Well, um, hi. So I haven’t updated in a while, as was noticed enough that I did get a comment checking in that I was okay, which was a little surprising to me, but welcome (I’m often taken off guard by the fact that anyone has ever really read these blogs, in a lot of … Continue reading An Overdue Update
So the time has come this week that I’ve embarked on a new language learning journey and have begun my first forays into Japanese. As I had expected, this is a really different mountain to begin climbing with a much steeper cost of entry compared to Spanish, and it’s been humbling, exciting, scary, and interesting, … Continue reading First Week Learning Japanese
So I’m at a little bit of a rough patch at the moment, because this week I am due to write a blog about language learning and recap the month of October, but I am at odds with actually completing that task, because my interests are heavily divided at the moment. Over the weekend, The … Continue reading Language Learning With Split Attention
Last week, I went through my month-long diversion into learning Toki Pona as a play-by-play. Without further preamble, this blog continues on where that one left off, so let’s dive in. So, four weeks of Toki Pona, going from a position of knowing nothing to the level I’m at now. The question then naturally becomes: … Continue reading Wrapping Up My Mini Add1 Challenge Pt. 2
With week four wrapping up, that means this mini Add1 Challenge for Toki Pona is coming to an end. It was a strange and wild month, and before getting back into the swing of the Spanish grind, I think it’s only appropriate to go through a post-mortem on the experiment, what I learned from it, … Continue reading Wrapping Up My Mini Add1 Challenge Pt. 1
Learning Toki Pona has been an interesting and unpredictable experience. The only part of it that’s really gone the way I expected was in the first week, going through traditional instruction lessons, because after that it’s been wildly different than I thought it would. After last week’s blog of me being blown away by how … Continue reading Week Three of Toki Pona is Apparently When Things Get Difficult
So after the previous blog’s disaster of dealing with the market crash, I had all of this week to work on getting back into the swing of things. The market’s still been volatile, but work’s evened out again for the most part, which meant I had the time available to ramp back up on my … Continue reading Trying (and Failing) to Ramp Back Up After a Tough Week
There are good weeks and bad weeks. I’ve covered this topic before, a long time ago, but as I just weathered a pretty difficult week it feels like a good time to revisit. This week was pretty rough for Spanish studying time, as will become apparent down in the number section of the blog. I … Continue reading Working Through Rough Weeks
A lot of advice and conversation about language learning gets devoted to the amount of time needed to spend per day working on the new language. Of course, the exact amount of time recommended per day tends to vary with who you’re talking to, and everyone has their own minimums, too, but the consensus is … Continue reading A Day In the Life of a Language Learner
I’ve talked before about how a lot of the general discourse of language learning as it exists online is centered on motivation. Which makes sense, as it’s probably the single largest failure point in a hopeful learner’s journey. Motivation dwindles as time and difficulty ramp up, until you start missing days here and there, shrug, … Continue reading The Value of Motivation Advice
Fumbling Toward Fluent 