L-Snap 1: 3 months of French and a Chinese update.
Hi! It’s been a long time since I have penned anything that is personal instead of just critiques and ranting. In the small time frame of my last post and now, I have changed the style I look at my weblog and while I want to continue the stuff I inscribed before, I would also like to write about life and take ‘snaps’ about some major modes (sorry, Emacs left me brain dead) in my life. This is, frankly, one of them. L-Snap, see it? Language snap.
So, I started learning French to entertain myself appropriately 3 months ago, and I have written a blog post about it. As of now, I have been doing Anki for a big total of 90 days, for French. Of course this is not comparable to those who have more than 1500 days of Anki streaks, like Livakivi, but it is still a success for me and I want it to continue. More about that later.
Let’s start with French. I, finally, managed to finish the 1K Refold Community deck. I have seen all one thousand terms, and even better, I have matured about ~900 of them!
Unfortunately, this doesn’t signify that I am opulent utilizing those words on my speech, nor does it mean I can always understand those words, especially verbs, when I see them in a sentence. Although there are words that I feel comfortable with, I still struggle with using them from time to time and I don’t know most of the proper grammar to form a sentence.
I feel comfier when I watch a YouTube video or listen to a podcast. However I feel as if I lack so much vocabulary, which is not just a feel but a fact.
The problem is, whilst being done with the new words of my current deck, I made no new cards for the words that I encountered while I immersed myself. I can see how this can be a big issue, since that’s what you do when you use a learning methodology or a system based on immersion and repetition, for instance Refold.
That being said, I will continue not to make any new cards due to multiple reasons; foremost, they need too much effort; I don’t like simple cards where it’s just meaning::definition, I fancy audio, example sentences and maybe an image or two. Secondly, even if I burden my feelings in myself and create those cards, it is just not worth it because I don’t gain enough knowledge to explain that effort.
Moving on, you might want to guess which book I am reading now. None! When I first commenced this project, I remember telling myself, ‘By the end of the third month, I want to be able to read at least one of the books I have.’ And those books are Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone or Around the World in Eighty Days. I think I can start one of those books, primarily the latter, around the end of my fourth month. Maybe.
I also started viewing content on YouTube. I still find it relatively hard to find engaging content that interests me, given that there are so many better options in either English or Chinese, not that I could understand when I watch them in Chinese but you get the idea. This is mainly because I don’t divine any genuine French creators. One I know is Lianna Jn and I like her but that is all I got, man. Apart from news and some shorts content since I have deleted Instagram.
That’s enough; let’s talk about competitive racism (Chinese). When I tell you, ‘There is a lengthy way between me and the intermediate level’, I kid you not, I have a long way. Currently I have finished the HSK 4 上 book and starting HSK 4 下 with my tutor but I do not feel ‘better’ in terms of vocabulary and sentence building.
I can NOT learn new words at peace, like in French, cause immersing in Chinese is hard. Now, I am only using the textbooks as my active reading material (I know, textbook, bad). And per each 1.5 hour-long lesson, I learn approximately ~35 new words, so 70 new words per week theoretically. Reality is much more cursed, since I do not have the retention of the words because I don’t want to make flashcards from them because it takes so much time.
Also, I would like to remind you that I am halfway into French 6M, and when I end that, I plan to push forward with Chinese a little bit.
Anyhow, I want to thank you for your attendence of my so-called conference of "Why you should date me". You can always contact me via e-mail or "Re:" me in your personal blog whenever you want.
See you soon!