Language Learning

I just finished my one week intensive Italian course for these couple of months and I learned way more than I expected (as a native Spanish speaker, it makes sense). I do this every few months with a local program to me.

It's quite interesting to see how many false grammatical cognates we have. Mainly the uses of the "congiuntivo / subjuntivo" and the "condizionale" being sometimes exchanged between both languages.

But yeah, it's good to finally have some time for language learning.

Bit of a confidence drop this week as I struggled with the newest chapter in my textbook. Unusually difficult for recent pace. I'm still making progress though, which is the important thing.

Growing concern over my listening comprehension problem. My new cards in Anki are solidly i+1, but I'm not getting there on audio with them (and even occasionally on repeats). Audio for the passages in the textbook without reading along? Forget it. As I've continued to incorporate more listening materials in general, I don't know that it's simply a "listen more" problem, which was the mindset. I think I'm going to find an ADHD community or two and ask some questions about active listening struggles in adult education, particularly for language learning. See if I can find an adaptation or two. I'm still new to the diagnosis and have a lot to learn.

I was already planning on pausing after this chapter of the text is done and doing a dedicated grammar review on forms I've logged as giving me trouble the past couple months. Since I'm a little more than halfway through, it's a good time for a "midterm"-type review. Maybe it would be good to pair that with some listening drills with a new method.

I finished translating Dragonball books 2 and 3. They help with some slang and the length of statements makes it easy to take in nibbles. I bought an omnibus book with books 4, 5, and 6 to do the next set.

We picked up a couple more children's books from zu vershenken boxen am strasse and have been churning through those.

I managed a few more fully in German interactions in stores. It's getting better, but if people could please stop slurring/muttering I'd be quite appreciative.

Still working on faster numbers. I can understand them, but it takes way too long to translate in my head. I'm trying to just listen and understand, not translate as a means of keeping up the pace.

Oh, and we've been singing the alphabet song in German more to remind us of the buchstaben (letters) so when people ask us to spell something or spell something out it'll go faster.

I have until May 2027 to have my B1 zertifikat to get residency. Only 16 months left! Muss üben.

The first session of my workplace sponsored French class (A0/A1 lol) ended this week. Since I'm working at a university the next session won't start until February when the new semester begins... until then it's just self study

I've been making steady progress on the Anki decks. Finished the first 500 words of the frequentist wordlist (This one, not sponsored), so I've moved on to part 2 with the other 4500 words now. Also started working on the irregular verbs training and sentence training, wishing myself good luck. The vocab training's effects have been showing... I can somewhat understand a lot of local news articles even before putting them in Google Translate now (if anyone has any recommendations for good LLM translators/"practice buddies" I'm open to them too, willing to pay)

Having some motivation issues with the main grammar courses since work is tough and I still want to have time for hobbies... (edit: also the courses are getting insanely difficult wtf) hopefully the Christmas break gives me some time to work more aggressively on those

I'm hoping that I could reach A2 by next year's August... I think B1 is needed for a lot of workplace benefits/immigration/etc, so that is the mid/long term goal before I start to work on Dutch/Nederlands