With November finished up, we have another month’s worth of numbers, bringing us to a total of six months’ worth of data logged through this blog. Six months is a nice, round number, which sounds like a good time to reflect and analyze how things have gone and see if any more long-term patterns have … Continue reading A Look Back on Six Months of Progress
I think that so far in this blog, I’ve done a bad job of accurately describing my listening comprehension level in Spanish, and may have presented things in a misleading way. Not on purpose, mind you, describing these sorts of things is kinda hard. It’s difficult to be truly impartial, what with my perspective of … Continue reading Defining Listening Comprehension
If you were to jump down to the numbers section for this week’s blog, you would see that last Saturday was rather abnormal for me. I had the day that was unusually free and could spend it basically however I wanted to spend it, and it turns out that what I wanted to do was … Continue reading Language Learning: Work or Play?
I finished Harry Potter y la Cámara Secreta last Friday and had to decide what to read next. Well, not really, Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban would be next, as I’ve been saying that I wanted to stay with the series. It’s a longstanding favorite that I find myself rereading again and again, … Continue reading The Role of Repetition
Ostensibly, one of the primary goals of this blog is to serve as an example after the fact of “What it takes to learn a language,” (if I’d done it perfectly, I would have started this back on day one, but hindsight being what it is and all, just gotta make do with the portion … Continue reading Learning a Foreign Language: How Much Time Does it Take?
In keeping track of all these numbers, one of the figures I haven’t been posting is what this is doing to my bank account. An old saw about language learning is how incredibly expensive it is by necessity. You need to go abroad and be immersed in the language in order to learn it, you … Continue reading Learning a Foreign Language Without Going Broke
So there’s an elephant in the room. It’s just a little one, but I’ve noticed it, as I’ve thought over these blogs and the topics I’d like to eventually cover. That elephant’s name is Motivation. I’ve skirted around the topic a few times. Having clear and compelling motivation is a key point of conversation in … Continue reading Motivational Speech
Two weeks in, and I am finding myself struggling with trying to figure out how to start these blogs off. I haven’t quite nailed down the voice I’m aiming to strike in them, or have a pictured “audience” that I could project to, so there’s a bit of stumbling to fall into a tone I … Continue reading What and Why Deeper Dive
