So as stated, here are the resources I will be using for French, Portuguese, Swedish, and Tamil. (I've bolded the resource(s) and underlined the study plan.)
[flag=]pt-br[/flag]
Practice Makes Perfect: Basic Portuguese by Sue Tyson-Ward. I started the book in the past and completed 5.5 / 50 chapters. I also wrote all the vocabulary and grammar I learned in my
Language Learning notebooks.
I think what I'll do is review the 5.5 chapters and then continue, finishing chapter 5 and then doing one chapter a week. My aim is to have the vocabulary and grammar from the first 5 chapters already put into Anki by the time I finish my review.
[flag=]sv[/flag]
Teach Yourself Complete Swedish by Vera Croghan and Ivo Holmqvist. (Is it just me or do they not sound like Swedish names at all?!) Since this is a TY Complete book, it goes from beginner to B2 level. There are 18 chapters which would mean each chapter contains a lot.
I think I will do one chapter every 2 weeks. My problem in the past with TY has been that there's not a lot of exercises and review. The Practice Makes Perfect series is pretty much all exercises, which is great! Perhaps I'll create exercises for myself as I go through TY Complete Swedish. Or I might look into buying Practice Makes Perfect for Swedish down the road after I finish TY.
[flag=]ta-lk[/flag]
Learn Tamil Language which is a Facebook group. I have many resources for learning Tamil but the difficulty I have is that self-study for Tamil doesn't quite work for me. Tamil is a diglossic language, and the resources either teach written Tamil or spoken Tamil, but usually the spoken Tamil variety they teach is the one found in Tamil Nadu, in India. (Well, there's more than one dialect in India, but I think they usually teach Chennai spoken Tamil). I do have one resource that teaches both written and spoken Tamil, and breaks down the differences between Sri Lankan spoken Tamil and Tamil Nadu spoken Tamil. Anyway, this FB group has posts with various lessons (see
here) as well as the advantage of being a group of Tamil speakers and learners. So I can always ask questions and even upload recordings and such.
My plan is to go through one lesson every week.[flag=]fr[/flag] French will be interesting because I don't have any resources specific to my level. Or, rather, I don't have a study book for intermediate; all my French study books are beginner ones. I do want to improve my listening skills specifically.
I think what I'll do is try to listen to 30 minutes of French audio every week, and write out the words I can understand. The ones I don't know the meaning of, I'll look up. I'm not going to include music, but
only spoken audio: news, TV shows, movies, comedy skits, etc. The difficulty will be that not all the things I listen to will have a transcript. But hopefully 30 minutes a week will help improve my listening skills. And maybe down the road I'll up the time amount.
I will also try to improve my reading skills. But I'm not yet sure how I'll do that;
I have a few French novels and comics. I'll probably start with those and then find more stuff. Either way, I'll figure it out.