Postby Saim » 2020-07-22, 10:02
Serbian, Hungarian
I'm fairly happy with my Serbian skills at this point, and I've also been socialising with local people a lot more than earlier in the year, so I'm not going to force myself to spend as much time with it. I'll keep reading novels and following the news whenever something seems interesting but I'm going to use most of my discipline and energy for focused study for other languages. I'll keep doing sentence cards, but mainly based on enjoyment rather than forcing any amount of consistency. The same goes for other European languages I'm interested in.
Since I don't need to put as much energy into Serbian, I'm going to try and push my Hungarian to the next level, which entails a lot of flashcards to try and get used to the language used in novels, as well as some non-fiction reading here and there. I've been trying to read the contemporary classic Az ajtó by Magda Szabó, which I found quite hard, so I'm going to try and read a couple more 'trashy' fiction works as well as any interesting non-fiction I can find and then circle back to Az ajtó. I might keep listening to 5-minute fragments from the audiobook, though.
Also, I've started doing translation exercises again on langcorrect to activate some of that passive vocabulary.
Islamicate languages + Hebrew
I've realised that part of the reason I've been putting off Hebrew is because I feel like I 'should' study Arabic instead, because in the long term I've always cared more about having active skills in Arabic. I've realised this is silly and that I should focus on what I actually enjoy studying. At this point Hebrew and Turkish are really a pleasure to study, whereas Arabic still feels like a slog, so I'm going to go cycle between Hebrew and Turkish for a while whenever I feel like studying "Middle Eastern" languages.
As for Urdu, I'm going to slow down with the flashcards a bit, limiting it to one or two a day. I will try to do 5-10 minutes of repetitive listening a day (but this is a flexible goal, I can skip days if I'm really not feeling it or need to prioritise something else); this is something I actually enjoy quite a lot and I don't find a hassle to do.
For Hebrew I've started studying the subtitles on the YouTube channel החברתית as well as the definitions on milog.co.il. I'd really like to keep Hebrew going for the long haul and get to a more solid level of comprehension. One thing I've realised is it's much easier to look up a word twice and only make a sentence card out of it the second time: the first time I make word cards with audio out of any new words in the Urdu definition, then I make a monolingual sentence card the second time around. I'm not going to do Netflix shows for Hebrew because I feel like that takes too much energy away from Turkish and Mandarin; focusing on political videos makes more sense due to the wealth of subtitled videos in Hebrew compared to Turkish. I also don't care that much if I ever end up going to Israel, which was one of the other things that was ruining my motivation; I'm content to just work on comprehension because I enjoy it.
For Turkish, my main source has been Hakan: Muhafız, but I've also been watching bits and pieces of Acil aşk aranıyor in the Urdu dub and then the Turkish original (I've also used fragments from the Urdu dub for repetitive Urdu listening, which helps make the Turkish original more comprehensible as well), and I also watched the romantic comedy Ya sonra with Hungarian subtitles (Turkish productions are fairly popular in Hungary), although I did skip some scenes.
Mandarin
I think I've found a good balance between sentence cards and word cards, similar to what I'm doing with Urdu. Whenever a sentence is really i+1, I make a sentence card with audio straight from the show. However, I'm much more strict with my definition of i+1 than I used to be: this means I need to be familiar with all the characters in the sentence, so I can focus entirely on the new word in the sentence. Drawing a clear distinction between new characters and new words is something I didn't realise would be this important; any sentence with a new word that is at the same time one or two new characters is already i+2 or i+3, as I'm not familiar enough with characters to acquire them easily from sentences.
When there are new characters in the new word, or more than one new word in the sentence, I make word cards with audio from forvo. I'm trying to limit my look-ups to 2-3 cards a day (at the absolute most 5 if I feel particularly inspired); if I go any further than that I burn out.
As for Japanese, I've realised that I do enjoy studying Mandarin and am very happy with my progress and don't feel like going through the beginner stage with another character-heavy language. I did have a "the grass is greener" moment (Japanese uses fewer characters! It has easier pronunciation! More content!), but I think that's just because I was overdoing the Mandarin study to the point where flashcards started feeling like a chore, and too much extensive TV watching to the point where it overtook other activities and languages that were more important to me.