I was giving some thought this morning to how I would like to proceed with my languages, and what resources to use. I think in the past, the problem with the print resources I have is that I would try to do everything from beginning to end. Even when I created weekly goals, if for example the resource was
Teach Yourself and the goal was to go through chapter 1, in my mind that meant read through chapter 1 + listen to all the audio + do all the exercises. Multiply that by 5 languages and it would get too much for me to keep up with.
But then it struck me that for the 5 Tier 1 languages, I could for the most part just read the print resource. I also could go through the audio at another time, such as after I've finished reading through the whole resource.
So with that said, my current plan is to use
Teach Yourself Complete Brazilian Portuguese for Portuguese and
Living Language French for French, and to just read through the book(s) without listening to the audio or trying the exercises. Well, I'll probably mentally work through the exercises but that's it.
Living Language has 3 books in their series:
Essential,
Intermediate and
Advanced. I'll start with
Essential.
I want to think some more about which resource to start with for Spanish and Swedish, although I have some ideas already. I also want to figure out what to do about Tamil. I do have several pasted (and some printed) notes on Tamil grammar from various sources, such as here or a Tamil Whatsapp group, from questions I've asked and the subsequent answers. I might start with going through those - though in this case, reading them and taking down notes in my notebook for reinforcement - and then do something like talk to my mom and set up a biweekly conversational Tamil class. I think I know enough about language learning as a process to create specific questions to ask my mom and basically direct the class so that I learn the basics.
I'm also thinking that I might end up doing French and Portuguese one week, and Spanish and Swedish the following week, again to keep things manageable.
Yay, now I have a plan! In the immortal words of Hannibal Smith, "I love it when a plan comes together". (Ok...so that quote might not fit exactly since I'm just coming up with the plan...but whatevs, it came to my mind, so I'm going with it!)