustrated with my lack of progress in Arabic. Similarly during my six months without a voice lesson, I was continually frustrated by what seemed like a lack of progress. However, by pushing through these times, I am now making large strides in both fields and have a renewed vigor in my studies. All things in life work in cycles. There is a business cycle, a geological cycle, and a motivation cycle. Many people get hung up when they reach the valleys of their motivational cycles and never progress past their initial motivational peak. However, if one can push through the valleys of frustration there are greater rewards in your next peak than what you found initially.
Steven Kaufmann of lingq has been making a series of videos on the 7 steps of a successful language learner on youtube and I felt that it would be of value to post a couple of them here which pertain to this methodology minute for perusal:
This first video of the series focuses on the topic of spending the time to learn. Continual work will lead to mastery.
The fifth video in the series advises the learner to be patient; contrary to our instant gratification culture, anything of quality takes time and effort.
