New to this forum! As my first post, I'm announcing my Total Annihilation Challenge plans for 2015.
[flag=]fr[/flag] So I had dabbled in the language on and off in late 2013/ early 2014 but probably never spent more than ~30 hours or so with the language. In the past few weeks, I have really buckled down AJATT-style. I've been exposing myself to the language as much as possible every day, via audiobooks (Le Hobbit, Jules Verne, Harry Potter), music, radio, movies (dubs of American movies mostly), comics (Tintin and Astérix Le Gaulois), etc. Aside from this, I've also been using the following materials for just old-fashioned "studying":
Pimsleur (Lesson 21)
FSI French Phonology (Lesson 10)
And as soon as I finish FSI French Phonology (tomorrow), I'm gonna start on Assimil French With Ease (the 1998 edition; I've heard it's better than more recent versions). At some point, I'll throw in FSI French Basic as well.
Knowing Spanish to a high level (~C1) has helped tremendously, of course. It makes reading possible even from day one, at least of comics (the pictures aid with the learning of new words). Listening is a different animal altogether, but I'm starting to pick up not just isolated words but sometimes entire sentences and even paragraphs/conversations.
The most exciting part of learning French will be that this is the first non-native language that will be almost entirely or entirely self-taught. I started learning Spanish in school, although I supplemented the poor quality instruction with lots of native media and Anki when I realized just how slow classroom learning was. I started learning Chinese by myself but then took classes on it in high school and college as well (before I realized I don't learn well that way). On the other hand, I never have and never plan on taking a French class.
My goals are to reach at least B2, aka basic fluency, by July or August. Rather ambitious, but I think it's doable.
[flag=]zh[/flag] I've been working with Mandarin on and off for some time, but life got in the way and I put it to the side. I still occasionally skim Chinese texts, listen to Chinese music, etc., so my skills have not completely eroded away. Anyways, I'm gonna get back to it sometime in late winter/ early spring, once my French is decently established.
I'd rate my current abilities at around an A2. I'd like to bring that to at least a B1 by the end of the year.
And on the back burner (languages that I have a solid command of, but that I will still be in contact with, just not as extensively as my main languages):
[flag=]es[/flag] I would rate myself around a C1, maybe even a C2 for listening and reading comprehension. At this point, being with Spanish never seems like work. It doesn't feel any different from just enjoying something in my native English. I have a couple of TV shows I really like that I watch on a regular basis, I like to keep up with Spanish and Latin American cinema, and I have a fairly large collection of Spanish music collected over the years. I'm also a huge fan of Jose Luis Borges, so I've been reading through some of his poetry and prose. I also anki new words I find, usually literary terms or occasionally slang.
[flag=]kn[/flag] I'm a native speaker of Kannada, since I speak it with my parents, but I'm also illiterate , like heritage speakers often are. This also means I suffer from many problems associated with illiteracy: a scant vocabulary and an inability to understand the higher registers of the language (which are often heavily Sanskritized). Fortunately, Kannada has a fairly intuitive abugida writing system, so one of these days, I plan on learning it, and hopefully I can work through a couple of books by year's end.
So... there! Let's see how I do.