Punjabihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeCal-gOpvMI understood almost all of this video! Sure, they use a lot of English, but I was shocked by how
easily I understood the bits I did understand; I remember how torturous it was to learn Punjabi morphology since there were no easy to consult reference works on it, and now it's all completely obvious and I could even transcribe most of this video in Shahmukhi if I wanted to. I'm happy my Punjabi hasn't completely disappeared.
Another thing that's surprised me lately is that when I've been talking to myself in Punjabi
I've been able to produce the tones. When did this happen?
I think one of the main things that prevented people from taking me seriously as a Punjabi-user in Pakistan was my accent, so I think if I keep putting effort into expanding my Urdu vocabulary and following Urdu media I'll be able to reactivate and use Punjabi next time I visit Pakistan (who knows when that'll be but it's still motivating to think about!).
It's fun how listening comprehension just kind of clicks at a certain point and how with related languages even if you abandon them and keep studying another member of the family, when you go back to them you understand even more. The longer I do this the more I'm convinced that a primarily input-based approach is the way to go.
Arabic, TurkishI'm going to start going through the Glossika courses for Turkish (GMS2), Egyptian Arabic (GMS1) and MSA (GMS1). I'll add any sentences with vocabulary I didn't recognise to Anki as well as finding other example sentences. The goal of this isn't to memorise all the sentences in the course, but to make all of them
transparent so I can later go through the course without the pdf and focus on pronunciation, grammar and automaticity rather than vocabulary and comprehension (which is how it helped me with French and Hungarian; I find it too boring to work with for non-transparent languages).
Since going back and forth between Urdu and Punjabi doesn't seem to have hurt my knowledge of those languages, I'm not really going to make any clear differentiation between Egyptian, Levantine and MSA for the time being. I don't have any short-term goal to speak any sort of Arabic, I'm only practicing comprehension and vocabulary, so I don't care at all if I end up mixing them up.
(I have a similar attitude regarding German and Dutch as well -- for a long time I put off German to avoid destroying my Dutch, but now I've found that after putting lots of effort into German I actually understand a bit more Dutch than I used to. So for the time being I'm going to keep reading German texts on lingq, occasionally listen to Euronews and other German media, and if I ever want to go back to Dutch it'll be easier after having spent time with German.)
MandarinI made the mistake of adding two entire Assimil lessons to my Anki deck in a single day. Those cards ended up being torture and I feel like it took me longer for me to learn them than if I had spaced them out. It's probably better to add fewer cards more often than more cards in big bursts, especially now that the lessons are getting more complicated. So far I have 165 cards and am up to lesson 16.